Saturday, 1 January 2011

Christmas and New Year in Tobago

We celebrated Christmas at Coral Cay by taking a couple of days off and all contributing to providing a proper Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, on Christmas Eve Nick and I had to go to Scarborough, Tobago's capital to extend our visas since immigration decided to only stamp us in for 1 month when we arrived. Christmas Eve in Scarborough was pretty much the same as Christmas Eve in any other city - busy, hot and full of people desparately trying to do last minute food, alcohol and present shopping. Visas extended we caught the bus back to Charlotteville around lunchtime so we had plennty of time in the afternoon to prepare food foor the next day.

I bought Nick a couple of nights in a nice studio room on the other side of the room for Christmas so we could spend some time away for the dorm room in the Coral Cay cottage. It was really nice to have some space and a big shower and fan all to ourselves. We also had the novelty of a TV!

Christmas morning we made our way back to Coral Cay for brunch and present opening! A wide variety of secret Santa presents had been bought ranging from chocolate to silly toys to tacky vases! Breakfast consisted of pancakes and bacon and sausages and spumante with orange juice - a welcome change from porridge!




The rest of the day passed in a typical Christmas fashion - watching a film (The Time Traveller's Wife) and playing board games (Boggle, Taboo). We ended the day in the evengin with a full on British Christmas dinner. We had turkey, ham, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, roast potatoes, etc. Roughly twice as much food as we notmally get for a meal. I even managed to obtained a real bottle of wine and made somee mulled wine with some cheaper stuff!




Boxing day was slowly back to work with cleaning up followed by planning the dive training for the week. A busy week for me since it is the monthly dive training week but nice to have a bit of a break before I start.

Foor New Year's Eve we had a BBQ and bonfire on the beach with a few beers. It was a lovely evening chatting around the fire, getting to know the new people who had arrived and singing Auld Lang Syne around the fire at midnight. Lovely!