Only one more day in PV. It is going by so fast!

Went to Le Bistro on the Rio Cuale island for our anniversary dinner. Cocktails, a yummy cream of spinach and scallop soup, Caesar salad, and scampi with linguine. A small jazz trio performing: piano, drums, voice (does the singer make it a trio?). Walking back along the Malecon after dinner, a huge party scene, the procession for the Virgin of Guadalupe had just ended and the streets were packed with revelers, a mix of locals and tourists. Walked by a disco bar with a giant Alice in Wonderland figure, about two stories high, standing in the doorway, very lifelike, with a scary yet inviting look on her face, as if one had entered another dimension ("one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small") .

My beach reading has been a mix of poetry, prose and magazines. Sharon Dolin's Burn and Dodge (the title comes from the photography terms for adding more or less light to the exposure), Paul Guest's My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (which is just a hoot for beach reading, several passersby gave the cover title a double-take), and James Hamilton-Paterson's novel Rancid Pansies, the title of which is, of course, an anagram of Princess Diana. It's a wonderful novel, very campy and literate and funny and dark all at once. I have just loved reading it and now want to find everything else he has written (apparently he has several other novels in the series, and also two books of poems!?). The story is about Gerry Samper, a gay Englishman, whose villa in Italy falls off the side of a cliff during an earthquake in the middle of his 50th birthday party. All of the guests escape unharmed because they happened to be outside at the time. Gerry makes an off-hand joke to a rescuing helicopter pilot that the ghost of Princess Diana had warned them all to flee the house seconds before the earthquake, and through many twists and turns of fate his joke becomes local legend, spawning a Diana Cult at the site of his former house. It's all hysterically funny and over the top, with anagrams and satirical jabs at The DaVinci Code and awful silly cuisine ("Mice Krispies") and more. Highly recommended beach reading!!

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We are off to Old Town and perhaps a tour of homes in Gringo Gulch. Dinner perhaps somewhere in the Olas Altas area. Then home tomorrow. Alas. The only trouble with going on vacation is having to come back from vacation.

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