Baltics - 11 June 2012 (3)

Entertaining Ourselves

Back at the hotel, it was time to change into something drier and hang our wet clothes up in the hope that they would be dry by the next morning.  The air conditioning was determined to cool the room, even when it was set to 30^oC.  I asked at reception and they said to turn off the air conditioning and move the radiator setting to “S”.  That did warm the room – eventually.

I tried the TV, which is always a sign of desperation.  They didn’t seem to have digital TV as we could only get 5 channels.  One channel was football – the European Championships were in the group stage.  Another showed either Neighbours or Home and Away, with the original Australian being drowned out by a man’s loud voice.  Far from any attempt at dubbing, he just read the whole dialogue – male and female parts – in Estonian.  A third channel had a lovely children’s cartoon with wide-eyed children talking French.  Again, a man drowned out the French with his Estonian translation.

We gave up and went downstairs to try the hotel café.  Charlie, Ian, Sue and Flo joined us.  Flo is a Canadian, who is also very widely travelled, so she and Sue made good room mates.

I ordered cheese and tomato toasties for €2.70, pancakes for €2.00 and a large orange juice for €1.00.  The toasties turned out to be three slices of bread, each cut in half and all covered in melted cheese, tomato and….bacon.  Ian hadn’t ordered yet, so he had them and I went back to order some without bacon.  The waitress said that someone else had ordered them, which turned out to be May.  So I thought the plate was for two people – there was enough for two anyway.  But then we all got a plate of toasties, so it was very good value.  I was even more impressed when my pancakes arrived – there were six!

Ian was in fine form, so he started a game of I-Spy.  “BC” turned out to be “black ceiling”, despite Charlie’s suggestions of “birth control” or “British Columbia”.  When Flo eventually got it, I suggested the alphabet game and we did six rounds.  It all got quite silly and the Ian/Charlie double act had me in stitches at times.  It was a real shame that they lived on opposite sides of the world.  They could have been the next “Armstrong and Miller” or “Mitchell and Webb”.

We were having so much fun that, despite our early start the next morning, we didn’t go upstairs until after 22.00.