Christmas Day

Well, I have to say, apart from when I took my father to Tong Fok on Lantau Island, Hong Kong for Christmas Day in 1991, this has to be the most memorable for a variety of reasons.

Julian was awake before the rest of us and decided to use the en-suite bathroom at 7am rather than the one down the corridor, so in effect we were all now awake due to the noise of the pipes in the bathroom.

Gianni woke up moaning about his back, he was in pain but could walk. It didn't look great and I handed over some doliprane, a French paracetamol type drug to help with the pain. He was going to take the morning slowly.

I opened my step-mothers Christmas present which was a gorgeous bracelet, I am kicking myself now for not wearing it all the time as it's gone missing with my backpack.

Both of us ready to go out for breakfast, we found a large cafe opposite the end of our street, on sitting down a man came up to us to order, as usual I ordered in French and then asked Julian what he wanted in English. The man, Ali, turns out to be an Iraqi and spoke fluent English, he asked for my nationality and I was happy that I could honestly say that I was Irish, Julian became Canadian again. So my Christmas morning started with a coffee with an Iraqi and a discussion about the Iraq War and the long term effect on tourism there especially on their artefacts & archaelogical sites ... followed by a 34second phone call home to say Happy Christmas!

Returning back to the auberge, I needed to do some laundry .. a great occupation on Christmas Day but it needed to be done! Gianni took it easy in the courtyard and Julian went off to find the previous night's internet cafe to update his website. Gianni & I then went off to the big souq to see what shopping could be done and I met Ahmed - an honest trader that sold Mauritanian pipes that I wanted to buy as presents for people at home.

Gianni & I looked into the chance of getting a good meal tonight somewhere in Nouachkott, looking through his Italian version of Lonely Planet, we nailed it down to Lebanese or Chinese. Then he decided he wanted to find a restaurant he'd been to before about 2km from the Auberge past all the Embassies ... we ended up meeting a French Alsatian couple who lived near the Malian border and were working there on behalf of the German government. We ended up back near the auberge, next to Ali the Iraqi wife's restaurant, in a Chinese called Bambou ... a BIG mistake.

The evening didn't go well, Gianni prompted Julian to talk to him, the two of them didn't have a common language and Gianni had never seen Julian ask for anything himself but relied on me to do his communication for him. So Gianni tried to show him the 'art' of hand & body language to communicate more freely with non-English speakers. It didn't work, Julian didn't understand and answered Gianni's attempts in full sentences in English; it ended with a non-comprehensible argument in two different languages and I was sat as a referee ... Julian's response to it all was 'well I speak Tibetan' - when I asked if it was fluent, I was told it was more fluent than my (non-existant) Tibetan was. Oh well, learning Tibetan to enable someone to travel around the world wasn't the most savvy of things to do .. but each to their own!