Saturday June 14

I had a real domestic day today. washing shopping, bakingand out visiting. But onboard ship in a different country it's just not so straightforward.
The laundry is towards the back of deck 6 and my cabin is towards the front of deck 2 so it's quite a walk just to reach the machines, but at least there are washing machines here.
The shopping involved a 4 mile walk in the rain and even that's different because it's too warm to wear a waterproof. I wore one to start but discarded it after I was more damp inside than outside the garment. Shopping for ingredients to bake was, shall we say a minor challenge. No golden syrup so pancake syrup had to suffice. When we eat the cake on Monday I'll let you know if the maple flavour in the syrup improved the cake or not. For those of you who know my baking it was a supper loaf I made. I also made a banana cake and that was easier.
However before the joys of shopping and baking I went to the Cheshire Home where there are 13 residents all of whom have profound physical disabilities and some also have profound mental disabilities. We stayed for around 2 hours playing, singing, painting nails, blowing up balloons and using Jenga blocks in different ways. building towers ready for knocking down - to much mirth, encouraging the residents to help build the towers, putting a couple of blocks into the Jenga container to make a shaker and even using the cylinder shaped container to roll down one of the boys legs. As with so many of these places they don't really have the facilities to care for the residents in the way we would expect at home but they do the best they can for them. There is little government support so they are reliant on charity to continue caring for them.
it's rained pretty well all day here but has finally stopped. Tomorrow I'm off to church in the morning and if the rain holds off, down to the beach. then back to OR Monday morning.