Saturday! I woke up this morning at 5am and wondered why Liem wasn't getting up to get started working. Of course, I had no idea it was 5am. There are no clocks in the house. We depend on one watch that Liem has. It's hard to keep track of the days too, though now that I've discovered the cable tv, not only are the evenings more entertaining, but I can keep track of the days. Sad, huh!
No anxiety dreams last night. Slept like a rock. All the sun and sea really wears ya out! I didn't get up at 5. It was more like 9:30am and it was because the housekeeper had come.
Having a full day today, we decided to go back to Jolly Harbour to the Epicurean to pick up some B1 vitamins. They are supposed to stop the "mossies" from eating you. The Brit's swear by it. We needed bread too so we killed two birds with one stone.
Today was overcast for a good part of the morning and early afternoon. Perfect for a day of shopping in St. Johns. The city is sooo hot because of all of the cars, pavement, and buildings blocking the breeze. The overcast helped with that, and there was a nice breeze today. We wandered to the farmers market to pick up some fruits and veggies. There is a lot of squash here, lots of peppers, bread fruits, and other things I didn't recognize. We picked up some lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, more mangos (which are NOTHING like what we get in the states, way sweeter, no pine flavor), green onions and some ginips. I was introduced to ginips last time I came. They are small green fruit about the size of a golf ball with a skin on them like a really thin citrus rind. You bite into the fruit and the skin just slides right off. You discard this and then suck the nut out of the half skin left in your hand. You suck the fruit off of the nut. Its like a citrisy green grape in flavor. The texture, however, is best described as fibrous snot. If you can get past the texture, its really good. Liem couldn't, haha! The kids liked them a lot.
After our farmers market shopping in St. Johns, we stopped at a local spot for some local cuisine for lunch. I had bbq chicken, Hayley had lasagna and Liem had Chicken Curry. Cohen picked off our plates. We all got rice and 2 salads with the meal. It was $6 per person, which was a decent price for the amount of food but I suspected we were getting the "White Man Special". It was confirmed when a local came in and was ordering with us. They did not want us to know we'd been screwed so they gave her the same price...she was really mad and was hollering about how she'd eaten here the day before for $5 EC. That's like $2 US. I really hate that. We know better than to eat someplace that the prices are not clearly marked.
After lunch we took the kids to our very favorite beach....or water I should say. The beach itself isn't much to look at, but the sand and water are AMAZING. The beach is almost always deserted becaue there are only 1 resort near it and its way over on a cliff to the left. You drive through some scrub to get to the beach itself and there are lots of puncture vine to get by. Once you hit the beach, the sand is the consitency of powdered sugar...no joke. It's so soft and silky. There are two bands of shells that run through the water. Tide was out today so one was on the beach. The shells are in fantastic shape and there are so so many. The water is so turquoise, it literally glows when the sun hits it right. I love this beach because you are literally swimming in turqouise and you can't help but play with the sand and pull up handfuls of shells in the shallow where the band is. We swam and sunbathed for a few hours and then headed to Sweet T's for ice cream (we really have to stop doing that, but its so good!!).
After our ice cream we came home to swim in the pool and get ready for dinner. Tonight we had hamburgers, ginips, mangos, potato chips and salad. The carrots here are like nothing I've tasted. The kids hate carrots but loved these. They are sweet, almost as sweet as candy. Cucumbers were good too. The lettuce is a hardy variety because of the heat and humidity here. It had kind of an herby flavor to it...I didn't care for it. Too bad, I normally love salad.
Tonight we're back in the house avoiding the man eating mossies. They love white meat, let me tell ya. We close up the house earlier than we'd like to make sure they stay out. Right at dusk, they are out in force, and we are forced in. Just happens to be a bad year for mossies here...and we are up in the hills where there are more bugs and frogs, etc. Still wouldn't deter me from living here. It's only day 4 though, so we'll see. =) Somehow I think I'll want to stay at the end of the month.
