The New Year Begins

On New Year’s Eve, Richard took me by boat to Placencia so I could get online at the Business Center.  I had not been able to check my work email since Dec 15^th when I discovered that the international plan I had on the 4G Samsung Galaxy Note for this very purpose did not cover data any longer.  I had racked up a whopping bill of $1600 dollars in 6 days accessing email and downloading documents!  Fortunately, since the contract AT&T had with Belize Telecom had changed without my knowledge, AT&T decided to waive the charges.  Whew!!!  We also did grocery shopping to last us for 10 or so days.  I scored big at the Fishermen’s Cooperative – they had just finished cleaning the morning’s lobster catch.  I picked out 2 nice ones to have for New Year’s Eve dinner and bought some frozen conch for later.  Also got to a produce stand just as a new delivery was being unpacked and was able to get nice fresh veg and fruit, including okra, plums, and sapodilla – a real treat.

Soon after we returned from the trip, the heavens let loose with a massive downpour.  We were thrilled because our water vats, in which we collect rainwater as our only water source, were getting low.  We had more rain throughout the night.  For New Year’s Eve dinner, Dennis baked the lobster with butter, chili powder, and Kaffir lime leaves off the tree we planted some years ago.  I made flat bread with garlic, similar to garlic naan. We opened a bottle of French white table wine.  Wine is expensive in Belize and the quality and variety are spotty.  This was a decent, reasonably priced wine that we will have again – if we can find it …

Dennis, happy with the flat bread.  ;-)

A nice wine to complement lobster.

Dinner is served.

We, including Max, managed to stay up to welcome the new year, listening to music from my IPod and watching from our veranda as the moon rose over the Caribbean.  The sea was quite rough and the moonlight was wildly shimmering as it was reflected off the baffled sea.

Sapodilla with a piece of white fruit cake from Joy.

Today is the first day of 2013.  We have stayed close to home, just puttering around getting settled in.  For brunch we had an omelet using leftovers.  An inauspicious start to the year you might say, but you would be WRONG!  We used leftover lobster with free-range eggs Christian Beck sells at the banana farm store, flavored with a smidge of truffle oil. Followed with sapodilla fruit spooned right out of the skin.  Imagine the flesh of a perfectly ripe pear combined with a slight butterscotch flavor and you have a rough approximation its taste and texture. Life is good.  J 

Our first Christmas Day in Belize and Boxing Day in Englishtown

Christmas Day dawned warm and beautifully sunny, a novel experience for us.  We spent a quiet day together unpacking Dennis’ bags instead of presents.  We did have presents for each other though - mine for Dennis was a Belize activated cell phone and his for me was the hard won cell phone signal booster.  Sort of an anti-Gift of the Magi (by O. Henry).  

Our Christmas tree was a habanero pepper plant given to us by Joy that we decorated with our parrot ornament given to Dennis along with the Santa Claus snow globe and a skirt of "mosquito netting" at his retirement.

 Our special bash was on Boxing Day when we were joined by Chris and Sue and later by Martha.  Chris and Sue brought a Christmas brew by the Belikin Brewery of sorrel beer (delightful) and a real find in Belize - port!  They also brought some nice cheeses.  Dennis and I had been saving a very special bottle of cognac for over 6 years to celebrate our arrival in Belize.  We had bought the cognac in France while visiting some other friends connected to Belize – a story for another day.  We also had several bottles of Freixenet cava.  We cooked chicken breast fillets wrapped around goat cheese and a casserole of broccoli and cauliflower with cheese and sour cream.  Also served a lovely fresh green salad with tomatoes, onions, and green peppers and fresh baked bread. Martha made a spice cake that Dennis served with sautéed sweet yellow plantains in a reduction sauce of Kahlua with shavings of the locally produced Goss chocolate on top.  Now to those of you not living in a third world country, this may seem pedestrian fare, but in these parts, this is haute cuisine!  We started in the early afternoon and enjoyed food, drink, music (yea! Dennis brought down my Bose IPod speakers!), each other’s company, and then more of the same for many delightful hours.  Martha, whose husband we met back in 1999, and who we finally met in 2004 when she helped us find this very property, and Chris and Sue, who we met in 2005, are the folks who we have been anxious to join in Belize.  It was all the celebration and more that we had been looking forward to for 8 years.

Dennis Joins Us

This is NOT the boat that picked Dennis up.  Too bad ...  These were visitors who anchored in the lee of Great Monkey Cay while some of its passengers went on a tour the Monkey River.

Dennis had a very busy 10 days between the time Max and I abandoned him in Minnesota before he arrived in Belize on Christmas Eve.  He rented a small UHaul trailer to be pulled by our car and filled both the trailer and the car with boxes of our belongings.  On the 18^th he left Rochester, MN trying to get ahead of a blizzard and drove south all the way to the gulf coast of Alabama, equivalent and sometimes parallel to the full length of the Mississippi River from its state of origin (MN) to its mouth into the Gulf of Mexico.  He drove for 2 days and spent the night along the way in Blytheville, Arkansas.  He spent another night in Camden, Alabama where he dropped off the car and trailer contents with our shipping agent.  Only a small snafu in that the car was supposed to go to Mobile, Alabama.  However, the agent arranged to have it driven there for Dennis, so problem resolved.  Dennis also had with him his three 70lb checked bags for his flight and had to get those and himself to the Atlanta airport.  To do that, he rented a 17 foot truck, nothing else available in little Camden, a town of only 2000 people, and drove.  He spent 2 nights in Atlanta, recovering from driving about 1400 miles, prior to departure to Miami on the 23rd. 

An entertaining (hmmm…) bit here:  We knew we would need a signal booster to get cell phone reception at our place in Belize and had ordered one to bring down with us in our checked bags rather than shipping it to Belize.  We had heard that signal boosters are sometimes seized when they arrive in shipments and that we would have an easier time getting one into the country by bringing it in personally.  Well, by mistake it was sent to our shipping agent instead of to us in MN, but no matter – Dennis would get it when he went to Camden and put it in his bags.  However – you knew there would be a “however”, didn’t you?- when he got to Camden, they told him they had just forwarded it to our Minnesota address.  Doh!  So, thinking quickly, Dennis got online in Atlanta and ordered another signal booster to be ready for pick up at Best Buy in Miami so he could bring it down.  When he got to Miami, he had to take a taxi on December 23 to Best Buy and pay the taxi to wait for him while he braved the last minute shopping crowd to pick up the signal booster.  I think the taxi cost more than the signal booster.

He caught the morning flight from Miami to Belize on Christmas Eve.  After he went through immigration and customs, he caught a puddle jumper flight to Placencia where Joy, Richard, and I picked him up in our boat.  He even managed to get on an earlier flight to Placencia.

Meanwhile, I had been busy at the cabana unpacking all the things we had brought down on earlier trips and stored.  Out came the kitchen and dining ware, the clothes, the kitchen, bed, and bath linens, the toiletries and first aid supplies, snorkel gear, and cameras.  Everything had to be cleaned and scrubbed to remove 6 years worth of dirt and bugs.  It just isn’t the tropics without the bugs.  Luckily I am not squeamish, but I might be allergic to roach poop.  After lots of bleach and bug spray, things look pretty good and I am not sneezing any more.

So Dennis arrived to a cabana that was clean and somewhat organized.  We celebrated by inviting our new neighbors, Kevin and Domini and their 4 children (who are house sitting at Steppingstones for Chris and Sue while they are working hard at White Rock), and Richard and Joy, our caretakers, to join us for a little Christmas Eve celebration. Richard chilled a bottle of spumanti in his freezer and I made flat bread, tostones (from green plantains), a spicy-hot salsa with shrimp, and a mild salsa without shrimp to accommodate diverse pallets and shellfish allergies.  Domini brought yummy Christmas cookies. All-in-all a nice welcome for Dennis and a Merry Christmas Eve for all.