Malapascua means bad christmas or unfortunate christmas, apparently Magellan had some rather bad weather when he arrived during Christmas nearly five hundred years ago.

Mirsada seems to have caught a cold during the travel and when we arrived at Palazzo Pensionne she more or less crashed. She didn’t feel much better in the morning so we changed our plans of riding by bus to go by taxi all the way to Maya. Well at the ferry dock we were offered to pay 200P for an immediate ride together with some other travelers or wait until the boat filled up and pay 50. We waited but decided to take their offer when they dropped to 150P (roughly 3€). Of course a swarm of 10 or so locals joined up for free or at least lower fee. But of course.

Finally arriving we expected to get ripped off again (during the taxi drive the driver had mentioned that the average rooms were about half the price we were paying) but found a rather nice bungalow with balcony. The view over sea was not even a lie, there were however quite a few branches and leaves blocking most of the view but still! We decided that even though the price probably was a bit high we could afford it and strolled off for dinner.

A thing that anyone visiting the island (or perhaps all of them?) would notice is the many newly-fallen-in-love couples, especially the combination of a local young female and a not so young western man. After some thoughts I figured that they probably got enough trash-talk by everyone else so I would try not to judge to harsh or quick. When we overheard one german guy about 60 started talking to a fellow german about his 18 year old girlfriend and in the sentence afterwards mentioned his wife and three kids I felt that perhaps this wasn’t the nicest guy after all.

The dinner was ok, but the service was perhaps the worst I’ve received ever. Cooking my Tom Kha Gai took perhaps 50 minutes, and I had to kindly ask for Mirsadas dish since they served only me first. The other tables were joking between them about how slow service was and one guy was bullying the staff complemented by his wife complaining about the cleaning in a less constructive way. Perhaps we were too swedish who didn’t make a scene but at least our late food didn’t have saliva as it’s main ingredient.

On the way back we picked up my PADI course material and signed in, and tomorrow it will be reading and DVD-watching before any dives.