Trouble blogging

I didn’t think that I would ever get our first blog on but perseverance pays off if you can be bothered. Last night we walked into town and found an internet café on the way so I asked him what time he opened in the morning and he said 10am. We walked further on and found a part of Calangute that we remembered and even found Molly Malone’s where we had a drink a few years ago. Everywhere in the world there is an Irish pub. All the bars seem to charge around 1 pound for a large Kingfisher which is not too bad. We stopped off at a local bar that was really full and talked to a couple from York that had just been to the waterfall. Unfortunately Claire has now been put off so I have a lot of work to do to get her back on track. We stopped off at our bar for a last drink and got chatting to 3 English guys from Nottingham and were about my age. How misleading first impressions can be, they turned out to be really interesting – more another time when I remember to take some photos. Anyway, even the staff got bored and went to bed, as we did but not until around 3.30am far too late for us. However, if you calculate back to English time it was only around 10pm so I feel a little better now. Then we sat on our balcony with a drink until – who knows what time; anyway we didn’t wake up until about 10.30am so had missed breakfast. I set off to the internet café around 11.45am but it had not even opened yet so I asked a man in the next shop and he said he doesn’t open until 12pm but there is another one over the road. This one was really nice and modern with brand new laptops; you even had to take your shoes off to enter. Even though the laptops were new they still couldn’t read my 8Gb SD card that I had saved the blog and pictures to. It’s the one from my new camera and Claire paid about £30 for it but I guessed that they could only see up to the normal 2Gb. The owner tried it in his computer but it said there were no files on it so I had to come back home but not before tracking down a shop where I could buy a 2Gb SD card first. When I got back I just had time to copy everything onto the new one and we were off for a walk along the beach to Candolim.

It was a long walk taking us over an hour and we stopped at almost the last shack build up on a mound of sand called Calamari its near the old rust boat that got stuck years ago. It was quite posh for a shack and they even had live music; I guess that’s how they could justify prices double that of all the others. Even so Claire had 2 Kingfishers while I had a large bottle of water and we shared a whole tandoori chicken with spicy mint sauce, a separate salad and garlic naan breads and we paid around £8 for the lot. It still sounds cheap but we should have only paid about £4 to £5 for it elsewhere. Once finished we had a walk into Candolim town to try and find another internet café again to put the blog on. Found one straight away and got stuck in to uploading the photos which normally takes twice as long as at home. Two photos to go and we had a power cut – bollocks! We started walking back along the main road as we needed an ATM as we were still living on the rupees that we had brought back with us last time. You are not really allowed to take rupees out the country but we always do because you need it immediately to tip everyone and his mate. Anyway, poor Claire started limping from her ham string injury so we decided to get a taxi back which did make sense because the clear blue skies had already been replaced by angry black clouds anyway. We got some money and had the taxi driver drop us back outside our internet café and I finally managed to get the blog published from my new SD card.

We got home and I started with a shower as I was covered in so much sand and then started my duties of downloading all the days photo’s to my laptop on the balcony. Now my pc can’t see anything from my 8Gb SD card; what a nightmare, I could still see them all on my camera but whatever I did I couldn’t see them on my pc. All I could do was copy them to the camera memory then switch SD cards and copy them from memory to the new SD card. What a performance but finally finished it but didn’t realize at the time that not all the photos had been copied, I guess that the internal memory on the camera is not to large so you only have pictures until just before we stopped for lunch; maybe I will include a few on tomorrows blog. Just a short one today as we have to go and find if we can find a pub where they are willing to play the final qualifying for the last Grand Prix. Have to go now see you! Come on Lewis or Mark lets whip that cheating Spaniard!