If you go down to the beach today, watch out for the elephants...

For the past few days Lydia and I have had one question nagging at us. Day and night. All hours. Burning a hole into our brains.

What happens to the elephants?

Seriously. We needed to know.

So for the sake of research, and I know you guys want to know too - we asked two of our local friends, Dilip and Tumo/Sumo.

Dilip: *shrugs shoulders* "They've gone."
Tumo/Sumo: "Not today, not tomorrow, but the day after we're going in to get it back."

I think we need to ask a few more people, although I suspect we'll get a variety of different answers again!! :o)

Oh, we've adopted a family of puppies, or to be more accurate, they've adopted us! Not sure what breed they are, but they're lovely, if very frightened. Two of them are very slim, you can see the outlines of their ribcages, so we've been stockpiling biscuits to feed them. The Lord of the Cats is Not Amused. He doesn't like dogs. I think we're going to have to stop soon as their restaurant opens on Saturday and Aggie will kill us if puppies are running amok in his restaurant!

Last night we went to the world's most awful Italian restaurant - Little Italy, and if you're ever in Palolem - don't go there. The waiter was besotted with Lydia, she had to place my food order for me as he couldn't tear his eyes off her! We've attracted a considerable amount of attention in India because we're deaf white females, but last night really took the proverbial biscuit. Spotting that we were deaf he went into a series of elaborate gestures, and then went dashing off to get his notepad and promptly wrote:

Waiter: How long you not speak? You use hands to speak?
Lydia: We are deaf, we can speak but we prefer sign language.
Waiter: Last year I met a shame girl.
Lydia: What do you mean shame girl?
Waiter: Shame girl like you.

I can only assume that the word he was looking for was "same," but nonetheless...!

We also met one guy who is the restaurant supervisor at Cozy Nook. He has said that he will pray for us and Allah's love has no bounds, one day our hearing will return. We assured him that we were quite happy - good life, great family, job in the UK, yadda yadda, but he was insistant that we were poor lost souls that need to be saved by the great Allah. Oh well.

Pray for me.

Caroline xx