As you might imagine, it’s not a really solid night of sleep. There’s the issue of being eight hours off my rhythm. There’s the fact that the bed has a footboard forcing me to sleep on the diagonal. Most of all there’s the issue that every single dog in Makale is barking. For hours. Barking. I hadn’t really noticed many dogs during the day, but at night they seem quite numerous. When I first wake up, I see that it’s light out and check my phone to see what time it is. The phone says 2 AM which surprises me until I head over to the window and see that the light is from spotlights highlighting the Kastel. I return to bed getting sleep in short, shallow doses. At five AM the church starts broadcasting prayers over loudspeakers. It is exactly what I imagine happens in Muslim countries at about this hour. In fact, at first I assume it's a mosque, but I'm corrected later. At any rate, it's too loud to ignore so I surrender.
After about thirty minutes, the speeches from the church turn into music which actually blends nicely with the birds chirping in the trees outside my window and the soft, (natural) early morning light. From the hotel one can see most of the city and the mountains in the distance. The whole effect is quite nice. Out the window I can see Scott sitting on the veranda working on his computer connected by satellite to the internet. I decide to take a shower.
The bathroom is reasonably large, but all of the porcelain has mineral stains. The bathroom is attached to our room (and exclusively our room), but it is situated at the end of hallway. The wall connecting to the hallway has a large window that’s been frosted from its bottom (about three feet above the floor) to about six feet above the floor. I’m not terribly concerned about privacy given that noone else is up and I’m not convinced there’s anyone else staying at the hotel. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that other design decisions could have been made. Another interesting architectural detail is that the shower curtain rod is actually a piece of rebar that has been bent to shape with the ends embedded in the wall.
I find water that’s warm enough and climb into the tub. Unfortunately the positioning of the showerhead and the tight circumference of the shower curtain conspire to make movement – such as one might make in a shower – difficult. I end up taking my shower seated on floor of the tub. This too is a bit of tight fit, but at least I can remain stationary and make the showerhead do the moving.
We’re heading out to two villages today so I put on one of my long-sleeve, deet-sprayed, linen shirts. I join Scott and have the same breakfast as the previous day, swapping in papaya juice. Scott’s been on the satellite dish for awhile and he’s carefully monitoring his bandwidth. The previous day he let me download about 20 emails (without attachments) and accused me of consuming 6MB. I’ve decided to stay away.
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