Sonia Marsh - Gutsy Living

Life's too short to play it safe

You are here: Home / Archives for Belize

I met Adam Lambert’s Dad from American Idol and more.

by

What an amazing day. I’m so excited, I have to blog about it. I’m, going to be in the Laguna Beach Independent this week with my photo and a small blurb. My first time in a newspaper talking about my memoir.

This happened unexpectedly on Easter Sunday when I left my family at home, to finish off the brunch leftovers and attended an open mic event at Laguna Beach Books. Amy Wallen, founded the Dime Stories, an event that allows writers to read their work for three minutes, and yes, every writer has to stop when the alarm beeps.

I showed up early and placed my name in the red tin. As luck would have it, my name was called first. I picked an excerpt from a chapter in my memoir called “Ivan” based on our first hurricane experience on the island, Ambergris Caye, Belize.

Nervous as hell, I kept reading as the camera clicked. It wasn’t till the end that I was told that I’d be in the newspaper and was interviewed by a reporter. This has never happened to me before.

One of the readers at the event was Adam Lambert’s father. If any of you watch American Idol, you’ll know who Adam Lambert is. He’s actually my favorite Idol right now. Here’s his latest song, “Mad World.”

Monday is still Belize Day, but I had to share my Easter Sunday.

1) Belize Buzz Wednesdays

by

Thanks for all your questions and interesting comments. I’d love to hear more experiences from others who have lived or perhaps just traveled around. Doesn’t have to be far, even in your own backyard. Please keep them coming. I shall answer your questions in my Wednesday Belize Buzz.

LadyFi said…

Please tell me more about driving to fetch fresh water! Was there none in the village? No pump or anything? Or did you mean drinking water?

In Consejo Shores, the first place we lived, we had the sulphur reeking water from a well. Let’s call it sh*t smelling water. The expat developer believed this water had healing powers and drank it himself, but my kids refused to take a shower in it for a week, until they stank more than the water did. We had to drive the 7 mile migrating pot-holed road to Corozal, to buy 5 gallon bottles of water for drinking and cooking.

How big was the house on stilts?

It actually had 3 bedrooms and 2 showers interconnected with long non-windowed hallways, with screens to supposedly keep the outdoor wildlife outdoors. More later.

Jientje said…

It reminded me of the butcher in France, where the butcher makes your hamburgers, grinding the beef and molding it while you’re waiting. Or if you want lamb stew, he takes a shoulder of lamb and removes the bones. I love to watch him do it!

You’re right Jientje. I almost wrote about how the Louis Vuitton butcher in Corozal, reminded me of the French butchers who take their time to cut up the meat to your liking. They seem to take pride in their work, unlike the butchers at my local Ralphs and Albertson’s supermarkets in Orange County.

Danie said…

What made you choose Belize as opposed to any other place? Please check out Danie’s book, “The Expat Arc” on her blog. I just ordered it from Amazon and love reading about her life with her husband, son and dog in Chennai, India. Lots of great color photos too.

Great question. In my travel memoir, I tell our funny story on how we were introduced to Belize, not having ever heard about the country. Since my husband isn’t gifted in languages, (unlike me, hahaha) we had to select a country where English was the main spoken language. All of Central America has Spanish as their first language except for Belize. Also the education of our 3 sons who came with us.

Miss Footloose said…

I would also love to know what made you choose Belize. And are you still there?

The answer to your first question is above. We stayed in Belize for one year. Could it have been because we missed the comforts of California, the lack of money, the humidity, or something more dramatic? I’ll let you guess. Let me just say for now, we had planned on staying for the rest of our lives. Miss Footloose, your stories sound fascinating though. How old are your kids now?


Gramma Ann said…

How did you do your laundry, because with five of you, there surely was dirty laundry? Did you go to the river and pound it clean on the rocks? LOL

Believe me from the day we moved to Belize, I learned to lighten up about laundry. I did have an ancient washing machine, underneath the hut and was worried the wooden stilts would crack and I’d end up with a hut on my back. There was no hot water, only cold, so I had to boil the water in saucepans. I shall write about the whole experience. What a story!

Lady Glamis said…

Did you get sick when you first moved there? I know that’s normal and just wondered if it took you awhile to get used to the water and different germs floating around. 🙂

I never thought of that until you brought it up. Unlike Mexico, we didn’t get sick, although there was a scary incident with my 13-year-old got hospitalized, but not for that.

Rob-bear said…

Sounds like you had a wonderful time in Belize. How long did you stay there?

One year, although that was not the original plan. There could have been many reasons why we left. What do you think?


Jacki said…

I am curious to find out about the Belize diet if the meat from the grocery stores isn’t the the most fresh. Are they mostly vegetarians?

Belizeans eat mainly chicken and fish with rice and beans. Most locals can’t afford steak. Vegetables consist mainly of onions, peppers and carrots. Things like salad, mushrooms, green beans, asparagus. Forget it. Coleslaw is common though.

BLOGitse said…

how long did it take to settle down? (i mean time after the honeymoon period=3 months) It took us about six months to finally settle down.

what do you miss from you ‘previous life’? I missed good coffee, books and stimulating presentations and lectures where you learn something. Your brain can easily stagnate on an island.

could you live there rest of your life? why? (yes or no) 🙂 NO, but 3 months/year YES

Our Life in Belize. A Belizean Butcher

by

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.

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

by

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.

Posted by Picasa

My Fresh Approach to Blogging

by

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.

Latest from the blog

Top Posts