Sonia Marsh - Gutsy Living

Our Life in Belize. A Belizean Butcher

April 6, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

Where is Belize? Since my travel memoir is about our adventures, experiences, and life changes in Belize, I thought you might like to see a map. It’s a country the size of Massachusetts with a population of 301,000, known for its 500 species of bird and 700 species of butterflies. Surrounded by Mexico in the north, Guatemala in the west, Honduras in the south and the turquoise Caribbean in the east.

The first two months, we rented the hut on stilts you see in the photo above in Consejo Shores, a community of mostly retired expats. Seven miles of migrating pot-holes, always shifting due to tropical rainstorms, made for Indiana Jones driving to Corozal a town very close to the Mexican border, for all our grocery shopping and drinking water.

It took me three weeks to find a decent butcher in town. I finally discovered Frank’s after discussing grocery shopping with a Canadian expat in Corozal. Frank and his wife greeted me with a friendly, “Good Morning,” and his two young daughters giggled and blushed when they saw Steve, sixteen and his younger brothers walk in behind me. All stores kept their front doors open, inviting flies and street dust inside. Entering Frank’s felt somewhat different, a little more like the Louis Vuitton of butchers. Unlike other butchers in town, Frank had a refrigerated display case where his meat was neatly arranged. Although three flies feasted on the ground beef, this no longer bothered me. Frank’s meat smelled fresh compared to the giant freezers in local supermarkets. With electric power turning on and off several times a week, chicken juice oozed and reeked from the continuous defrosting and refreezing of chicken pieces.

Frank and his family offered the best in Belizean customer service. If you asked Frank for steaks, he’d sharpen the thick blade on his butcher’s knife, then holding the slab of refrigerated beef in the air, he moved the knife until you signaled the thickness you wanted. What a change from the skinny quarter inch frozen steaks in the supermarkets. Frank did the same with his slab of bacon. Alec, my 14-year-old middle son, couldn’t wait to get back to our hut for some thick fried bacon. The eggs were a different story though, especially when an almost developed chick fell into the frying pan. The kids were slowly learning to appreciate the simple things we’d taken for granted back in the U.S. and to become less picky eaters.

Do you have any questions, comments or experiences of your own you’d like to share from where you live? I’d love to get a discussion going and shall post your questions/comments with links back to you and my answers on Wednesday. Hope to hear from all of you.

The Travel Detective Gives Us Some Tips

April 3, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

The line slithered outside the sliding glass doors of the awesome Newport Beach Public Library one hour before the scheduled presentation of Peter Greenberg. Greenberg, travel correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America and a New York Times best-selling author of the Travel Detective series, fights to give consumers the best kept secrets such as, “There are secret seats on coach that are better than Business class seats. In case you were wondering, they’re not the bulk head seats or the exit row seats either. Greenberg says they’re in his latest book, Tough Times, Great Travels: The Travel Detective’s Guide to Hidden Deals, Unadvertised Bargains and Great Experiences.

I shall give you a few snippets from his presentation that I found useful and interesting:

* Don’t book tickets online thinking you’ll get the best deal. Call the airline first, get the best deal they offer and book it. The airline will hold it for free for 24 hours. Then go online after and compare prices with the one you got from a real person.
* Greenberg recommends Kayak and onetime to book online tickets.
* Openskies offers only business class seats at a great cost. They fly between New York, Paris and Amsterdam and I checked a flight from NY to Paris one-way in May was only $662.
* Korean airlines fly everywhere in the U.S., for example Los Angeles to Sao Paulo and offer better rates and service.
* 85 banned airlines are still flying abroad.
* Buy one way tickets, then you never need to change ticket.
* Get trip cancellation insurance.
* Never buy insurance from travel provider itself, go through the travel agent.

Other comments of interest:
Greenberg mentioned the worst airports in the U.S. are Miami and LAX, due to passport control and customs delays. The best airports are Portland, Seattle and Chicago.

The best bargains and countries to visit in South America are Argentina, Chile,(has the most to offer in terms of diversity, dry desert in the north, Lake District, Patagonia.) Colombia has turned things around and is a great place to visit now. Paraguay is the most dangerous country for a woman traveling alone in South America.

You know what DELTA stands for? “Don’t ever leave the airport.”

If you’re interested in listening to the podasts of these famous speakers, please click here. It usually takes a few weeks for the podcast to be available after the presentation. So please be patient and come back if you don’t see it right away.

So what are your travel plans this year? Any good tips you can share?

1) Monday is Belize Day and today is April Fool’s Day.

April 1, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

In May 2008, I visited an expat friend in Belize for a week. She had recently lost her spouse and I was there to comfort and listen to her as she felt lonely and unsure of whether she wanted to stay in Belize or move back to the U.S.

As I swayed in Becky’s hammock overlooking the Caribbean, I felt myself slip into a heavenly trance. This lasted only a few minutes when I heard a loud Belizean man’s voice,”F**k you.” In Belize you replace the “u” with an “o.” I can hear all of you enunciating it right now. I waited a few seconds then heard it again. Was this the start of another fight like the one I’d witnessed outside a vegetable shack when we lived on Ambergris Caye? My stomach churned as I heard, “F**k you,” coming closer. I swung my legs out of the hammock and followed the voice. Leaning over the balcony, I saw a stray cat but not a single person. I lifted the latch on the small wooden gate to the steps below and there I found the source. It was the beautiful parrot in the picture above.

Thanks for all your comments on my first post about our life in Belize. I’m going to try something new. I’ve decided to post 3 times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Mondays, will be a slice of our life in Belize. I’d love to hear from you with any questions or comments you may have on the topic I post. I know today isn’t Monday, but it’s April Fool’s.

Wednesdays, I shall answer your questions with links to your blog. Perhaps we can get a discussion going in the comments section. If no one asks any questions then I’ll think of something interesting, I hope.

Fridays, A general post, a speaker I heard and found interesting, a guest blogger, or something about writing.

We’ll see how it goes and I shall modify things if necessary.
I look forward to hearing from you.

My Fresh Approach to Blogging

March 29, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

Have you ever had one of those moments where you say, “I need to re-think my blog?”

A mixture of writers’ block and panic set in over the weekend and I reached out to my friends, including the always helpful and caring, LadyFi and asked for advice. She said something that made sense. “Gutsy Writer, I’m sure we’d love to hear more about you and your life in Belize. Little snippets of memories would appeal to many of us.”

So here goes, a snippet from our life in northern Belize two weeks after we moved from our comfortable 5 bedroom house in California, to our hut on stilts in Consejo Shores.

We saw very few gyms in Belize and I figured out why. Who needed a gym when you were whacking sugar cane with a machete all day long? At thirteen, sometimes younger, Belizean boys started a career in the sugar cane fields cutting and loading the stalks into smoke coughing, diesel trucks, and by the time they hit eighteen, their bodies were more buff and cut than most guys at our local 24 Hour Fitness.

Fishing, growing crops and raising chickens to sell at the local outdoor markets, kept Belizeans in good physical shape too. Most women did their laundry manually, some the good old-fashioned way, pounding clothes on large rocks next to a river and drying them on lines tied between tree trunks. So daily chores and just existing required more physical exertion than in the U.S. I guess this is how we lived before modern conveniences forced us to exercise at a gym.

In Belize, uniform was mandatory in all public schools, even in the poorest areas. The more remote and destitute the village, the whiter the uniforms. I wondered if the white uniforms dated back to British colonial days. Belizean kids were experts at not getting one drop of terra cotta mud onto their clothes whenever it rained. They pedaled in the rust colored slush without the bicycle tires flinging a single ounce of mud onto their starched white clothes. Our white T-shirts and underwear turned yellow within ten days, mostly due to sweat. I should have tried pounding our clothes on a rock, perhaps that was the secret to crisp white linens.

Whether you wanted to or not, you automatically started walking more and bike riding, once you lived in Belize. Despite this lifestyle change, Duke and I still believed we should weight train six days a week. Why? Maybe because we weren’t into sugar cane whacking. It certainly wasn’t fun exercising in a clammy room with no air-conditioning. With salty sweat beads rolling all the way down my face and into my socks, I longed for a laundromat. I never realized how much I had taken fresh scented clothes and clean bed sheets for granted.

Self-Publishing, Vanity Publishing, Print on Demand (POD)

March 26, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

My last post in this series on publishing is to give you information about self-publishing, vanity publishing and print on demand (POD) as outlined by Jared Kuritz, Co-President of Strategies, presented on March 21st, 2009 at the Southern California Writers’ Association.

Self-publishing allows the author to have 100% control over every aspect of the book. That includes design and production decisions. The bad part is that you are responsible for all production and publishing costs too. A rough estimate on cost of 1,000 copies, is $9,000. Fortunately a second print run of 1,000 books will cost you around $1,500, since you’ve already dealt with cover design, interior design, etc. Unlike traditional publishing, and cooperative publishing where the author nets ($1.36-$2.04) and ($1.80-$5.70) respectively, with self-publishing, the author nets ($6-$11.40) on a cover price of $20.

As with any other form of publishing, PR & Marketing, are key to successful sales. Kuritz pointed out that if you decide to self-publish, you are strapped down to the U.S. Cooperative and traditional publishing give you more flexibility, in terms of traveling. As I mentioned in a previous post,
W.C. Jameson, mentioned self-publishing being more suited for poets and experts on a specific subject as they sell most of their own books through speaking engagements and therefore back of room (BOR) sales.

Vanity Publishing is generally expensive, around $20,000, and often, there are many problems, according to Kuritz. For example, Vanity Press, promise you distribution, but they generally just mean contacting the “.com” like amazon.com, etc. Anyone can do that. Often things are done incorrectly, the title is not on the spine of the book, or the ISBN # is in the wrong place, so you have to pay to get it re-edited and a new layout, after you’ve already spent $20,000.

Print on Demand (POD) should be used sparingly, according to Kuritz. It will cost you between $9 to $12 per copy to get 100 copies out. Distributors won’t accept (POD) books. Kuritz mentioned an example of where (POD) books can be useful. If you want to send your book to reviewers 5 months prior to it being published, then you can get (POD) copies. Also if you have speaking engagements prior to your book being published, then (POD) is useful.

I asked you for a 25 word synopsis of your book to share, and so far I have seven, including my own. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT ON THESE SYNOPSIS AND ADD YOUR OWN IF YOU WISH.

Thanks for submitting them, and good luck with publication.

Rob-bear: Many people live with chronic pain which is “poorly managed” — that’s an ethical problem. How do we come to a better ethical solution?

Kelli-Norgaard: “Most foreigners move to a new place, expecting adventures, but what they find is a place totally different from home. Then they get upset.Why?”

Shirley H.S.: As a Mennonite, I grew up with my nose pressed against the window of the world. From birth to college, 1948-1966, I became a conservative-rebel, proud-humble, deep-wide bundle of opposites ready to pioneer a new path.

Lady Glamis: Synopsis For Monarch:
Fighting for his life from terrorists in the South American jungle, a double-crossed CIA officer heads to the mountains of West Virginia, prey to an even larger battle: the one for his heart.

Jungle Mom: Synopsis: Jungle Mom invites you along as she experiences adventure in the Amazon jungle living among a primitive tribe. It’s a wild ride!

Cindy: A terrible loss and heartbreaking prophecy lead Shannon on a challenging course to return home and battle with the trials of her waning faith.

Gutsy Writer That’s me: Parents chuck the good life and move their defiant teenager and entitled siblings to a Caribbean island where they all learn about real life and gratitude.