From the Bottle

That's the coolest thing about being in any country besides the US- coke and everything comes in glass bottles. Even beer, and all those amazing Fanta flavors that they had in Kenya, like passion-fruit and mango. They don't have all the amazing Fanta flavors here, although they have fruits enough to inspire good ones. I wish I could remember the names of all the funky fruits they have here: there is this bite-sized fruit that you eat with salt, tastes sour and sweet, and then salty, and it's green and then more red when riper. I like that one. I hate papaya. At first I was trying to eat it, but now I've just given completely up, and ask specially that it not be served to me because I'll barf if I even smell it now. There were these weird fruits that we kept seeing in the markets and trees in Rio Dulce, that looked like a big, wooden pear. I think the lady said they were called zapotes, which also happens to mean "shoe." She said they were so good, that I had to try one, that they tasted like papayas except much stronger. Shoe, indeed. I didn't try one. Anyway, all the soda and beer comes in those awesome glass bottles here, with the little worn rim where the bottles knock and rub each other when packed together in pallets during their long, long lifespans. Seems very environmentally friendly, to reuse bottles like that. But it would never fly in the US. People would get freaked out that the bottles are obviously used, even though they are certainly cleaned and sterilized, and plus, what would we throw out after we were done? We can hardly consume a product unless we get to peel the plastic off the box, open the box to find the bag inside, then eat the ounce of whatever inside, open the plastic wrapped free toy/piece of garbage inside that bag, and then throw the whole mess away to let someone else deal with it. It is refreshing to be refreshed while avoiding that whole cycle (although the little industry that has people dumping drinks into plastic bags with straws, so that they can collect the deposit for the reusable glass bottle, sidesteps every benefit and adds its own trash problem to the equation), but now I find myself drinking 4 or 5 carbonated beverages a day, where before I drank 0.
I'm at the second internet cafe of the day, after spending over an hour at the first place downloading all my pictures to the desktop only to find it was impossible to install the software to upload them to this blog or anywhere, as well as to burn them to cd. Now I'm at the next place, where I made sure I could download the software first, only to find after the hour of downloading the pics again that uploading 425 pics in 'largest' format was going to take aproximately 2643 minutes. Then the computer crashed, so I started over again, this time using the smallest format for only a few pictures, which started out taking 15 minutes, but the counter kept going up, until it hit 150 minutes. So I'm just doing a few, and it's taking forever, so I figured I'd write a little while I wait, which is probably slowing it down but what the hell. See how hard life on a tropical island can be?
Tonight, after Mariam finishes her first few dives to practice all the technical skills, we're going to get sushi and play poker at the bar. I dove on a huge Halliburton wreck today, and did a big, long drift dive. Last night we did a night dive, where I saw a moray, an octopus, and a bunch of sleeping fish. Fish sleep resting on the coral, not moving even when you shine a light right on them. Plus there were these little nematodes and bitsy fishes that were attracted to the light beam, and they would swarm so thick it was uncomfortable at times. They'd fill your ears and ping off your mask and face and get stuck between your fingers. But if you shined the light on the coral, little polyps would shoot out, grab the worms, and suck out their insides right while you were watching. It was a great dive.
I really wish the pictures were easier to post, because they tell an amazing story without me gumming it up with too many words. I might try putting them on a disk and sending them to the States with someone whose going that way, to mail to my house when they hit US soil, and then have my dad post them.