Fast day 4

Hours since eating - 87

I'm in my least favourite, but nearest to my house internet cafe. Least favourite for 2 reasons:

a) It has a pub/cafe downstairs, which serves the most enormous and delicious pizzas
b) There are frequently cockroaches crawling over the keyboard whilst I type.

But today I´m lucky, it's too early for the smell of pizzas to drive me wild, and the cockroaches seem to have disappeared.

Well, today I'm feeling remarkably chipper. This morning I led the 7am yoga class, and everyone said I was really good, so I'm feeling really great. I would love to do a morning yoga class followed by breakfast back home in Leeds. I think it would be really nice. I wonder if anyone would come!?

Some of the fasters are feeling depressed and weak today, but for me it's my best day so far. Although I'd be hard pushed to do a 5k run, I'm feeling really alive. My body feels healthy and lithe, and my mind feels quite clear and sharp. All the things that John the yoga teacher said we would feel on the fourth or fifth day. It's great.

Although I have a strong desire for food, it wouldn't be correct to say that I'm ravenously hungry. I can tell the difference now between stomach hunger and brain hunger. It's definitely brain hunger - the desire for the pleasure of food, and to be doing all the food type things like cooking and shopping - that I have today. I think that this has been a valuable lesson learnt.

What else? Xela is deathly quiet and very beautiful. As I mentioned before, it's semana santa, easter week, and many of the businesses are closed. The streets are quite deserted too. T and I just walked up to the video shop in zone 3. Some of the fasters are going crazy wondering how to pass the rest of the time until they can eat again. We decided to get the Lord of the Rings trilogy to while away 9 hours! This is great for me as I can disappear into an Aragorn frenzy. However, when we got to the video shop, they needed about 15 telephone numbers, a passport, proof of address etc before they would rent us a DVD, it´s ok to get a video cassette though. No problem. We found the Lord of the Rings and paid for it. Then discovered that unlike most films here, which are in English and with Spanish subtitles, this one is in Spanish with no subtitles. So now we have 9 hours of Spanish practise too! Cool!

If you're interested, here's how Trevor and I plan to spend our next 3 days of eating:

1) friday 8pm, official end of fast, watermelon and water in the blender (here these drinks are hugely popular, they are called licuados and I adore them)

2) Saturday 8am, watermelon and banana licuado

3) Saturday lunchtime, salad with spinach, raw broccoli and tomatoes

4) Saturday evening, a tofu burger with hummous on the side at Casa Babylon (groovy cafe in the middle of town), disgusting amounts of tomoto ketchup slathered everywhere

5) Sunday morning, TOAST (oh God, the smell of it drives me crazy) with honey

6) Sunday lunchtime, massive blow out for all the fasters at El Alquimista, a fabulous veggie cafe on the hillside overlooking Xela. They do salads, curries, veggie burgers and chocolate truffles to die for, and I possibly will!