The End

The last week in Palolem has been an insane rollercoaster of bickering, altered perceptions, body painting, rainy days, sleep deprivation, cancellations, good food, booze, hammock wars and that’s just telling you about the stuff I can feel I can write about here.

In three word, it was nuts. The group I was hanging with was basically cobbled together only in the last week of my stay in Palolem, so we had to condense all the fun we wanted to have into the time that was available. As usual, one of the first things to go was sleep.

It was amazing how well we got along, considering that we were about as dissimilar as possible. I think the thing that made our group work was that we were all up for everything; which included the Holly festival that happened last week, despite the fact that it was raining buckets. We didn’t actually know what the Holly festival celebrated, but what we did know was that it was celebrated by throwing huge amounts of paint at each other.

We stocked up on a couple of kilos of the stuff and attacked the town, coming out of the night as bandits and fighting skirmishes with the local village boys (who were damned good shots), we ran the gauntlet of the village’s main street (where the rain ran purple, yellow and red) and then we fought it out on the beach with other willing – and other not so willing – foreigners. Suffice it to say that my backpack is now not quite as heavy as when we first arrived, but a great deal more colourful.

There was also my farewell party which was originally meant to be a pre-party for my last Silent Noise, but turned into the main party for a great deal of people when the Silent Noise party got cancelled (officially because of the rain). Of course, it still being Holly as well, my living room got painted in many livid colours. I had to pay the maid double just to get her to clean up the aftermath.

Then there was the dinner. One of our group was a passionate cook who hadn’t had a kitchen in months; my place had a kitchen; I imagine you can see the reasoning. The food was lovely and it was here also that a great deal of the hammock wars took place (that is, until somebody was smart enough to go and buy more hammocks). The cook is now living in my place, having taken it over with a friend now that I’ve moved out. It feels good to leave the place in the hands of people who will utilise it well.

All in all a very good last week, though I’ll probably need to sleep for days just to recover from it. Hopefully I’ll manage to snatch some more moments of writing between moments of sleep. As you might have guessed, my work did suffer under the pressure of the fun.

Still, there is enough time to write in the weeks ahead. There won’t be a great deal of time to spend at the beach. Well, except for in Portugal, but that will be an entirely different experience. It will be brilliant to get to hang out with the whole family again. It must have been more than a few years ago since I saw my sister.

But first, university applications.