Sunday, September 30, 2012

Still Alive!

A few days ago, there was massive power outage that effected the entire region. I woke up early in the morning to the unpleasant smell of diesel fuel, and I knew right away we were on generator. This lasted the entire day, but at least I got to have A/C and made some significant progress into Xenoblade. Going out, it was the strangest thing ever, power outages aren't new, but this one completely killed the region. It's weird seeing these guys who basically spend all their time working, just sitting around doing nothing. From dawn till dusk, these guys are doing their jobs, but on that day, all they could do was sit around and fish.

With that, we had a nasty internet outage that lasted even longer. I don't understand why this happened, but after the power outage was over, we still had no internet. When it came back the next day, it was really bad, and virtually impossible to do anything with it. No matter now, I'm back and soon we'll be going full steam ahead!

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Holandesa

Today while in town, we stopped at the bakery, Holandesa. Holandesa is kind of like the Time Hortons of Central America, but the big thing is that they sell all kinds of baked goods like cakes, donuts, and anything else. If it's made from dough, it's either bought from Holendesa, or it's from Bimbo. What I would do for a slice of D'Italiano bread...

First thing we got was a six pack of tiny donuts. These donuts are covered with icing sugar, and have orange jelly inside. The donut is average, but the jelly helps give it a refreshing feeling.


Saturday, September 22, 2012

G-g-ghosts!!

Going out for a stroll in the morning sun, I came across some unearthly apparitions.Terrified of the impending consequences, I used my trusty Camera Obscura, to exorcise these foul beasts, and return peace to the land.  Do you dare take a look at them? You may never be the same again if you do. You have been warned.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Noooo!

Today we were cleaning some containers on the back of the boat, and I was dreading this chore. The cleaning isn't the bad part, but I knew that such an area would be home to a vast menagerie of roaches and other undesirables. We started by removing some old ropes, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. That's good. Then came some tarps, and it started...

A whole bunch of roaches were living here, I think there must have been half a dozen there. And one is really strange. It had a typical body of a roach, but it's head was shaped almost like an ants head. Strange isn't it? It seemed more aggressive than the others, but my dad flattened it before it could go nuts. Either all the roaches were trapped in a garbage bad, or were squashed, never had so many been killed in a single day. But it got worse, much worse.

I later stopped cleaning, and left to go make supper. My parents continued cleaning out the containers on the back of the boat. A few minutes later I heard my mom yell stop, and I came up to see what was going on. My mom told me to grab the wasp spray, and right then I knew what was going on. A massive spider had appeared, one even larger than the other one I talked about before. My dad took the can of wasp spray, and just smothered this bastard with the stuff. A few seconds later he curled up and died. One less enemy to worry about.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Fruits and Veggies

After about a week or so, we begin to run out of all the produce, we consume a lot here, and the stuff will go bad rather quickly. So once again, we trekked into town, and got a few bags full of produce, and returned to the boat. Remember earlier how I was ranting about chicken being expensive? Well it is, but produce on the other hand, is very affordable.

How much do you think the below cost? (There was a little more not shown in the pic.)


Tuesday, September 18, 2012

100!

That's right people, it has finally come and it will be gone like a transcendent dream. The post of all posts, post number 1-0-0. Yes sirree Bob, it has been one hundred great original posts from me since May. You're saying that I should do something for such a splendid anniversary? Huh, well, I didn't exactly plan on doing something special...

Perhaps a summary of my favourite moments on the trip?

Monday, September 17, 2012

Puppy Photo Shoot! Yay!

Lola was in a good mood today, and she just loved posing for the camera. Let's see if she has what it takes to be a star.


 Why hello there Lola!

 Nice day isn't it?

Sunday, September 16, 2012

A Huge Storm

Last night as I was getting ready to go to bed, a heavy downpour arrived and covered the region in a thick fog. Being that the only ventilation in my room is created by a ceiling hatch, I stopped what I was doing and closed the hatch before an unmanageable amount of rain could pour inside. As I turned around after closing the hatch, I spotted something brown and shiny scurrying around the stairs. God damn it! Another roach is spreading it's filth.

I quickly dashed up into the living room and grabbed the bottle of water/soap that we use to stun roaches. As I raced back downstairs, the roach was still scurrying around, so I took the bottle and sprayed it. It seemed to effect it a little bit, but the roach then started running around like mad. As this was happening, all of the lights suddenly went out, and I was afraid that my prey would escape into the darkness. Fortunately, it was only a power surge and the lights were restored about ten seconds later, though it seemed like an eternity for me, and likely the roach as well.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Independence Day

Tomorrow is one of the most celebrated days in all of Guatemala, Independence Day. Yes on September 15, 1821 Guatemala threw off the colonial shackles from Spain, and declared itself a sovereign nation. It hasn't been a completely flawless 191 years, but it could be worse. However there is one thing that has disappointed me about this holiday, and it's a rather odd thing to mention.

Not that Independence Day!

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Tacos and Sun

Once again, we had our homemade tacos and homemade sour cream. As I kind of promised in a non-committal way, here's a low quality picture of my taco. The only thing I have on it is the beef/rice/jalapeno mix, sour cream, cheese, and lettuce.


Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Tacos

Tonight for supper we had beef tacos. Rather than making them from ground beef like we usually do, today we used the same kind of roast beef as I wrote about last week with the wine. Once again we put it in a slow cooker with rice and allowed it to cook all day. After a few hours, we added some fajita spice and jalapeno peppers to the meat, and allowed the meat to absorb the awesome flavors. All together, I would say that the meat probably cooked for almost if not ten hours.

Now one thing I love to have on my taco is sour cream. I think it's the perfect dressing to temper the spiciness of the meat. However, like many things here, sour cream can be difficult to acquire. Yet despite seeming out of luck, it turns out that making sour cream is actually extremely easy. All it is is heavy cream, lime juice, and vinegar; items which are all easily found in town.With that, we made our own sour cream, and it was actually pretty good. Not as thick as store bough, the flavor was relatively the same. Altogether, the meal was pretty good, perhaps there will be picks when we have more tomorrow?

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Robalo

For the past two days, we've been having a huge fillet of robalo fish (also known as snook) for supper. The robalo fish is native to the waters from the south eastern US, all the way down to Brazil, so it's eaten fairly commonly. We were told that robalo was one the best tasting fish there is, so we naturally bought some. After sitting in our freezer for a few weeks, we finally took it up and cooked it up yesterday.

What a cute little guy! 

What came afterwards, was chunks of white fish meat which were battered and fried on the stove. The taste was rather... disappointing. It really didn't taste like anything at all, it was just generic white fish. In fact, I would say that a "mystery fish stick" has more flavour than this thing. It's really sad actually.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Small Post

Not much happened today, and I'm fairly tired, so I'll just post a couple pictures of a boat I saw today. Maybe I'll throw in a puppy pic or two...

 Ah, the majestic sailboat. Is there any greater mode of transport?

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Want Some?

One of the easiest things to make in this great heat, are hamburgers. They don't take long to make, you don't need to use the oven, and they taste good (I love them). So yesterday, we went to the general store to buy some ground beef to make burgers. We arrived at the store, and began looking through the meat freezer for some ground beef. We found some ground pork, but no beef, so I was prepared to leave in disappointment. However, the owner of the store came by, and showed us some beef cubes, we have a meat grinder, so this could work.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Courtesy

I want to talk about something I may have gone on about before. I'm not sure if I did, perhaps I didn't, but I'm going to do it anyway. I want to talk about the courtesy that the rich Guatemalans show all the other people, and how they need to be taken down a peg.

First off, I should talk about how the land is distributed in this country, specifically in this region. Relatively speaking, there are three types of people who own any significant land down here. Those people are either foreigners, criminals, or politicians (some might say that the latter two are the same group). You see, the people who own the land next to us, are druglords. The next three properties are owned by the druglords and their associates, and the fourth property is owned by the president of Guatemala. Strange isn't it?

Friday, September 7, 2012

It's Back

I can't remember the last time like this, but after about two weeks of dry conditions, it stormed once again this night. It's odd, apparently September is supposed to be the wettest month of the year, yet it's been by far the driest so far. Tonight though, everything changed again. As evening arrived, instead of the normal picturesque sunset, heavy dark clouds covered the landscape. An hour or so after that, sheet lightning filled the sky, and soon regular bolt lightning joined in. When the thunder rang out, surprisingly Sonic ran for cover. Now, usually Molson is scared of loud cracking sounds, but this time Sonic ran for the bottom of the boat. In fact, he only came out of hiding as I typed this up.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Great Taste

Tonight I had a simple meal that was much greater than the disappointing jambalaya of before. This meal was homemade, so it has nothing to do with any of the restaurants here, it was merely a product of my mother. The meal itself was a simple plate of roast beef and rice, but is was so delicious I can't even believe it.

You see, the beef was prepared in a slow cooker all day, with white wine as the only thing added to it. I don't like the taste of alcohol, so I don't really drink wine, but with all the alcohol being burned off through out the day, it gave the beef and intensely rich flavour. That's not even to talk about tenderness. The meat just came apart like cotton candy. Sometimes the simplest things in life are truly the best.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Promised

Here it was after failure to acquire the promised sustenance, we once again had our chance to claim victory. Wanting no mistakes this time, my parents left much earlier than normal time to get this promised stuff. This stuff of course was the jambalaya from Vista Rio that my dad wanted to buy a little over a week ago. Pressured my public demand, Vista Rio made another batch of jambalaya, and my dad would not allow himself to miss it once again. He left a little bit before 3, and returned a little while later with five orders of the stuff.

My verdict.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Garbage

I don't have much to say today because this was another day where nothing really happened. Because of that, I'll talk about the dreaded trash removal process.

First off, our one and only trash bag is kept in a trash compactor located in the kitchen. One mystery of the compactor is that no matter how hard it's cleaned, there is always a small dirty pool of water building up at the bottom every time we change bags. The bags aren't ripping, so maybe the excessive heat causes this?

Monday, September 3, 2012

A New Year

The summer is over, vacations around the land come to an end as people get ready to head back to school. My vacation to is at an end, I've packed my things into my suitcase and am prepared to head back to school for some more knowledge. All though my time down here in the Rio was brief, it feels almost like an entire lifetime. Yes, by this time tomorrow, I should be in Calgary, ready to resume my normal life.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

But they won't drown...

Yesterday I was getting ready to go to bed, and went to my bathroom. I hate using the bathroom on this boat, there is no ventilation, so it's hot like an oven. You can walk in perfectly normal, but when you come out you'll be drenched in sweat. When I say drenched, I mean covered in the stuff where your clothes end up soaked. It's that unbelievably hot.