Canary Islands Part II: The Hotel Buffet and the Naked People

So the hotel we stayed at in the Canary Islands had a daily breakfast and dinner buffet, and so for a modest 80 euros we got breakfast and dinner for each of us for a whole week - we couldn't turn that deal down...

Well, it turns out, our children were OBSESSED with the buffet. It became the focus of their life - what could be better than their own control over what they eat and how much they eat - I am sure it is hard to remember what it was like to have someone decide for you what you eat and if you don't like it having them tell you that you can eat it or go hungry...

So every morning it was the same routine: do they get a pot of hot chocolate or tea?; Bennett would get cereal, followed by eggs (either made to order omelet or standard fried egg) where Karl would go straight to the crepes with chocolate sauce - I swear he ate at least 4 if not 8 every morning - and usually with a course of vanilla yogurt thrown in the middle. They loved to make a ceremony out of the tea or chocolate (I imagine it made them feel quite adult) and if we were lucky we snuck in a piece of fruit.

Toward the end of the trip, when I finally read the travel book, I tried a thing at the cereal buffet called Gofio - it is toasted grains ground into a flour: corn, wheat, barley, etc. - you mix it with milk to make a paste, and then add dried fruits for an incredibly filling breakfast. Bennett starting eating it too, as it kind of tasted like Wheatabix that we eat every morning at home - if you put it in the blender. So enamoroued that I had found a food I had never seen before, we bought up 4 kilos to take back with us to keep remembering the "vacation" experience. Apparently, the wonderful web has a bunch of different recipes to try, so we will be busy with Gofio for a while (caution if you come over to our house to eat, guinea pig...).

So that was breakfast. Dinnner was a bigger deal. First, Karl would whine incessantly all day if we could not go to the buffet at exactly 7 pm when it opened. I don't know if he had visions of food shortages and hoards of people eating everything up - I think most of it was just an excitement of all the possibilities... When we finally got there, the waiter would take drink orders, then the excitement would begin. Each night some of the selections changed, so each boy would stroll around looking at all the options: salad choices, pasta choices, grilled meats, hot dishes, vegetables, and of course a review of the dessert buffet to see how much room to keep. Bennett actually got quite organized and starting bringing down a note pad and pen, and would write down his "order" which upon returning to the table became my job to go get for him. Karl liked the system as well, and so by the last few nights I was doing it for both of them. As much as it sounds like I was their maid-servant, it actually was fun, and made me eat slower, so all was good. Karl was a straight pasta guy - Bennett, on the other hand, would get so creative: beets, cucumbers, pasta with butter, cheese with the orange rind, bread with butter, and a sliced apple...the boy knows what his body needs...

So one night, after serving the boys and having them finish well before me, Eric took them over to the disco to catch the daily awards show, and I sat with my red wine and slowly finished my dinner.

Watching the people that night was probably one of the highlights of my trip. The hotel guests ranged from honeymooning couples to young families to a lot of older middle age couples who left the kids at home, and then a fair showing of senior citizens. The nationalities were mostly English and Spanish, with some Italian and German thrown in - I am sure there were a few Dutch and Scandanavian as well, but probably too few to really count. What made this people-watching so fun was the diversity: I am sitting there in a old wrap skirt, Gap t-shirt, and flip-flops - probably normal fare for a Fairfax cafe; others had obviously packed their "resort wear" and were decked out in formal dresses complete with rhinestones and high heels. It is not that I was out of place - there was everyone on the continuum between me and them. I found the two inch stacked orthopedic flip flops with the rhinestone bling a fascinating choice; and of course all the women who have grown larger than their short skirts and low cut blouses...the tables ranged from couples sitting formally, virtually not talking (even the kids found it strange how many people just sat there and did not talk to each other) to loud boisterous parties of families traveling together. I just loved soaking up all the people and imagining what all their stories were...

One of the nights, two funny things happened:

We sat at a table next to the dessert buffet, and we saw a girl probably no older than three toddle up to the bar. Now, it was pretty clear that she should not have come there alone, but each family has different limits - and hence as it was past our limit, Eric and I could not take our eyes off of her, fearing something here may go wrong. So she takes the serving spoon to serve herself some of the strawberry mousse, and inadvertently puts a scoop the size of a bocce ball into her bowl. After evaluating the situation for a few seconds, she did what logically made sense to her: she took that bocce ball scoop of stawberry mousse in her hand and threw it back into the mousse bowl. Eric, horrified, jumped up and started to help her by taking the bocce ball scoop back out of the mousse bowl and back into her bowl, and then gently pushed her on her way.

Then, if that wasn't enough action at the dessert bar, Bennett went up to get some ice cream. He was very proud that he could scoop it himself, but unfortunately the toppings and sauces were a bit out of his reach. So before we could catch him, he had climbed up onto the dessert bar to serve himself to some chocolate sauce. What made it funnier was that before we could get up an older lady walked between us and the dessert bar, saw him up there, and then turned back toward us and said something in Spanish that I could interpret to be something like :"don't parent's have any limits anymore??"

Speaking of limits, the other funny thing about the vacation was the "naturalists" on all the beaches. Eric and I have both traveled a lot before, so running into topless sunbathers in Europe was no surprise. But we were a bit taken aback our first day at the beach to find so many TOTALLY naked people - and, as my friend Randy pointed out, it is not the people you want naked who have their clothes off. I would say easily 20-30% of the people were in their birthday suits, with most of them being over 50 and most being as brown and leathery as shoe leather. They played paddle ball naked, they went down to the tide pools to feed the fish naked - it was really not a pleasant site at all. Karl and Bennett noticed, but were mostly oblivious - definitely strange, but nothing to get goofy about (thank god). What was funny on our second day at the beach is that we were walking down trying to find a good spot to lay our towels, and every time we thought we found a good spot, there was a naked person next to us. Whoops - keep going, only to find the next spot with yet again a naked person there, too. Finally on about the 4th try we found a nice spot with only harmless topless people...

Alas, the vacation is over. Fall is full swing in Basel, and the leaves are rapidly falling off the trees - winter here we come...