Two Days In...

Well, for those of you who haven’t heard, we made it to Grenada safely. After a short 45 minute drive from the airport by Cleetus, the amazing taxi driver, we were dropped off at our new home. I tried to enter Grenada without any preconceived notions about where we would be living or what we would be doing, I just wanted to do the best with what we were given. And I have found Gouyave (pronounced Guave, like the fruit, for those family members that kept hearing us saying gou-yah-ve) to be a very laid back kinda town. Our house is very nice, of concrete construction like many around, with all the major amenities. (Though our clothes washer is not hooked up yet.)

The people we have meet in Gouyave are, for the majority, very friendly and helpful. The official language is English but most of the people around here converse in a very rapid-fire form of Patoi and English. The accents are thick and we are finding it harder to understand than we thought. Though we ask people to repeat what they are saying often, most keep on smiling and try to speak more slowly for these slow foreigners.

Our landlords are very nice and accommodating. And we have already met one of the neighbours, John. He seems to spend much of the day sitting on his front porch railing, talking to friends as they walk by. Today he brought by a fruit we had not seen before, a sour-sup (sp?). He said you can squeeze it into juice but we don’t have a juicer so we juiced it by hand, much to the amusement of our housemate, Andrew. The flavour is very hard to describe, it’s thick and milky with an almost papaya aftertaste. The juice tasted better with a sour orange bought at the farmer’s market squeezed into it. We were also gifted with some sugarcane from a man named Chester that we had met yesterday on the street as we were exploring the town. Everyone knows our landlord, Torro (Dillon but everyone seems to have a nickname) and so Chester (aka Cat-man, I told you, many nicknames) knew where to find us. Chester invited us to a cricket match on Sunday in Grenville on the other side of the island but we are going to ask around to see if Chester is on the level, so to speak, before we hop into a bus with him.

Our cooking is an ongoing experiment with many ingredients hard-to-find or strange to us. For example, today we had plantains for lunch (also bought from the farmers’ market) that we fried up in some margarine and sprinkled a little cinnamon and sugar over them. Oh yeah, that reminds me of the FIRST margarine that we bought. Yesterday at the supermarket (small but pretty well stocked with dry goods) we bought some margarine that is made with hydrogenated fish oil. Yep, fish oil. Its this weird-looking orange margarine that smells like fish. So we don’t spread it on bread but it works well for sautéing onions and garlic.

As I write this post it is raining for the ?th time today. We don’t know how many but it is probably more than six. None of the rains are long but they come quick and hard and disappear just as quickly. It is hot, as expected, but it cools off nicely in the evenings and we have fans for comfortable sleeping at night. So the heat doesn’t keep us up but the neighbourhood dogs like to provide a bit of a sideshow at night.

It is impossible to describe all the things we are seeing and feeling without you being here to experience for yourself. So we will end this post for now and leave you yearning for more.



Jason, with lots of help from Kristy