Gala Dinner

This was the evening for the Gala Dinner. Being vegans, our food choice is quite “limited”, so it doesn’t make sense to pay the exorbitant price for much of the food that we are simply not going to touch, and the good thing about this favourite resort of ours is that it doesn’t require guests to join the Christmas Dinner like many other hotels.

But we did take some part.

One of the activities for the Gala Dinner was “Cinema Paradiso”, in which movies were shown in front of a lotus pond while the guests were having dinner.  The show being open air meant that other guests were also able to see it, so when we returned to the resort after having our own version of “Gala Dinner” (garlic bread + fried asparagus + yellow curry with vegetables + rice) at about 5 percent of the price of this one, we sat at a secluded corner and quietly enjoyed the show. It was a Disney cartoon, a Christmas version of Beauty and the Beast in which Belle helped turn the Beast into the prince that once was and his gloomy and cursed castle into a hopeful and lively one on Christmas Eve.

A typical storyline for a fairy tale, you might say, but interestingly, the cartoon reinforced some important concepts I learned about life from Nick Vujicic’s book Life Without Limits: Inspiration for a Ridiculously Good Life. In the two chapters that I read at the poolside in the last two days, Nick talks about how to handle life when things go against us. He proposes that we should have hope and adopt a positive attitude – an attitude of gratitude, action, empathy and forgiveness. These happened to be the very weapons that brought Belle her triumph, and it was a lack of these that had left the Beast trapped by the dark voices in his own psyche.

Some things in life are more than coincidence, when you think carefully about them.