Sunday, July 19th

Every morning we have a wake up call at around 6am. Well, it's not a real wake up call. There's this annoying noise that sounds every morning like clockwork. It's like the call of a wild bird. I'm all for nature and animals, but if I find that bird I'm going to beat the living day lights out of it. Anyways, after a leisure breakfast we headed out. After a long walk, or perhaps it wasn't long, but with the heat, it sure felt like it, we arrived at our destination...The Diamond Plaza. What keeps pulling us back is those stickin pastries. One is better than the other. All these carbs are killing us! Killing us I tell you!! We managed to do a few errands yesterday, but we were exhausted and headed back to the hotel soon after. Perhaps we were at the pool for maybe a half hour when Franca looked up and said "Here comes the monsoon." A few drops fell from the sky and then it started raining buckets. The rain here is unlike anything we've seen before. There isn't any lightening or thunder. Sometimes there's not even a hint of what is about to come. The other day we managed to catch the whole thing from our 8th floor windows. The wind was so strong it blew our patio door open. If you were outside, you would have been soaked in 0.8 seconds flat. It's beautiful but you can see why the locals always carry a poncho. We took it really easy and stayed in our hotel room and puttered around. At 6pm Franca and I had another massage. Ninja and her sister showed up so we tried to explain that we wanted a relaxing massage. Apparently relaxing here is different from what we refer to as relaxing at home. This time there were no acrobatic moves but we yelped a few times from the pain. After a quick supper and remaining pastries, we all went to sleep at around 9pm. That's pretty amazing for us since we tend to usually start going down around 7:30pm. Will post some pictures later.