Pole Pole

And here's a nice picture taken from the veranda of the villa where I was situated in Zanzibar on my recent trip there. One of the lessons I've learned over the years is that there is a certain beauty in heading someplace during the low season, and you couldn't get more low than when I was staying at the Dolphin Bay Resort (it was technically the rainy season, although the weather was amazing every day). Of the forty villas one was occupied, mine. So, three bedrooms, two living rooms, a veranda, a balcony and my own private pool (well, come to think of it, the big pool up by the main building was my own private pool as well) - all for around $180 a night. I don't normally stay at places like that, but I thought it might be fun to do something different and Hotels.com said that this was the last room at that price so I jumped on it. I'm sure that a place that posh doesn't normally cost $180 a night, so maybe it was the last room at that price, although that's not what I thought they meant. Still, it was lovely. I swam with dolphins and cavorted with monkeys and raced giant tortoises and strolled around Stone Town, but I also spent a lot of time doing nothing, which is not something I'm especially good at. As my best friend David is wont to opine, no of us ever survive our childhood - and I came out of mine believing that I'm the laziest person in the world. So sitting around and doing nothing is really hard for me because it seems to reenforce my own worst self-image. I had to laugh the other night when I went out by the pool here to relax, bringing with me two books, my Blackberry and my Nano - again, I'm still trying to get my brain around this whole relaxing thing. I tried to get into the spirit of the Swahili words pole pole, which is pronounced something like poe-lee poe-lee (although I'm sure my good friend Trish, who speaks Swahili, would roll her eyes) and it means something like "slow slow" or maybe "slowly slowly" (again, I should have asked Trish first). I did manage to spend a couple entire days just reading and staring out at the ocean. See, I can learn.

Oh, and I had this odd epiphany. I was thinking back to Woody Allen's Radio Days where he recounts his mother and father arguing all the time, including one on whether the Atlantic or the Pacific is the greater ocean. Upon mature reflection - and shaped by my own amazing memories of Zanzibar, Salalah, Fujairah and Mumbai - I'd have to pick the Indian Ocean.