The last 5 days in Tenerife - Part 1

Relaxing Day

The next morning I woke up quite early another time. But this time I was totally free - I stayed in bed and watched some episodes of my favorite series at TV, I didn't have a breakfast appointment or anything similar and it felt great. There were only two (three) things disturbing my relaxing morning: the fact that the restaurant with the breakfast buffet closed at 10 am already, the fact that I was hungry and the fact that I didn't know when the room maid would come in order to clean my hotel room - they had come at quite different times the days before. But as I was hungry anyway, I got up, put some comfortable clothes on and went down to have breakfast. It was a bit weird to be there totally alone and see all the families and couples eating together and having a good time. But I thought at the behaviour of my Mum's boyfriend and immediately I was happy to be here alone for some days. I wanted to enjoy my last days as much as possible, even if I knew that the weekend would become quite stressful with the Carnaval and the other girls wanting to go everywhere and party all the nights long. Fortunately, with the Vietnamese girl I had found somebody who doesn't like partying too much, similar to me, and who went home with me earlier when we went with them. 

After breakfast I went back to my room in order to change my clothes and get ready for the pool. I could already see the cleaning lady in my floor, so I had to hurry up a bit. I took my bikini, a towel and something to drink and left the room again. It was sunny outside and even if there was still that cold wind, I was looking forward to my day at the pool - I had planned not to move back to my room before 2 or 3 pm - I also wanted to tan a bit before I went back to Germany, because during the time of my internship I had passed 9 hours a day inside and the evenings, too, so I had tanned a bit, but one could not see that I had passed 6 months at a place where you have sun almost all the time. So I put sunscreen on and relaxed on one of the sunbeds that were a bit farer away from the pool. The school holidays in Germany had just started and because of that the day before and that day an incredible amount of families with school children had arrived and I didn't want to have them running around my sunbed the whole afternoon. But for the moment the pool was almost empty because they were either doing excursions, had just arrived, or were still preparing for going to the pool. I enjoyed that period of silence as I knew that it would end soon and tried to sleep a bit with the sun in my face. Unfortunately, I am not the person that sleeps well everywhere, so it was more a "trance", but it was great. No embarrassment, no complaints, no bad mood - just me and the sun. 

After a while I started to read my book and listened to some music, as the noise of the children had already started. But I wasn't a person that is annoyed quickly, I guess I am quite good at ignoring things like that. When I checked my mobile phone for news and messages I saw that my Vietnamese friend had sent me new stories about our project manager and the othe colleagues in the office. It was too funny to read what she was writing, and as she didn't have a lot to do we started to chat a bit via Hangouts and laughed a lot. When she told me that she had to finish a task now, we agreed on meeting in the evening at the Italian restaurant in order to talk a bit and to see her stories with gestures and everything. I was really looking forward to that, because I liked spending time with her and I also started to feel a bit lonely already among all those couples and families at the pool and all over the hotel. Of course, I had seen that during the whole 6 months, but here in the hotel it was even nearer, as before I had been to work almost the whole time, or at home in the evening. Here I was "living" next to all the happy people. When we had stopped chatting, I decided to swim a bit in the pool in order to move at least a bit, and to cool down my body that had been warmed by the sun for some hours now. The water was quite cold, but after a while it was very refreshing and felt good. But as there were so many children playing ball and diving and jumping in the swimming pool, I went to the jacuzzi shortly (forbidden for children) and finally back to my sunbed. 

As it had become a bit boring and the sun was already hidden behind clouds, as every afternoon, I decided to wait until I had dried and then walk back to my room and relax a bit in front of the TV until I had to get ready for the dinner with my friend. It took some time until my bikini was dry again and I had been freezing the whole time as the sun wasn't there anymore, but the wind yes. Of course, I could have gone to my room with a wet bikini and just put it on the balcony and let it dry there, but I had simply been too lazy to get up already and walk to my room. But as I had dried, I packed my things and went up to my hotel room where I unpacked the pool things and put my towel outside to let it dry. I changed my clothes to something comfortable and went to bed in order to watch some TV and recap sleep - even if I wasn't able to sleep at a sunbed, it was very possible in bed at every time of the day. But after I had relaxed a bit, I really had to take a shower and get ready for the dinner and when I had finished, I looked for some nice clothes, grabbed my bag and left the hotel room again. 

News from the Office

As I had already told in my blog entry before, the Italian restaurant where I would meet my Vietnamese friend wasn't that far away from the hotel, so I only needed about 15 minutes to arrive there. I expected that she would be late as always when we met at a certain time, but finally for the first time in those 6 months she had arrived before me! We laughed a lot about that fact, as she had already been afraid that I had forgotten the "date" or she had confused the time. But everything was allright, so we entered the restaurant and chose a table - it was quite early for dinner in Spain (6 pm), so the restaurant was still more or less empty and we were free to choose. We ordered our drinks and a special pasta mix plate where one could choose three kinds of pasta and three kinds of sauces - the perfect possibility to try a lot of things at the same time. As I had only eaten pizza in that Italian restaurant so far, I really wanted to try the noodles as well. When the waiter had left we started our conversation about work and the office immediately. My former colleague told me the stories she had already written in the messenger again, this time with all the gestures and other important factors that were not possible to transmit via phone or computer. I guess they all thought that we might be crazy, as we hadn't stopped laughing since we had sat down at our table. I enjoyed it a lot to be there with a "normal" person and to be able to really enjoy it, without any restrictions or weird behaviour. 

When she had finished all the important histories we also talked about my five days with Mum and her boyfriend. Of course, I had told her the most annoying moments and we had discussed about his strange behaviour, but as the stories of the office, it was funnier and better to tell everything again face-to-face. While I was telling my problems from the days before, I was so incredibly happy to have somebody with very similar attitudes and opinions about most of the things. She had become my best friend at Tenerife and even if I hadn't expected that when I had met her for the first time, I didn't know what I would have done without her. We had so much fun together, we had the same imagination of free time activities and we both didn't like partying so much. Furthermore, we could talk about almost everything and understood the opinion of the other person perfectly. And - the most important part - without her I would have never been able to survive the last months of the internship. I felt so sorry for her, because she had to do three weeks without me, but with the new interns there was some new, interesting atmosphere in the office, so it was okay. But I can really say that she has improved my internship a lot and that I would have contact with her back in Germany, too. 

The food arrived, and after all the stories about project managers and weird behaving boyfriends we now focused on the pasta that looked great. It also tasted delicious and it had been a really good idea to order three different kinds of pasta with three different kinds of sauces. Anyway, it was a lot of food and after the second pasta type we already had problems to continue eating. But we never left anything at our plates when we were eating in a restaurant, so we pulled ourselves together and finished the whole pasta dish. It had taken a while and afterwards we were feeling as always - full and unable to move, but it had been one of the most delicious dinner I had had during my time at Tenerife. So if anyone of you is passing by that island - go to Puerto de la Cruz, to the Italian restaurant "Arianna's" in the district La Paz. You will love it! 

After we had finished our food we stayed at the table for a while because we weren't able to move anyway, but finally the waiter convinced us to order some panna cotta as dessert. I didn't know why this was always happening when we were out to eat in a restaurant, but every time we simply ate too much. And not just the "one little piece" too much - so much that afterwards I always thought I would never ever be able to eat anything in my life. But we enjoyed the panna cotta that he brought after some minutes and continued talking about the office and my Mum's boyfriend, as those were the most interesting subjects. She described me the two interns and said that we could maybe have dinner together the next evening or at Sunday - I really wanted to meet them at least once. I told her that I was available the whole time, as the dinner in my hotel wasn't worth eating it and I was relaxing at the pool all the time. We didn't know yet what the others had planned for Carnaval, but we were sure that they would go to Santa Cruz at least one day of the weekend and we didn't really know if we should go with them or not - we didn't want to party the whole night, but we really wanted to see the famous Carnaval once, as the whole island seemed to talk about it. But we decided to wait for the next day, as we were sure they would tell us something about their plans in the Whatsapp group. We finished the dessert and as my colleague was quite tired from the working week, we decided to pay and leave the restaurant. The next day we wanted to talk about further plans for Carnaval and maybe meet again, so we remained with this and everyone walked home. 

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