A Girl in Guyana and Suriname

Hello, hello readers! I’m so happy to get all your comments!!

Well, we are off on our 5-day overland adventure to Blanche Marie tomorrow. Nothing too exciting has happened since I last updated, but I thought I’d mention a few fun stories.

There are these huge beetles (did I spell that right?) that fly onto the veranda at night. They fly right into things and sometimes land on their backs and can’t get flipped over. So we’ve taken to practicing our “batting swing” (with a ping pong paddle). Someone will pitch one to me, and I hit it “out of the park”.

I made $10 US the other day at a fast food roti joint called Roopram, when Anne bet me that I wouldn’t eat a half teaspoonful of chopped up bird peppers. I looked at it, ate it, immediately turned bright red and ran around the restaurant steaming, and then was very happy to have earned an extra $10!!

I am deathly afraid of bats… the thing that really scares me about them is that they’ll get caught in my hair and I won’t be able to get them out. Ok, ok… I know they have sonar, but still… it COULD happen. Well, where I’m staying in Suriname is LOADED with bats. And because we leave the windows and doors open in the house all the time, usually there is a bat a night that flies around the living room/kitchen area. The other night I walked into the kitchen to put a glass in the sink, and a bat started flying around me. It came so close that I really thought my worst nightmare would come true. I immediately started shrieking and dropped to the floor. Anne came to try to rescue me, but I wouldn’t stand up. I had to crawl my way out. It was traumatizing!!!

The Dutch call goosebumps “mierentietjes”… ant tits. I thought this was hilarious. They thought my pronounciation of mierentietjes was just as funny. Every day I’m learning more useful Dutch.

Yesterday, we gathered a group of the girls’ co-workers and played this game I like to call “NO RULES” because there literally are no rules. We split into two teams in the water and fight over a soccer ball. You have to run it in to shore and hit it on some “goal” we decide at the beginning of the game to score a point. But in the water, there are no rules… anything goes. It’s ridiculously crazy… and super fun. I drank so much water yesterday I thought I’d be sick today for sure!!

Last night we played a Suriname card game with some of the girls’ co-workers. It’s called Troef Call. Similar to euchre but you deal the whole deck of cards out and there are no bauers (or bowers, however you spell it). Very fun.

I’m going to add some photos here quickly if I can… and then I’m off…

Tags: South America, Suriname, Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Suriname, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.