Monkey business

Just a short blog today! I keep on forgetting to mention the food that I am having so most of this short blog will be about food. While last week I was dying for vegetables, this week I am doing well in that department. We get a real feast for lunch every day that is properly balanced with meat, starch and vegetables. Yesterday as part of the lunch there was an entire fried tilapia along with some beef, two types of rice, spinach, cabbage and salad. There was fruit juice to drink and an apple for dessert. I have never eaten tilapia and was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was. Having the entire fish on my plate does put me off a little! I like my fish filleted, battered and fried and I don't really want to see its shriveled up eyes.

The breakfasts at the hotel have been good too. It is usually fruit juice, toast, an omelette and a friend starch (either potato or sweet potato). This morning the juice was so delicious, it was beetroot mixed with passion fruit. A really good combination!

For lunch today everyone got really excited when they took the foil wrappers off their food trays because along with the beef stew and fried chicken wings, there were prawns. I promptly gave my prawns away to one of the guys who was extremely happy to get a double helping. The rest of the food was really good and came with a chapati, rice, more spinach and cabbage. Today we got bananas as well as apples for dessert. I am really enjoying these meals.

Maybe the good food is helping but whatever it is, the work went really well today. What was so encouraging was that one of the guys from the Fisheries Department, who is with us for the first time, told me today that he is really very excited to be involved in the project. He went on to say that he can't wait to use it afterwards because he can see how it can help him in improving how the department collects its data and where they need to improve their research. This is exactly what the project was designed for so it is fantastic to hear it unsolicited.

It was another long day but we finished a little earlier than last night at 17:30. By then KMFRI's grounds were deserted except for some little furry ones. So the one and only photo tonight is for my dear friend who really, really loves monkeys ;-P
One of the monkeys in the KMFRI grounds. He is eating bread out of a plastic bag.

I was told by one of the ladies at work that tonight is karaoke night at my hotel. I really hope it doesn't go on too late. Last night I tried sleeping with the earplugs again. It wasn't really noisy but I wanted to see if it would help me sleep better. Well I woke up at some stage during the night thinking that something was missing. In my sleep-confused state it eventually dawned on me that I no longer had the earplugs in! After searching around the bed I finally found them: not only had I taken them out in my sleep but I had tossed them right to the bottom of the bed. If the mosquito net hadn't been there they would have been on the floor. Clearly subconsciously I didn't like them!

That's all for today! Take care everyone.

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