mozzarella and the mennonites

update from saturday:

today’s newly discovered quote (g k chesterton): the traveller sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see.  

on friday we went round belize city buying supplies for the island workers with our guide and helper, homer. great name - he is neither greek author nor fat yellow cartoon character. he served in the belize special forces working on anti drug operations, and in plymouth and the states. he got shot in the thigh by one of his own soldiers who he was training to plant grenades but who freaked out and his gun went off. he now has one real leg, one fake one, and is a taxi driver and our helper, probably amongst various other things. he used to cycle and had 5 bikes at one point and dreamt of riding in the tour de france. he knows everywhere to go in belize city to get what we need for the best price, and all the street names which is an especially elitist and vital piece of knowledge. 

first stop was heritage bank to pick up our kitty money via a cheque sent from america. heritage bank was all shiny walls and black tiled floors and power dressed cashiers, like something from an 80s pop video. next stop was a different branch of heritage bank to cash the cheque - it would be too straightforward for the same branch of heritage bank to both issue and cash the cheque, this being belize. next on our tour was tommy’s distribution services, a non-sales-tax-charging warehouse packed floor to ceiling with boxes and bags of contraband groceries from mexico, salvador etc - kit kats, colgate, various horrendously bad for you packets of sweets, chips, noodle soups full of e numbers. a new item for me was a bucket of pigtail. i asked homer what is pigtail - it’s tails of pigs he said. i hope this isn’t something i’ll be expected to eat. at this store if you want an official receipt you pay the gst (general sales tax - 12.5%) and they submit that receipt to the government at tax time; if you’re happy with no receipt or a scrawled piece of paper with the total on, you don’t pay the gst and they don’t declare the sale. it’s a fairly easy decision when you’ve got a budget to stick to, and by golly after 2 days here i’m as corrupt as the rest of them. i asked homer howcome the government don’t close them down or insist they declare all their sales - he said the government take what they need from the store as payment for turning a blind eye. 

we went to smiling meats, and met matthew smiling and he was smiling by name and smiling by nature. he has jamaican ancestry and used to cycle, once won the belize cross country (happening next sunday: a race twice across belize - 144 miles, or once across it if you’re a girl - he asked if i would do it but i said sadly not). he said he’d look into finding me a good cheap bike, or getting parts and building one for me. he had tons of cycling trophies around his shop. we put in our meat order and arranged to pick it up later.  we went to wellworth and left them our list of other bits - curry powder, lee and perrins, hot sauce, pan scrubbers etc. homer asked them if they can source a supplier of polo mints as i had told him i’m addicted to them. i thought - that is the action of an ex special forces man - and gave him a medal. wellworth had trouble finding the 15 lbs of mozzarella cheese for us: the government  aren’t allowing imported mozzarella at the moment so that there is no competition for the belizean mennonites who make their own mozzarella. apparently mennonite mozzarella is not as nice as the imported stuff but it seems a (totally uncharacteristally) fair decision from the government - i will see if there is some ulterior motive behind it - there must be…. 

we bought plumbing parts for the workers back at the house: elbows, tees, coupling, c-clamps, pvc pipes. these are the type of things that occupy men’s brains i now understand. that’s why they can’t wash up or change sheets and pillowcases or do the hoovering or write lists. 

our last bit on the shopping list was to collect 5 lamps and 2 shower curtains from the airport that had been flown in for the house. this involved paying amerijet (the freight company) around 3 times as much as the value of the items, then standing in a disorderly queue of other people, watching a forklift truck move pallets of boxes around a large warehouse. they find your things for you and then you tell a different man how much the total was. we guessed as we had no idea and no receipt - robert said 245, but didn’t specify what currency, could’ve been greek drachma for all they knew. the man wrote down 915.20 on his receipt, using carbon paper to make a copy (carbon paper  - what a blast from the past, reminds me of mum typing documents on a typewriter about 20 years ago - it probably doesn’t exist anywhere anymore except in huge quantities in belizean government departments). we got in a different queue headed towards a door behind which was another official man with a stapler and rubber stamp and computer. there was a sign saying absolutely only one importer in this room at any one time - no exceptions! we hovered by the door every time it opened to get a blast of air conditioner as we were starting to wilt in the mid afternoon heat. i kept sending robert back to the other man to try to ask him why he had written down 915.20 instead of the amount we’d actually told him. turns out they add the freight cost you’ve paid and you get taxed on the whole total, not just your item total - but our fabricated total plus the actual freight total didn’t make 915.20. the mormon missionaries we met in the queue didn’t understand the system either, and i felt bad for taking god’s name in vain after i realized they were mormons, though i don’t know what mormons believe in - a giant moomin or moron or some kind of combination of the two? god works in very mysterious ways in this country. the lady infront of us had around 10 forms and was in there for about 30 minutes, we were watching through the door. the man’s stapler broke and he whacked it on the table, then stamped a few more forms, got some more carbon paper out, did some stuff on a computer. when we had our turn i stamped our forms for us for a kick, he didn’t say whether we needed to or not. they absolutely love rubber stamping things here, nothing exists until it’s been rubber stamped.  i surreptitiously  took a photo of the handwritten poster on the wall listing customs percentage charges - various figures, with 4 special categories at the bottom - jewellery, watches, guns, cosmetics. your cheapest option of these is cosmetics at 67.2%, with guns coming in at an astonishing 100.2%. our total owing to mr rubber stamp was 368 bzd - more than the actual total of the goods (we later found out from doug we’d overestimated the price by around 100 greek drachma). we said - blimey mr rubber stamp where does that money go - he sighed and rolled his eyes - we said, seriously what does the government do with it, the roads here are rubbish, to name but one thing - he said i know i know i know, it goes in their pockets. we bid him good day and went on our merry way with our lamps and shower curtains. seriously - you think we have a hard choice between cameron clegg and brown and that england’s going down the drain - bear this belizean mayhem in mind before despairing too much. 

today we drove down to placencia in the south, which is the nearest town to where hatchet caye our island is. there were tons of police stops en route, they check your car tax sticker on the windscreen and then wave you on. i guess if you don’t have your car tax sticker up to date you give them some beer money then they wave you on. we won’t be out on hatchet caye for a few more months, but will be living in a house in placencia once work is completed up in belize city. we brought down the contraband groceries and dropped them off with alex who takes them out on a barge to the island. alex and his girlfriend cherimay live on the bottom floor of our house here. the house is right on the water - placencia is a very long thing peninsula [interesting etymological fact: peninsula comes from latin 'paene insula' which means 'almost an island'], with ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other - full of big american owned houses and resorts in various stages of construction (and various stages of money laundering no doubt) and painted tropical colours. there is a little mayan village called seine bight that you come through on the way down the otherwise fairly swanky peninsula, and thus have the obligatory weird feelings about the rich/poor native/foreigner divide. 

i have to admit i had forgotten what belize is like, in both its negatives and its positives. we drove down the hummingbird highway which runs north to south and is stunningly beautiful with its rolling jungled limestone hills of funny shapes and sizes, mountains off in the distance, tropical birds narrowly avoiding your car as they dart across the road, rural spanish villages, crap bumpy roads, diversions where bridges have washed out and still haven’t been rebuilt, banana and citrus plantations, pick up trucks full of people hanging on in the back, cute little kids trying to cycle along while carrying a box of eggs, crazy chinese store owners who cannot speak a word of english and shout manically at you if you ask them something that they can’t answer by typing numbers in a calculator and showing you the screen. robert has updated me on various belizean stories - barry bowen the richest man in belize (we met him in blog number 1) has died in his private plane out on san pedro; out on blackbird caye (of blog 1 fame where we visited the oceanic research society) a small plane was found in the water, the pilot dead - the next day pilot and plane had vanished - quite a vanishing act, but an important one when it’s a known drug drop off location; someone we know whose island we had stayed on turns out not to own the island at all and has now also vanished………….. it’s all intrigue and scandal, and that’s not even all of it. i’m quite enjoying it, contrary to expectations, it’s cool to be busy and working towards something that could be pretty exciting, and i much prefer placencia to san ignacio where we were before. even belize city has an unexpected appeal now we have all that inside information on where to get what and how. i am however also missing home, and the new shed, and cups of tea and cake, and the mild weather. 

over and out, happy belizean labour day - to our chagrin (note first usage of the word chagrin in blog) the bank was closed today so we couldn’t pick up our next cheque… but to cheer us up there is a big agricultural fair in belmopan all weekend so we’ll get to see some cows and pigs tomorrow.

ps - monday afternoon's mini update - having trouble uploading pictures but have taken some good ones, you'll have to use your powers of imagination for now. internet here, like most things, is slow. we went to the agricultural fair yesterday which was pretty fun, but very hot - it's around 102 degrees F here at the moment so you drip with sweat after 2 minutes in the sun. thankfully the rainy season will come within the next month. more soon.