Joe is up and out early, and by the time I get up at 7am, he’s already back. The girls are still asleep though, and so it doesn’t take much more than Joe suggesting I go for a walk, for me to be dressed and out the door!
I turn right at the main road today, towards a dessert place that was recommended to me a week ago, but we haven’t been to yet. It’s a half hour walk from where we’re staying, and only open after dark, so I don’t know if we’ll walk or taxi to experience it eventually. I start walking, and I walk for what feels like a long time, but when I check the map, I’m still 15 minutes away from the place.
I abort mission of trying to find the dessert place, and take a random right. As I’m walking along, I see so much I want to take pictures of, but I hesitate. This place though, a bar? Restaurant? “Space”? Clearly shows how businesses here don’t care for walls. It was not yet open, and nobody inside, so I figured I could take a picture here, at least.
Everyone is waiting for me to have breakfast, so we eat first, and then I’m taking the girls to the beach. Joe is watching hockey (because yes, a 7pm Toronto game is a 7am Vietnam game), so he will join us later.
The tide patterns have changed since we arrived, when it used to be high and low tide once each per day, it’s now twice per day. It changes the texture of the sand, so today we have a very narrow strip of soft dry sand, and most is wet and packed sand. My feet feel wet just walking across the solid sand.
On the beach this morning it’s chilly, windy, and for a while when we get there, I just want to sit and soak up the atmosphere. There are two of the regular stray dogs running around, and they are so funny to watch. Lots of foreigners are walking their dogs on the beach this morning as well, so the dogs all look like they’re having the best morning ever. (They pay absolutely no attention to people whatsoever. They’re not looking for food, and avoid walking up to people or their belongings.)
Once I’ve had enough of the people/dog watching, or maybe it’s the “Mom, are we going in the water yet?” I’ve had enough of, we actually approach the waves. Even the water knows it’s a cold morning for swimming, and the waves look stronger than usual. We trudge in, and have the greatest time bobbing in the waves. Each wave is different, and so each wave is excitement anew. At one point, a local lady wearing full long leggings, water shoes, heavy hoodie, full face coverage and a large sun hat, with a water belt around her waist, walks up to us, waves hello, and starts swimming. My flabbers were ghasted! She’s a wave or two further out, but spends her morning swimming back and forth. That’s what I call dedication to daily exercise, without risking a sunburn or getting too cold in the water!
Joe finally joins us as well, and he takes his sweet time even getting into the water. Us girls giggle, because once you’re used to the water temperature, it’s not cold at all! Our collective confidence increases once we’re four in the water. It’s a whole lot easier to supervise one kid each, than two kids all alone. We have set rules and make sure the kids stick to them, these waves and currents are strong this time of year. Two weeks ago the rescue force here had 7 rescues! We do not want to be part of those statistics, thank you very much!
I get out first. When bobbing in the waves, we stay fairly close to the shore, and so I have to crouch down to float on most of the waves. My knees are tired, I’m sure the girls and I have been in the water over an hour at this point. The girls and Joe stay in, and when they come up, Joe is itchy. To be fair, he’s usually itchy after a swim, but today it looks different. Three spots that we can easily see look like they’ve been touched by tentacles. The girls and I have no such stripes on us, nor have we on any other day in the ocean.
We send Joe and Maylin home to shower off (Maylin likes to make sure Dad is safe), and Téa and I stay behind to relax and tidy up (the girls brought their sand toys, so they all need to be rinsed off and drip off, at least a little bit). Maylin is all done in the shower when we get upstairs, so Téa goes straight in to wash up as well.
Lunch is low effort, there’s cereal and yogurt and oat milk at the ready. Joe has a small bowl, he isn’t really a fan of cereal, but also he does not feel good. At all. He feels cold, but has no fever. He takes a nap, while the girls play and I blog. After a few hours of napping and working and complaining his head hurts, it becomes clear that he’s in no shape to do anything this evening, and I start planning for a night out with the girls. But first, we have to provide Joe with something hot and comforting for dinner!
I’ll take the girls to the Stockholm restaurant for dinner! Once Joe has been fed, and reassures us he’ll be fine for a couple of hours without us, I take the girls downstairs and book a taxi. Our driver is eager to converse, with his limited English and a bit of Google Translate, we have a fun conversation, and he tells me where to look for the best dessert downtown as well. But first, we go to Stockholm.
The place is fancy. The bar portion when you enter is all open. No walls, just a counter. The spiral staircase to the upstairs coworking space, also no walls. The restaurant/dining room however, glass walls. Inside is dark, and they play bossanova music. There is one other occupied table, and another one enters right after us. When they give us the menus, I tell the girls to order whatever they want off the menu. I don’t think she goes by price, but Téa manages to spend a lot of money on her main course…
We are almost in a Scandinavian food coma, but we had caught a small glimpse of the dessert menu, and we saved our dessert stomachs especially for this purpose.
We finally call it a night, and I don’t usually share pictures from the ladies’ facilities, but this was the door to the washroom…
We got outside and turned our heads left, and found a bright tulip-looking light feature in the roundabout!
We get home and Joe is awake. He doesn’t need anything from the store, so we head up and excitedly tell him about our evening. We relax into our evening and try to go to bed early. When Joe and I get ready in our bathroom, we notice that last night’s almost invisible drip from our shower faucet is now a hairline stream. It’s concerning, and we message our AirBnb host about it.
After the girls are asleep, I check on the bathroom one more time before crawling into my own bed. Joe says “don’t worry about it”, but those words are a whole lot easier to say out loud than actually follow through on! I finally do fall asleep, but it’s not to be a restful night…