El Andalous - War of the Sunbeds

El Andalous Pools (Old Photo)

All the beaches here are still closed.

An upshot of this is that people have moved from sitting on our beach to sitting by our pools. The sunbeds are placed in pairs, 2m apart. Actually, there aren’t so many of them; I guess they are trying to discourage people from gathering.

I don’t ever sit by the pool. I’m not sure why, because I used to sit on the beach. Possibly, it’s because I feel I can more easily access drinks, my books, etc when I’m on my balcony and also I have a fan, so I can keep cooler there than when sitting outside. It’s possibly also to do with the fact that I see the pools from my balcony anyway, so I don’t see the point in sitting by them, whereas when I'm on the beach, it's a proper change of scene.

Quite a few people are complaining that the Russians are reserving all the sunbeds by the smaller (adult) pool from around 8am and then going off to sit on the balcony at the (closed) diving centre from 10am to 3pm (it’s about a ten minute walk away). Meanwhile, other people come out, want to sit by the pool and have a quick dip during the day, but can’t because the Russians have reserved all the sunbeds.

There was initially some kind of truce, as at least one of the Russians would usually be there and would clear a sunbed every time they saw anyone looking round for one. However, nowadays, they are spending more of their time at the diving centre, and people are looking at the sunbeds in despair.

A friend of mine happened to wake early (we’ve had a heatwave, so it’s been extremely hot, and the only cool time is early morning), so she went and used one of the sunbeds at 6.30am. The Russians turned up at 8am and appeared not to be very happy. The next day, they got up and reserved the sunbeds at 6am.

A few more days passed and my friend woke up early again. This time, she was down by the pool at around 5am. Again, the Russians appeared quite disconcerted when they discovered that one of their sunbeds had been taken. The following morning, they got up and reserved the sunbeds at 4am.

What will be the next part of this saga?

It’s also been very busy here this past week because of Eid, the big celebration after Ramadan. The large pool has been packed with children. Fortunately, our pool guy and the security guy have been very good at asking children to keep out of the adult pool, so I’ve been able to get a proper swim (if children are in the pool, it's impossible). One day I was even brave enough to tell a guy, in Arabic, that the small pool was for adults only. Fortunately, he replied in English, and said that nobody had been there, but he’d move his children over to the other pool (which was fine).

We’ve had problems with the smaller children (the children of our previous manager, no less!) throwing large rocks into the larger pool. Obviously, this could damage the pool and we don’t want a load of rocks at the bottom of the pool (even if the children are diving to collect them, they don’t always do it). Several of us have told the children off and in the end a security guy had to sit there all day to make sure they behaved. Their father (our previous manager!) didn’t do a single thing to apologise or to stop them. No wonder nothing ever got done when he used to be in charge.

So, that’s what life is like when you lead a privileged existence!