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Our Life in Belize. A Belizean Butcher

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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

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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.

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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.

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Why do you write? Publishing with a purpose: Part I Traditional Publishing

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The first question you need to ask yourself as a writer is, “Why am I writing?” says Jared Kuritz, Co-President of Strategies, during his presentation, “Publishing with a Purpose.” The answer to this question will help you determine your publishing needs.
Jared offers writers 4 reasons, and it’s important to select the one that best fits you.

1) For a personal reason. Is it an extension of journaling?

2) For posterity. For example a grandparent writing for his grandchildren or a CEO writing for his employees.

3) For professional reasons. To augment your existing business.

4) Writing for profit. To make a living at it.

Your answer to, “Why am I writing?” will determine your publishing goals.

Jared covered traditional publishing, Cooperative publishing, Self publishing, Vanity publishing and print on demand (POD).

This post will highlight the points Jared made on traditional publishing, that I found useful and interesting.

With the traditional BIG publishers, 96-97% of all books FAIL. What kind of a business can succeed with such a high failure rate? “It’s the Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings that carry those publishers,” Jared said. The pro’s are that the publisher absorbs all the costs, and the initial and ongoing publishing duties, for example sending your books to book events where you have decided to promote your own book. The con’s are that you, the author have no control over any publishing decisions, and that you have to buy books from your publisher for PR, unless you’ve negotiated say 500 or so books specifically for promotion in your contract. Otherwise any book you need, you’ll have to pay the publisher 60% of the cover price.

In general on a cover price of $20.00, the bookstore gets $8-$11 (40-55%), the distributor gets $3.40-$7.00 (17-35%), the publisher $4.40-$9.00 (22-45%), the agent ($0.24-$0.36) and the author nets $1.36-$2.04

I know most writers are aware of all these layers and how, with the traditional big publishers, authors are at the bottom of the totem pole. What I had not heard of myself is that many mid-size to small publishers are offering Cooperative Publishing. I shall let you know what Jared Kuritz, said about this new trend in my next post.

How would you answer, “Why am I writing?”
Another thing I’d love to have you share with us, and I shall post it with a link to your blog in my next post, is your book synopsis in 25 words. I worked on mine, and shall post it next time as it helps determine your publishing goals.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

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“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.” Would you agree?

This morning I listened to Sir Ken Robinson’s presentation on the educational system. I urge you to watch it, if you haven’t already. Not only do I find his speech thought provoking, but he also has an incredible sense of humor.

He claims that, “Creativity is as important in education as literacy and that we should treat it with the same status?”
Do you agree?

Picasso said, “All kids are born artists.” The problem is, how do we remain artists as we grow up? It’s our fear of making mistakes and being wrong that causes our loss of creativity as we grow older.

Sir Ken gave the example of a six-year-old girl who hardly ever paid attention in class. One day, during a drawing lesson, she finally sat still. The teacher asked her, “What are you drawing?” the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” The teacher responded, “But no one knows what God looks like.” To which the little girl said, “They will in a minute.”

Sir Ken claims that we run our companies in the same way as our educational system. “We stigmatize mistakes, and we run our education system this way, where mistakes are the worst thing we can make, and the result is we’re educating people out of their creative capacities.”

As a writer, I’m teaching myself to become more creative. Classes are offered in creative writing and now I wonder if that’s because we lost our creativity in school and as adults, we’re trying to get it back. Just as Picasso said, “We’re all born artists.” We just have to remain artists as we grow up.

Sir Ken points out something very interesting. Every education system has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and language, then the humanities and at the bottom, the arts. Even within the arts there’s a hierarchy. Art and music are generally given a higher status than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system in the world that teaches dance everyday, the way we teach mathematics. Why not? Dance is very important as is math. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to. We all have bodies. As children grow up, we start educating them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on the heads, and then only one side of the brain.

If you’re a teacher, have children or grandchildren, and even if you look back at your own education, what do you think about education killing creativity?

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