Up for a bikeride into the armpit that is Playa del Carmen. Then breakfast at Spices--how much prosciutto y melone can you eat? Out to the beach for some reading. I finished my book, Regeneration by Pat Barker, an historical novel about William Rivers, a British neurologist serving in the military, who treats officers in a psychiatric hospital in Scotland who are suffering from war neuroses in World War II. He faces the ethical dilemma of having to rehabilitate men in order to send them back to the front to face more horror and probably die. Among his patients are two poets, Siegfried Sassoon (Sephardic) and Wilfred Owen (whose poetry was set to music by Britten in The War Requiem. It only took me 10 years, Lee Monro, but it was worth it. Thank you. Out for a stroll through the shopping mall across the street. Junk. Back to check e-mail in the library. Then on to Spices for some lunch. Down to the beach for a new book and a caiprinha. Back to the pool for a Spanish lesson. Up to the room to rest from this exhausting day. On to Azia, the hotel's Thai restaurant. Each of the hotel's restaurants is beautifully decorated in its own theme, and every table is excellent, private and roomy. Azia served very good Thai food, some of it great. The hotel seems only half full, despite the presence of large parties of prizewinners in a Yamaha snowmobile sales contest from Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as Sunoco gas station owners who have won incentive prizes, all of whom are readily identifiable by an enormous gut and a T-shirt advertising beer. It is a small hotel to begin with, but there is so much room and space on the beach, in the restaurants, in the haciendas, that you feel that it's your own private castle. In the distance, you can hear the honkytonk carrying through the jungle from the Allegro Playacar and the Riu Resort, but here, it's just Mozart.