Hotel Europa

Scotty and I decided to spend a night in a nice hotel downtown to celebrate our anniversary. We've never left Natty overnight with anyone before, so this was a big deal for all of us. Thankfully, we have some good missionary friends that live in Mallasilla and have a little 3-year old daughter who were happy to add to an already full house. We happily left her there to play and drove up in time to check-in and have a yummy buffet-style lunch. Our main reason for choosing this hotel was that they have a nice pool/spa/sauna area that is warm and comfy and relaxing. Since we live in La Paz, we had no desire to be outside the hotel much to see anything cause we've seen it all a million times before. After lunch we headed up to our room to digest. We found that the hotel was more than willing to give us the honeymoon special, which included a beautiful bouquet of flowers, his and hers robes, roses in the bathroom, rose petals and salts for the bath, chocolate covered strawberries and an entire bottle of champagne (which we didn't open since I'm pregnant and Scotty's not a big fan) and breakfast in bed (which we skipped so we could engorge at the buffet instead). All of this costs less than a normal night for two in the hotel! Doesn't make much sense, but a no-brainer for us. After sprawling on the bed for a bit, we felt like we were capable of moving again so we grabbed our suits and books and went downstairs to hit the indoor pool. When we came out of the elevator, we saw it was dark in the pool area. Upon checking, we were informed the pool is closed on Tuesdays- ALL DAY. Scotty and I exchanged angry/disappointed/unbelieving stares and sulked back to our room. I actually cried. The whole point of getting away and leaving Natty was to just relax and enjoy the amenities of the hotel. The idea of sitting in a hotel room, listening to the continual screams from the huge school below us, until dinner time, was not what we were going for. It was interesting to watch each other respond, both of us feeling like we are so frequently disappointed in a similar manner by things in Bolivia, and think about the counseling seminar we were just a part of. We learned that when the heat of life is pressing on you, you either have thorn tree responses (which I was struggling with) or fruit tree responses, which is due only to the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. We wanted to have fruit tree responses and I think we eventually got there- but we had to wrestle with a fair amount of irritation first. So, once we decided to stay and make the most of it (we were about to call the whole thing off), we had a great time. We read, we walked to a nearby coffee shop, I took a bath- the afternoon passed quite nicely. Then we went upstairs to a snazzy restaurant with live piano player and had a delicious dinner- best I've had in a long time. One of the things I was looking forward to the most was not being woken up at 6:30 by "mommymommymommymommy!" Of course, I expected to still wake up pretty early, as my body is now trained, but it sure was nice to just be able to lay there for a while before actually getting up. After another eating frenzy at breakfast we were happy to lay around for the rest of the morning and finish up the books we had brought. Then we actually were able to make it for an hour to the pool, order a quick lunch, and jet. What a nice time we had talking about important things, talking about not important things, playing Boggle, reading, resting, eating. I loved having Scotty to myself for a day and just doing whatever we wanted to do. After a busy last month, it was a much-needed time away.