As predicted, we did very little during our stay in Goa. Palolem the village / town was a bit of a disappointment but we only went there to check our email and walk along the beach. Palolem's internet connection was quite slow and it took a while to upload some of our pictures but it's not as if we had a huge amount planned anyway. Electricity there is a little on the intermittent side too, making life interesting.

Finding the beach, and the internet bar, wasn't quite as easy as we thought. We followed the directions we'd been given but kept hitting dead ends. Or so we thought. It turns out that we just weren't persistent enough and had we walked five metres further down one of the dead ends, we would have seen the path we needed, as obvious as a fly on a Christmas cake. The beach itself was pretty good, better than my expectations in fact but not better than Whitehaven beach in Australia. It wasn't crowded at all but we'd been told that we were there at a bit of a crossover time when the travelers have gone home and the Christmas guests are on their way. Lucky us!

Walking back from the beach we stopped so I could get a scary hair cut from a man with a very sharp razor. It was about time I got it done, almost 8 weeks since the last cut! It made me feel like I had a really small head all of a sudden. And that was Friday done. More yummy food back at the Oceanic hotel that night and more beer too. I tried my first lobster and liked it. It was a bit like a giant prawn really.

Saturday was... interesting. We headed up to the pool as usual and were getting comfortable when two more people came up. The girl was late twenties and Irish, the man was forty plus and really, really loved the sound of his own voice. He hardly stopped talking for the whole three or more hours that the pair were there and it wasn't exactly easy to ignore him either. As we listened to him talking to the girl (he was a bit too loud to ignore), we heard all manner of rubbish come out of his mouth punctuated with plenty of bad language. He claimed to know everything although it eventually transpired that he thought it was Friday even though it was Saturday. At first I felt a bit sorry for the girl but then I realised that she could have left if she wanted. In the man's defence, he was apparently very nearly blind and perhaps he was compensating for it a bit. Fortunately though he wasn't a hotel guest, he lived along the road and was borrowing the pool for the afternoon. That was about it for Saturday.

Sunday, the traditional day for roast dinner. Something we've missed since March but something our British hosts had on offer today. The rest of the day we did the usual lying by the pool sort of thing and then in the evening ordered a nice Chardonnay and ate a most delicious roast chicken dinner. A perfect Sunday.

Monday was also a nice, relaxing day but sadly we had to check out of our room. We spent the day by the pool again, had some supper and headed to the station to get our train.

Goa itself isn't a hugely special place on its own in my opinion but the Oceanic hotel is an amazing place to relax and do very little. I want to go back there one day.