a short december

The last part of december started with arranging the official: getting our visa, and Roger getting his driving licence. So we went to the city, twice. Getting our visa involved getting stamps to pay for the visa, going to the police station, getting send off because they needed Roger too, coming again with Roger, getting send away again because they needed some time to fill in and check all the forms and coming back again on Wednesday to collect our passports eventually.
Getting to the city and walking there (especially around Christmas), isn’t that much of a pleasure. You have traffic jams while sitting in a black jeep in which there is no possibility of getting the windows open.
And in the city, concrete walls get so warm because of the sun, that when you pass them, you feel like somebody just opened a huge oven right next to you. And because it is almost Christmas, the whole city is filled with people searching for Christmas presents and also, very important, people searching for food for Christmas. Kilograms of sugar, flour and meat go over the cashier desk. To walk over the streets in this heat isn’t much of a pleasure either. The smell of rotten smoked fish mixes with the smell of expired urine.
We were haunting for some potential Christmas presents too, a blender. But they turned to be as expensive as €50,- for a blender to be compared with a broken blender from a second-hand internet shop.
Even though the city wasn’t too much of a pleasure all the time, we also did some nice things there. We went for an ice coffee and coconut&cherry cookies at Bounty and bought lots of exotic fruits on the market: sorrel, fresh passion fruits(the peel is actually yellow), plumroses(tastes like apple & radish, I won’t know how to make a more particular description), oranges(which are rather dry here, and the peel is green because of the little difference in temperature during day and night) and a coconut. When we headed home, we drove trough little villages and it is a very common sight to see fruit trees full of quite exotic/expensive fruits –as we are used to- (like mango, coconut or papaya) just in someone’s garden

So far for the city. But we also went for a lot of Christmas shopping. Here, Christmas is mostly about eating. According to a butcher, the island actually run out of their pigs, because they all were turned into hams. Even a tension was felt from all people whether or not to have enough eggs for Christmas. For Christmas we got ourselves some nice ice cream, such a huge ham and lettuce(which is really rare, for example, normally if you buy 3 tiny heads, it costs you as much as €7,50).

We have been holiday baking. At first we had Roger’s birthday and baked him a Best Ever Chocolate Pie. For Christmas we baked gingerbread men, raisin buns and an apple cake. And for New Years Eve we’ve been already making chocolate vanilla muffins filled with grape jam, and a crust for a quiche. It’s so hard to bake here. You have to clean up everything immediately, because of all the bugs (especially ants) who want to steal your food, if you want to use electric tools (like a mixer), you have to find a European plug first and then you can only prepare your food at a place where the plug is, of course far away from the place where you were cooking. The scale doesn’t measure right, so we always have just a little bit too much or just too little from certain ingredients. Also the oven is so bad, bottoms get burned so quickly while tops are still uncooked. But we manage a little better everyday.

We also had the needed comfortable occupations. We watched lots of movies: ‘Brothers’,’ Haar naam was Sarah’, and to get in the Christmas atmosphere ‘the Grinch’, ‘Christmas Carol’ and ‘Love Actually’. We also followed the best televisions series ever: ‘Breaking Bad’. Too bad we’re now done with it, but I really recommend it.
We went to sea and the pelicans were back. There were at least eleven of them just hanging around on the waves. There were a lot of boats too, from ten levelled Cruise ships to fisher boats, from Catamarans, to sailing ships, from express to a pirate ship. The funniest boat though, was a huge fancy one called ‘Bad Girl.

Then came Christmas.

On the day of Christmas Eve we put up some Christmas decorations and made a Christmas tree with lights. Besides, Anthony and his dad Barbequed the huge ham from the supermarket, for that extra smoky taste.

On the first Christmas day we had a kind of Christmas breakfast with the homemade raisin buns, jelly beans in a plastic penguin and fruits (mango and passion fruit). In the afternoon, some of Anthony’s family came by. They do more of a Christmas lunch then dinner here really. Therefore they took macaroni pie, fruitcake, ham and other meat with them. We also had some stir fry and the apple cake Anthony and I made. After lunch most of the family actually fell asleep on the comfortable garden chairs. Before lunch, we went for a swim down at the beach with some of the kids who were also visiting us. As much as I was just thinking how amazed I was that the Afro hairs of the girls, which were smelling like coconuts, weren’t at all effected by the seawater, they seemed to be pretty amazed by my hairs which were totally straightened by the sea water. While I was diving underwater, they were secretly touching my hairs, and then kind of cheerful about having touched it. As for Christmas presents: The blender was a little to trashy and expensive, so Ant got a machete.

On the second Christmas day, Anthony, Baxter and I walked on the beach. I found a rare shell(the skeleton from a sea-egg / sea-urchin). It was rare because normally, the shell has a little whole on the top, but mine was still whole. When Ant and I went for a swim Baxter went uphill again, and just when we decided to get out of the sea, Baxter came back to the beach, watching to the sea, and when I called him, he started wagging his tail and walking towards us. Just as if he was picking us up from school or something. The butcher came to visit us and brought us some root-vegetables and a chicken(slaughtered) and then he told me he forgot my mango and golden apples. We also went out for a drink, and took a test drive with the car. But during the ride, the car showed some weird defects. The ride was pretty bumpy and we seemed to be home Just in time. We didn’t really make the drink. So now Roger has a driving licence, but not a working car. Soon it will get fixed, though. We did barbecue some nice corns and Ann made some really nice baked bananas from the garden.

On the third day of Christmas (which doesn’t really exist, but makes it more easy for me to tell my story ‘chronologized’), we watched Narnia with warm chocolate milk and marshmallows. The butcher came by again. This time to bring me the mango and golden apples, and also he took some pizza hut pizza, KFC fries and fresh coconuts. Meanwhile we watched the second Narnia and baked pizza and had some calaloo soup. I also harvested a paw paw (papaya) and a star fruit.

So much for the Christmas, which got a little more Christmassy by the napkins and fluffy animals from my parents. The Christmas socks they got me came in handy at some other time though. They served as good protection against red ants while raking and levelling some ground for the water tanks. This week I furthermore didn’t really do a lot of work. It was more Anthony who had done some pretty nice jobs: cleaning, pick-axing more ground for the pizza oven, hanging coat racks,. The boxes arrived this week too, unfortunately just too late to set up the Christmas tree for Christmas. Roger was in town for hours to arrange everything. But eventually everything arrived safely and whole (even a bottle of red wine). We took pretty much stuff uphill, which was quite a lot of dragging. But now it is rather nice. We have a new bed, which actually feels stabile. We have lots of tools for cooking and baking, (a scale with right measurements, cooking trays, a pancake pan and so much more). This makes the baking so much nicer and easier!

Baxter is doing very much okay, even though he was threatened by some drunks, saying they will eat him, but skin him first. He has a weird scratch though, with orange things in it looking like a fungus or something. We also had some night-lizard issues some days. Every evening we sat down at the dinner table a weird screech was heard ( like the sound ‘Boo’ from Mario makes, really EXACTLY the same). This sound appeared to came from some fighting lizards (the ones that look like poo). Underneath the house is a space where Rodger is building more rooms. I was curious and I went in there to see how it was. But this space didn’t only functioned as a future room. It also functioned as a sleeping room for bats. And Anthony seems to have an eye for seeing snakes. Every day he sees one, and I just don’t ever seem to spot one. Last but not least, there lives a sweet turtle in the garden. Him being very slow, gives us the opportunity to enjoy his company. We fed him some apple and banana. At first, he pulled back his head in his shell, but already at the second time he got fed, he associated human beings with food and didn’t took the slightest effort to even get his neck in his shell.
Bugs haven’t been so bad these days, except maybe for the trail of ‘crazy ants’ (they run as if they are crazy, really fast and in circles), the whole wall was covered by a strip of tiny tiny ants, without any interruptions.

If you haven’t seen the movie of here, you could watch it on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz_9pRd5j5Y
And for new pictures you can watch this link:
Watch sets and then ‘new pictures’

It’s the last day of the year today, I wish you a very nice evening and all the best for 2012! Please be careful and bye for now =D.