Dallas is an hour behind Belize, making it six hours behind BST. Not that it matters to anyone, it's just nice to get that sorted occasionally. Woke up tired and decided to go back to sleep. Mikey went down to breakfast, I ignored all thoughts of food.

I had made a list of the things that we needed to get while we were somewhere we could talk to people and somewhere likely to have the things we wanted. I wanted paracetamol, for example, and some mosquito-bite cream. I also needed a spare pair of glasses, being scared that mine will explode any moment after I fixed them with superglue in Mexico. Mikey wanted a compact flash card for his camera, we both wanted to see a film. So we set out, and were mostly succesful in accomplishing the little treasure hunt of tasks we'd set ourselves. A small setback in the drugstore: I wanted paracetamol and they didn't have any. I asked the pharmacist, who'd never heard of it. 'Is it Tylenol?' he asked. I didn't know. Hmmmm. 'It's not aspirin, it's not ibuprofen', I said, hoping that would help. 'Is it Tylenol?' he replied. It hadn't. We finally compromised by me buying Tylenol and making sure I could take it with aspirin or ibuprofen, should I get the urge. Strange, such a little thing should pose such a language barrier.

More luck with the glasses. After the first guy insisted that I have the original prescription (I don't, just my hand-written copy of it) or a $50 eye test, we find a really helpful lady who can make some for me in about an hour, and even helps me choose the frames and has spare washers for my current glasses. The camera shop man looks blankly when we ask for a compact flash card. 'For multiplication?' he asks. But we find one in another shop. We realise that we'd left the shopping list with the optician lady because the prescription was written on the back. Number one on the list was the film we wanted to see: Kill Bill. The look she gave us when handing back the piece of paper made us realise she'd seen the list and wasn't sure if Killing Bill was something we intended to do or already had.

Dallas was cool (25/80-ish) and cloudy, with occasional drizzle. It was a half hour walk back to the hotel to dump all of our shopping, and phone Mikey's mum to say happy birthday, and then a similar walk to the other mall to find the cinema. Which had a very nice ice rink on the ground floor, that you could watch from a gallery on all the levels of the mall, but no cinema. The whole place was being refurbished and lumps of concrete and bare wires hung out of walls, and big posters reassured us that 'Change was a Wonderful Thing'. The nearest cinema was five miles away, so we got a taxi and watched the film. I'll post a review on Mirkwood, but in short I thoroughly enjoyed it, it made the whole film a really great story, it was much funnier than the first one, much more Quentin Tarantino as he should be, and extraordinarily pretty, bloody, violent, as it should be. The cimena sported signs requesting No Smoking; No Soliciting; No Firearms. Sort of added to the atmosphere.

So that was Dallas. I saw a single stetson, no cowboy boots and very little of the city itself. This was really just a pit-stop, a chance to stock up on a few things and hopefully let my tummy feel a bit better. Next stop Lima. The flight's at 5, it's about 7 hours long, and we have to check out of the hotel at 12, so it'll be another day of hanging around. I'll have to buy another book.