Furry Venture

[diffrentcolours]

In an attempt to help cosmolinguist escape the cold and dark, and as a distraction from US politics, I followed my friend liw's advice and booked a long weekend holiday in the sun. I looked on Lastminute.com and there were a number of inexpensive package holidays in the Canary Islands in January. So many in fact that I had a bit of decision paralysis, but we decided we didn't want anything fancy or with lots of activities - the whole point would be to lounge around in warm weather and longer days. So I picked a three-star resort with relatively few amenities in Fuerteventura. We flew out on Friday and back on Tuesday. The weather was a little overcast the first couple of days, but at 15C still much warmer than the frosty UK, and rising to over 20C with bright sunshine on the Sunday and Monday. The days were appreciably longer too, being near the equator.

Caleta de Fuste is a small, English-dominated collection of resorts based around a large sandy beach in a bay. Our resort was a collection of small apartments arranged roughly in a square around a central area with swimming pool and a poolside bar. The grounds are dotted with palm trees growing out of black gravel from the volcanic rocks of the island. The flat was adequate for our needs, grubby and worn down without being dirty. We had a little patio outside where we could sit in the shade. Ours was on the outside, looking towards a building site and a boxing gym from which energetic grunts could be heard.

The resort wasn't busy, but it wasn't full either. Mostly English tourists, with a smattering of French and German. We went for the all-inclusive option, which meant free food and drinks. We drank sangria around the poolside and managed to avoid being entirely sober without ever actually getting drunk. The canteen served three meals a day, and parts of it reminded me of 80s school food with chocolate pudding and bright green jelly. There wasn't a lot of hot vegetarian food but E managed fine. The evening meals were more themed; one day was Italian, one Mexican and one bizarrely involved turkey and cranberry sauce. Christmas in January! The canteen was large and well ventilated but we still sat at the edge, up against the windows onto the street. Some well-fed street cats sat outside the window meowing at us, but I couldn't open the window to toss them some morsels. One of them, Puma, was a sleek black cat who was well known to resort staff. Everyone there, both in the resort and in local shops, spoke English so I didn't have to worry about falling back when my flimsy Spanish failed me, but I did make an effort.

One staff member kept trying to rope me and E into activities during the day, specifically French bowls / petanque and darts. "Don't be lazy!" he said when we demurred. "We're here to be lazy!" I replied. He also ran karaoke sessions at the poolside bar some evenings, and DJ'd a carefully curated selection of 70s American rock classics, his primary audience seeming to be himself. On the last night we joined in a bingo game as we drank rum and coke, which was surprisingly fun - he was announcing the numbers in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. His thick accent meant I did a better job of recognising the non-English numbers!

We ventured out of the resort every day. We were about ten minutes from the beach, and our walk there took us through the Centro Comercial (shopping centre), which was mostly full of bars targeted at English tourists. I enjoyed having a poke around the HiperDino Express supermarket, looking at different brands. We played mini golf - not well, but we had fun. We had a look at the Castillo de San Buenaventura, the small fort which defended the bay against Barbary pirates. Sadly it was locked up so we couldn't go and visit. Another day we went round the bay to the next beach and some of the bigger, more expensive resorts I'd considered. We passed a creepy abandoned beach café with a sign inviting people to "join us in the full moon", which is definitely the seed for some kind of weird fiction. We met another street cat who climbed up me and nuzzled my neck, and got talking to a Luxembourger woman who now lived in Köln but spends three months every winter in Fuerteventura. The conversation was in a mixture of English, German, Spanish and French and it was a delightfully cosmopolitan encounter. On the way back we tried the local E-scooters which I quite enjoyed and E hated. I can definitely see how they make sense for tourists there.

I'd not taken my laptop, and I'd uninstalled Facebook from my phone due to the Meta boycott following their explicit adoption of anti-LGBTQ+ policies. I struggled with this a bit, but managed to relax. I did some analogue reading - most of a collection of John Ajvide Lindqvist short stories and several more chapters of Shon Faye's "The Transgender Issue", which I've been chipping away at for far too long. I spent a lot of time in the sun, and I was very brave letting E put icky suncream on me rather than get burned.

On the whole I think it was a good trip. While it couldn't completely distract E from the shit-show that is the world and various other things, lying tipsily in the sun absorbing photons and doing very little was definitely a nice break for us. I came back feeling re-energised towards a few projects, and while life has had a fair go at grinding me down since I got back I can still remember the dry sunny air of Fuerteventura.

Comments

[apiphile]

This sounds like a really nice break, especially the cats. I hope it helped you feel less stressed.