Christmas in Mindelo

The local town seemed to continue as normal on Christmas Eve as we popped out to the market to get some fresh veggies and a stack of bananas – there are bananas being sold in vast quantities on every street corner so you feel the need to buy some of every trip off the boat!

African supermarket

A few of the other northern European boats celebrated Christmas in the evening and it was nice to have Swiss and French kids on the boats next to us excitedly running up and down the pontoon.

We were relieved not to have any banging music disturbing the marina on Christmas Eve and were looking forward to a peaceful night, it was a bit disappointing that we had a howling gale in the marina, must have been up to 30 knots of wind which made for an uncomfortable night but I was pleased that we were in the marina and not dancing around the anchorage!

Look what Santa brought us !

Christmas morning was sunny (whilst it was raining in the UK J) but still super windy.  We started the morning with Michael Buble’s Christmas album much to Mark’s delight and then whilst we sat having our breakfast and opening presents we moved onto Mary Poppins! Not that we would be watching at home but we were both feeling a bit homesick and it was nice to have some Christmas traditions.

Before leaving the UK we had thought it was odd returning with so many Christmas gifts but it actually was very very nice to have such lovely presents to open and to be thinking of home.

We ventured out of the marina with the hope of using the local wifi to Skype family, but various other tourists had the same thought so there was no chance of that! So we hurried back to the boat for a few quick (expensive) calls from the Sat Phone.

Away in a manger.....

Later in the day we went back out to the local park and it was really nice to see all the locals out and enjoying themselves, the kids all dressed up in their best clothes and showing off their new toys – scooters, skates. It seemed important for the local community to come together at Christmas

Cape Verde Christmas Day

We then return to our lovely cosy boat, the wind was still howling, to sit down to our Christmas dinner, yes we did have a roast dinner, it was only a chicken/nut style roast which we brought with us, but it was delicious. We finished it off with a mint tea and some lovely biscuits which our very kind neighbours had given to us J oh and a small piece of Green and Blacks chocolate - thanks mum for the Christmas chocolate J

Yum !