In which Roz and Layla manage to eat against all the odds and go under the sea

By Roz

Layla’s fears about our dining options turned out to be absolutely well-founded. Despite all the references in reviews to the plethora of dining options nearby, we were flummoxed and gently shepherded out of the restaurant or two which we entered by alarmed waiters, having conveyed our vegetarian situation through gesticulation (I don’t think the problem was our charade, but you can never tell). And so it was that we ended up in a not very glamorous dining establishment eating vegetarian pizza (again). However, dinner was very swiftly over and we then headed over to a very lovely café called Dorothy, in which we drank beer and discussed with excitement / fear / wonder our imminent move to Washington DC.

The next morning, I got up as early as I could bring myself to (which was not very early at all) and went running. I’m not getting in quite the distances I’d like given how near my half marathon is, but something is better than nothing… I accompanied my run by listening to an economics lecture series from a CD that I was given by one of my staff (an economist, concerned about my lack of knowledge of the subject given the topics I shall be covering in DC). I therefore had the rather surreal (but entirely pleasant) experience of running through a walking trail, through parks and by the waterfall, whilst hearing about supply and demand from a leading American academic…

Back in the hotel, and smug at not having got too lost, we headed out for breakfast at a French bakery (again) and contemplated our plan to go to a sculpture park, involving a bus, the number of which we did not know, and could not find out. It will therefore comes as little surprise to the reader to hear that shortly thereafter we were ordering kimbap to take-away in the lunch joint we’d been in yesterday, licking ice lollies from the French bakery, and heading down to the port with a vague plan of taking a boat trip. In fact, we ended up booking to go on two: a little tour round the nearby islands, and a submarine trip. But we of course planned our time well enough that we were able to retreat to the lovely shack that we’d been in the day before, to eat our takeaway kimbap and sip beer.

Both boat trips proved to be lots of fun. The first took us past islands that we’d only seen from a distance and which looked very different close up: impossible to scale, and unforgiving terrain, but bemusingly nevertheless peopled with a couple of fisherman perched on a rock (with no sign of how they could possibly have got there, or possibly hope to get off again). The submarine was even more fab: it’s not something either of us had done before, and it was brilliant to see the fish and coral so close, and gave me (momentarily anyway) rather an enthusiasm to learn to dive, as we descended to 40m to look at an old shipwreck.

After these waterey adventures, we headed to the Alice café for copious amounts of peppermint tea and cake for me (and lemonade for Layla). We spent a while there, reading our books and gorging, before it dawned on us both that the café had a music selection which only entailed three songs, and that these had now been repeated a rather unfortunate number of times. So we headed back to our room, manically humming the Carpenters, and began to contemplate what an earth we can do for dinner. But I have a plan…