Monday, February 16, 2009

After cave tubing and the zoo, and the long drive back, we napped then walked into town for dinner and then came back, watched TV and fell asleep. Our little cabana had TV, yes! Half of the channels were in English, and we got Comedy Central and Cartoon Network and everything.

I really liked just walking around the town and looking at everything. Here are a bunch of San Ignacio photos. Travelogue to continue next post.

Nescafe! And note the hand-painted stop sign.



Al's Diner, where we did not eat. I bet it would be tasty, though.



Here's a typical meal that we had: white or black beans over white rice, in a kind of mildly-spiced gravy, with a fried fish fillet (though usually we got a piece of chicken), garnished with a fried plantain. Usually there's a scoop of coleslaw on the plate too. The dish in the middle has hot sauce, and CJ has a skinny burrito. And I always got a Belikin (made by Germans in Belize).



A street downtown. We wanted to go horseback riding, but the good affordable people were on vacation or booked, and so we didn't go. Anyway, Easy Rider seemed like a nice company.



This isn't a grocery store, but, relatedly: Pretty much all of the supermarkets in Belize are owned and run by Chinese people. So you find weird Chinglish stuff along with native Belize/Mexican stuff.



We passed this lot for sale every day. I like that they kept the cement staircase up, because, hey, you can use that for the next house, right? This is along a row of shacks like the one you can sort of see past the metal wall. Even shanty-dwellers can realize the dream of owning property.



The house below is atypical because:
It has actual windows, not just wood shutters.
The top part is larger than the bottom part.
There are no dogs in the photograph.
It's also not a one-story house on stilts, with laundry drying on lines underneath the house.



The house on stilts thing was very common. One of our guides said that they use the space like a deck -- it's shady and cool, after all. And if the kid grows up and needs a place to live with their spouse, you can enclose the space and make it the first story of a now-two-story house. None of these placed have running water, by the way, or if they do, they don't have plumbing for toilets/baths. Outhouses don't seem quite so terrible in a climate where it never really gets cold.

And finally, a wall topped with decorative tires.

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