White Sabbath

Sunday was a day of rest. I mostly sat around and read tourist literature about the island. This is more entertaining for me than it seems, because its a lot like reading damn you autocorrect. Most of the people on the island are proficient in multiple languages. The writers for some of the magazines, however struggle with cognates, homonyms, and idioms, which makes reading them as a word nerd extra fun. It makes me giggle that the dutch left behind donkey "bread".

One of my other favourite Bonaire factoiods appears on this page... Enslaved Africans called the island "White Hell" because of the salt extraction in which they were forced to participate. I have a feeling the title has been resurrected lately, as the Bonaireans are currently attempting to secede from Dutch rule. There is a pretty big financial divide between the locals and the tourists and expats. This divide also happens to fall squarely on racial lines.

Yesterday, I managed to experience my own white hell. My mother found a labelmaker. 

She experienced some kind of lable frenzy. Once she was done with the things she needed to label, she began actively looking for more things she could label. I fully expect to wake up branded. Yes, she has already said she will be labelling crabs. It is out again this morning. I can only hope she runs out of tape before she makes it upstairs.

I walked over to the beach briefly to test that my camera is working again. A tourist ship happened to be passing by. I grabbed a couple of pictures, but it was pretty grey by Bonaire standards.

Happy hour has become a tradition here in Bonaire. It mostly means eating wine and cheese at five every night. We sit outside in the front yard, and sometimes various neighbours join us. My dad fills some feeders with sugar for the local birds, so we had a few of them fluttering around. While we were watching them, I happened to look up into the tree above us. it turned out we were being joined by at least three iguanas. Here is the view of the happy hour table from my balcony, if you look closely....

...you can see our guests.

Happy Hour is open to everyone.

After dinner, my mother went on her first crab hunt of the season. I manned the 

flashlight for the roundup (I was only following orders), while we walked around the complex. i suspect we will feature prominently on the neighborhood watch facebook page today.

When the crabture was complete, we came back to the house. Only to discover that the bats had found the birdsugar. The front yard was swarming with them. I tried to get some pictures, but didnt do very well. Im going to try again tonight. They dont stay still to have their pictures taken and are kinda all over the place. There are three in this photo, none of which gave me rabies or got in my hair. Like any good goth, they just sort of wing around and ignore you.