miscellaneous

this morning in belize is misty and cold, i am in fact wearing leggings and 3 layers of jumpers, and thick woolly socks. maybe if i was to venture outside i would warm up but it is still breakfast time so i am not ready to go outside yet.

some things of note that have happened this week:

i found a stationery shop that sells the twizzly mechanical pencils i have been searching for. i had given up the search long ago, but there they were here in san ignacio, so i bought six of them.

we found an amazing cake shop and have been eating cake. my favourite so far is the carrot cake, but the chocolate one is good too.

i boiled some eggs for 10 minutes the other day and they were still quite soft. once i boiled some for 4 minutes and they were hard. what is happening? does belize have separate laws of physics? or bionic chickens?

i bought a new bike (thank you overdraft facility) in belize city. it isn't anything exciting but it's great to have a bike again, and it is blue! it is in the lounge on a turbo trainer, and you get a dvd with it which shows a bike road race. i suppose you can play it while you're turbo training and pretend you're in the race. i'm only going to do that if i can win.

i saw an ambulance which was called BERT. it stands for belize emergency response team.

we went to a yoga class in a jungle lodge up the road yesterday. consequently am a bit sore today, but it was a really good class, so i will go every week now. i nearly had a big giggling fit when we were doing the tree which is balancing on one leg and everyone wobbles around. need to practise that one. met some nice english girls there too which was cool.

watched the film a time to kill, which is brilliant.

we went to belize zoo. i wouldn't normally go to zoos these days, but bert (not the ambulance) wanted to go. it is in fact totally amazing, and only has animals there that are native to belize, and that have either been rescued, or saved from being ill, or donated etc. there is a problem jaguar programme which is the jaguars in the wild kill lots of the sheep, so they try to get them and put them in the zoo so they can't kill sheep anymore. here is what we saw, in no particular order

- a harpy eagle - what an amazing eagle, they have the best eyesight and hearing in the whole animal world, and eat anteaters and iguanas. they are massive and the most impressive bird i have ever seen. they can spin their heads round 180 degrees which is very disconcerting.
- an anteater - not being eaten by a harpy eagle. he was digging around inside a log getting ants out to eat. he had long fingers which he used as well as his snout thing to get to the ants. there are loads of ants in belize so he should be fine. i might get one and put it in the kitchen here.
- scarlet macaws - there are only around 200 of these left in belize. bert has seen some when he flew up to chulillo dam, but at the moment i think they are still on holiday. they are beautiful, bright red, blue and yellow. they were sitting on branches pecking each other.
- jaguar - he was called junior, and was 2 years old. his dad was asleep on a high up branch in a tree. for 100 belize dollars you could get in a little cage and pet junior and feed him. bert wanted to but we didn't have 100 dollars, plus i didn't think it was a good idea. i think junior had been brought up by people so he was very tame, but still. his paws were huge, you wouldn't want to be swiped by one of them.
- ocelots - these are pretty much thin versions of jaguars it seems. they were prowling around their enclosure. (all the animals in the zoo have loads of space in their enclosures by the way).
- gray fox - he was eating a mouse when we saw him the second time. the first time he was just walking around. he was very cute, with nice sleek gray fur.
- crocodiles - they were slumped around a bit of water, asleep i suppose. they don't move much. they look very prehistoric like dinosaurs. we saw their teeth, they don't fit in their mouths when they close them, they look pretty sharp.
- some really smelly pigs, called warrees i think. they were hairy too. like warthogs i suppose. they really did stink.
- a tarantula in a glass box. they are venemous but don't bite humans, they are timid by nature apparently. whatever.
- some howler monkeys - we have seen these in the wild too. they are cute. i think i might be over my monkey phobia, but i wouldn't like to test it by getting too close to any. they weren't dressed in clothes or drinking cups of pg tips at least.
- a puma - he was asleep and a bit far away, so nothing to say about him.
- a keel-billed toucan, very impressive. and some aracari toucans, which are the same as the ones we saw at caracol that day.
- other birds like turkeys, storks (they were busy delivering babies), and a hawk eagle.
- there was a gibnut enclosure but they come out later in the day. they are my favourite belizean animal. also there was an otter house but they must have been having a siesta too.

all in all it was brilliant, and we bought a mug with a macaw on it and the words belize zoo.

also this week i listened to a cd of the steve miller band and was very impressed. they did a famous song, can't remember what it's called.