facts, no figures...

Okay guys,

it’s the 7th of April today, which means that by the time I’ll be putting this onto the blog tomorrow I will have been here for a month… A month???? Already? Tempus fugit yet again I’ll have you know, cause it definitely doesn’t feel like a month.

Rather regrettably though I’m also at a stage where I really don’t know what to write anymore, so I’m gonna busy myself with telling you a few of the profanities of life around here.

· My bread-making attempts so far failed hopelessly, I end up with things that would be considered bricks even by German standards… and that even though I finally managed to find some yeast now and don’t have to use baking powder anymore. Really don’t know what to do, but I’m not giving up yet…

· There appears to be a particularly nasty mozzie-like thing round these parts of the world called jiggers or something like that… itchy like hell and according to the legend they lay eggs in you or something like that, until you put oil onto the bites, which suffocates them and then the itching apparently stops. Nasty, right? So far, all my bites have stopped itching after a while, which leads me to think that I’ve been spared, but one of my fellow volunteers resembles a red and brown pin-cushion these days….

· We found the coolest stick-insect ever the other day, he was massive, you could actually see his eyes and all… for those of you not too familiar with stick insects, they usually look just like a stick with legs, near impossible to tell one end from the other… but one could definitely make heads and tails of our Mr. Stick

· This week I’m not working on the iguana project (whoop whoop), but the lansan project, which means hunting trees for a change. We monitor the health and yield of lansan trees, which are being tapped in a number of different ways. A fairly straight-forward and interesting project, it is now in its final stages, we should be the last team to collect data on the trees, it’s data analysis from October on. Hopefully I’ll be on the white-breasted thrasher survey next week, rough going apparently, but real good for bird-ID skills, since we’re recording other species as well

· Another very interesting fruit: guavanese plums (?!), taste like a mix of gooseberry and cherry, absolutely delicious. Also had a cashew apple the other day, it’s the fruit that comes with the cashew nut (though apparently you need some sort of chemical to de-poison the nut, so we have to chuck them), weird but interesting one. Not gonna be my favourite, I don’t think…

· A very charming St. Lucian pastime is an uncommon affinity for gardening round here, a lot of people grow crops in their back yards or even have little plots somewhere in between the banana plantations, where they grow food and spend their days off…

· A lot of people smoke round here, as well as most of my fellow volunteers, which makes life kind of hard for me, but thumbs up so far, I’m still resisting…

· Another peculiarity of the St. Lucians is a rather strange obsession with Country music, not something you’d expect to come blasting out of a house you pass by on a tropical island, but there we go, it’s all the rage…

Right, I can’t think of anything else at the moment, so I’m gonna give the bread-making disaster another go… fare well oh you lovely people, let me know what you’re all up to…

Cheers,

Carola