Sofa

I have so many aches from sleeping repeatedly on the ground. It is unbelieveably solid, despite the fact that there must be an underground river flowing through it by now.
We woke at 5am, to see the rain actually causing dents to appear in the top of the tent. Dragging ourselves through the rain to the kitchen, we made our porridge breakfast (we bought exciting flavoured satchets of porridge oats to enliven the monotonous regime of porridge) and chatted to the guy also in the kitchen cooking. Guess what he was making? He was cooking up a whole pan (read=20) of giant green-lipped mussels. For breakfast. Having been up since 2am at Cape Kidnappers, diving for them.
This guy eats more food than I can even comprehend eating in a week, let alone one sitting. The other day, he was making dinner. This involved five fried eggs, six lamb cutlets, three garlic breads and ten sausages. I am not even kidding. This morning, for breakfast, other than the mussels he had four sausage sandwiches and a french baguette filled with a whole cow. Okay, maybe that last was a little exageratted, but otherwise, yup, those are his eating habits. I do not know how 1) He has the time to cook and eat all this stuff, 2) How he has time in between cooking and eating this stuff to work enough to afford it all and 3) How anyone's stomuch can take that amount of food on a constant basis! He is also unfailingly generous and friendly, offering anyone around a share. This morning, Alex tried a fresh cooked, caught two hours previously mussel. I demurred, as it was a copped coloured squidge complete with rusty black breathing tubes and squelchy white stretchy bits attached to the shell. I like the shells, not the inhabitants! Apparently, it was really chewy and tasted of salt. Not surprising, really, but defiately not my preferred breakfast of choice!
Anyways, we hung out in the lounge again and Alex started up something new on the laptop for his portfolio. I read a magazine full of shiny pictures. We had some beans on toast for lunch and I bemoaned the Kiwi need to make everything sweet and their seeming hatred of hot foods.
We moved to the sofas and I started in on my book. We had music videos in the background. All the other backpackers were hanging about too, all reading and moping about the weather.
Then, amazingly, the sun came out and the rain stopped. Blue sky began to appear. We all gathered at the windows in sheer amazement. Then, fast as it had appeared, as if to give us false hope, it disappeared again. Its not raining (yet) but it is definately grey. Doh.
We had some exciting distraction in the form of the police showing up wanting to talk to the guy who cooks all the massive amounts of food - turns out he'd bashed osmeone attempting to rob his car on the head and the robber had complained to the police. But he was offskies anyways - he drove past and waved at me as I was returning to the lounge after a pasta-fetching mission form the tent!
A car race came on and absorbed Alex into its distracting circuits and crashes. I decided to do some mindless things on the laptop for a while, instead of consuming my book within one day. We had dinner, chocolate (amazing stuff with cherry flavoured jelly beans and bits of biscuit included in the chocolate) and watched Legally Blonde 2 on the tv with another couple. Now it is dark and it is time to re-greet to solid mattress of doom known to others as the ground. Joy.