Night at the Beach

Date: Wednesday. 25th of May, 2022.

I truly missed being here. When I started writing on read.cash, I was so consistent that I never skipped a day, but I broke that streak few weeks ago. However, I'm so glad to be back.

Today was great, not because of any event in particular but it just was. I woke up feeling refreshed, work wasn't stressful at all and I breezed through it with few hours to spare so I spent those hours pretending to work while watching a TV series on my phone haha.

Today, I recalled the night my colleagues and I went to the beach and I thought I should write about it.

If you read my post yesterday, I talked about how I attended a work retreat and was able to bond with my colleagues outside of the work setting and it was really nice to see what everyone was like when they were not being professional. For the retreat, we stayed at a shortlet serviced apartment in a beautiful location. The day we arrived, someone suggested that we should go to the beach that night and hang out.

We all knew we would be going to a beach at some point as we were informed so that we could pack our clothes appropriately. One of us however came with lots of work clothes and planned to wear formal shirt, trousers and a shoe lol. She was aware that we had to go to the beach as she was the one who informed us but she forgot to pack. We laughed about it with her and managed to style her clothes to be beach appropriate and it was cool. There were lots of beaches around and we chose one of the popular ones to go to. The beach was close but we experienced a little traffic on the way.

When we got there, I was surprised to see how alive the night was. The place was filled with people, vendors were still actively selling their wares and people were moving about. We got some drinks and delicious food. After eating, we went to another section of the beach that was closer to the water.

On getting there, there were red floating thingies in the water which I believe marks the point people are not allowed to go beyond as the water gets deeper from that point. Some of us went on barefoot and went into the water while we watched the waves as they grew bigger and swept our feet. We didn't go in too far, just enough to feel the strength of the waves. We held each other and tried not to fall whenever a big one came, it was funny. The life guards didn't even care about us and just laid on their chairs, backing us and discussing.

One of us then drew our attention to some girls who had been walking to and fro since we got there. I didn't really pay attention to them until he explained that they were 'night workers'. My naive mind didn't believe him until I noticed they were dressed very differently than everyone, not beach appropriate at all, with little handbags and an exaggerated swing of the hips whenever they walked. I took my mind off them though as I didn't think it was my business.

After spending about an hour in the water, I went to get 'suya' (meat slowly grilled openly, served with a specific blend of spices and wrapped in a paper. It is usually in a skewer but the chop it in small bits and give you a toothpick to eat with). The suya was really nice and I shared with others, I ate most of it though haha. After that, we went to a section that has something like a cabana built on the water. There we stayed, talked, had more drinks (I was having non-alcoholic drinks) and danced till we were exhausted.

It was past midnight when we decided to head back to the house. We took our baths, came downstairs and kept talking until our boss told us we would have to wake up by 5am for morning exercise 😅 I didn't wake up till 7am. Thankfully, it rained that morning so we couldn't go out for a jog and I got to sleep for longer.

Thank you so much for reading about my first experience of being at the beach at night. How about you? Been there at night before?