Merry Christmas from Emily

I hope you all had a good Christmas! This will be a short post since Bill already wrote about our day. Tamales are traditional Christmas food and the restaurant had tamales for breakfast so we ate some. I like tamales so I thought they were pretty good. Bill had never had them and said he wouldn’t be asking for them at home. I have a picture below. They were even wrapped in banana leaves.

We did decide to walk to Portrero this morning. It’s a 5 minute taxi ride and the internet said it was about a 37 minute walk. It took us about an hour and a half. I had expected a relatively short walk in the shade so I only put sunscreen on my face and tattoo. I have a very weird sunburn now. I have a picture of my tattoo below because you can see exactly where the sunscreen was. 70 Neutrogena does a good job. I should have put it on the rest of me too.

Like Bill said, Portrero was disappointing. We had expected a bunch of little shops and maybe there are some but we only found restaurants and hotels. Fortunately we got a taxi on the way back and stopped by the bakery for some delicious brownies.

I developed a pretty bad migraine this afternoon. My prescription medicine didn’t work so I took Excedrin migraine. That worked but I had a very upset stomach. Francie brought me a bowl of cereal for supper because I didn’t feel like I could eat anything else. By the time I finished my cereal, I felt better. When the medicine works, I feel like I’ve been brought back from the dead.

There is a really nice recreation center with nice cabins, a pool and a fancy playground area right behind our hotel. It says recreation center on the fence so I assumed it was for the community. Francie told us tonight that the government used taxpayer money to build it and it’s only available to the families of government officials. So Francie’s taxes went to build the center but her kid can’t play there.

The hotel had live music tonight. It was pretty loud. A family arrived with two little girls earlier today. They were probably exhausted from travel and I’m sure they put their little girls to bed with music blasting right over their room. Bill and I watched Downton Abbey the movie. It was pretty good and we put in earbuds to drown out the music from the restaurant. I’m glad we had a movie. I feel significantly better but I’m not sure I’m up for a few hours of listening to a muffled band playing loud music. It’s quieter now.

We’ll probably try to snorkel tomorrow with liberally applied sunscreen!