Susanna Goes to the Big City.

I went to Belize City today - 67 miles and three hours from Cayo, where I live. (Unless my British landlord is driving and then it's a mere hour and 40 minutes. That was a breakneck experience.) The city hit me with all of its pressing throng, city noise and exhaust.  I remembered I was in Central America, overwhelmed to step into this energy of city life and masses of people after my so-quiet life  in my jungle town.

Traffic was stalled all through town. The narrow streets were narrowed more by pedestrians and vendors stationed on the fringes of where the cars wanted to go. One traffic warden walked up to my landlord's car with a big smile and waved him into the stream of traffic.

"You're in Belize now, you have to learn to drive like a Belizean!" he said. "You just go." He motioned us in with friendly grand gestures. The Brits laughed and joined the flow of traffic.

The stores are packed to overflowing, merchandise bursting out the doors. Each of the hundred stores sells almost the same thing. How they all carry on enough business, right next to each other, is not clear to me. But, this week, with Christmas days away, every store, no matter how tiny, had shoppers in it.

Outside the stores on the sidewalks and the edge of the road street vendors hawk everything from fruits to plastics to shoes, they have it all. I almost bought a bucket. If you see enough buckets and are asked enough times to buy a bucket, you start to reason that you could use a bucket. And kitchen towels are the hot Christmas item this year. ?! On every corner vendors sold stacks of dishtowels. Toward the end of my mile trek on foot (having left my landlords at the ferry), I bought two linen towels with fruit designs made in Guatemala. Who (besides me) doesn't need dish towels?!

My Real find was kalamata olives that a Mediterranean woman fished out of a big bucket for me. I haven't seen them anywhere in Belize - even bottled. We are going to have a few happy meals with those.

I was tired of shopping almost as soon as I started. The mystery of Belizean Pedestrian Traffic Patterns was a large part of it. I was constantly run into and over by people - even when there were only 20 of us at hand. It doesn't work to just keep right; it doesn't work to watch oncoming pedestrians and dodge out of the way - they seem to travel in sixes and tens. You avoid one and run into his companions. And children among them are like carems on a board, back and forth, around you and through you (if they could). If you wait at the end of one store aisle to find a break to enter into a cross aisle, no break comes. One person passes but you still can’t get in because the other nine follow - all moving as one, all wanting to look at what you are unintentionally standing right in front of.

Check out lines were not as confusing in the city as they are in town where I live. In the city there are queues, so you wait in turn, but should you pause to choose between a Dark Chocolate bar (70% cocoa) from organic chocolate made in Belize or a Dark *Milk* Chocolate bar (50% cocoa), then the four women and a girl will squeeze right by you to check out in front of you. But I didn't mind because the queue still lends a sense of order. In Cayo, you just don't know where to stand at the counter, and wherever you stand, people come next to you and make their purchase before you and you can't figure out what about your stance or demeanor suggests that you are not standing there solely to pay for your groceries and go home. It's very confusing. I find myself verging on rudeness. Someone hands money to the cashier to cut in line, and I hand the cashier one of my goods to ring up. In this case, he will give a short nod to the cutter-in-line and say "Right now," which means "Just a minute," and he will finish my purchase. Then, before I have paid, he will take money from the next person who is invariably in an urgent rush to leave the store and whose order he has added in his head. Sometimes three other people are helped in the course of adding up my order - even if it's small - before my change is given. It's a multitasking job for the cashier.

In Cayo, the foot traffic through stores is light, so you don't ever have to just cling to the shelf to get out of everyone's way. But in Belize City, checking out was orderly, it was the shopping that was hectic.

I noticed more household supplies in the city - kitchen gadgets and such - that I thought I could not find in Belize. I didn't need them, but I noticed them. What I did need, and found, was a big half-gallon mason jar for brining fresh mozzarella for Christmas. I will serve it on slices of tomato from my garden and basil from the organic farm in Teakettle. Fabio will love me for this feat. He loves anything that harks of authentic Italian cooking from home. I probably can't achieve that, but at least a semblance of it.

My first attempt at mozzarella is a jar of little white rock-like cheese balls in the fridge right now. The flavor is nice, but it's not the soft beautiful texture it should be. My one source of good milk (according to my friend Christina, whose discernment I trust because she used to have dairy cows herself) was all out when I stopped by for another gallon after making these cheese-like rocks.
I panicked a little. We are very close to Christmas and mozzarella is a two-day affair. I asked when there would be more.

"It depends on how much milk we get. She's not giving as much lately," the young Mennonite girl in the shop told me.

"She?" I asked, a little dumbfounded. "You have only one cow?"

"Yes," she smiled.

Everyone seems to know about this "dairy" called Bowen and Bowen, where you can get fresh milk, it’s even unhomogenized. (Mmm the cream goes to the top and you can make Butter from it.), but they have only one cow.?!

"We can save some for you - how much do you need?" she wondered.

"Well, two gallons," I said, thinking if I failed batch number 2, I would have enough for one last attempt before Christmas dawned. But I wondered if I was depriving all of Cayo from milk by hoarding two gallons. Still, she agreed.

"I can't believe you have only one cow." I was still stuck on this news. “How much milk does she give a day?”

I guess it's not surprising for a family to have one cow, but to (bother to) sell the milk from only one cow and to be known as the place to buy milk....you’d just think they’d need more than one cow. It does explain why, now and on three previous visits, they were out of milk.

"About two and a half gallons right now." she answered.

So I was hoarding after all, one cow's whole day supply all saved for me. Well, nothing could be done. If you need two gallons of milk for your cheese, you need two gallons of milk for your cheese. I gave her my name and promised to come on Monday, first thing.

As the girl sent her brother to fetch me an 8-1/2 pound turkey from the freezer, I continued to ponder the one cow scenario. If you have one cow, you probably don't have a whole milking set up. Was this young girl or the turkey runner brother sitting on a three-legged stool every early morning, milking Bessie by hand? The Mennonites here are definitely old world. That's just older-world than I imagined.

When I return on Monday for the milk, I'm going to ask the cow's name, and I will name my cheese after her. I think I love that cow.

But this all took place in Cayo, in a little village called Esperanza (which means "hope," or "wait" - but hope is better.) Back to my tale of the big city. I looked for milk there but found none. A lot of the milk sold in Belize is in boxes on the grocery shelf, not fresh refrigerated milk. Butter too is found on the shelf next to oil. It is sold in a blue decorative can. About US$8 per pound. The butter I buy (when I'm not making it with the cream from Bessie) is "fresh" - meaning sold in the refrigerated section, but it's imported from New Zealand (so how fresh can that be?). I am sure Wisconsin is closer than New Zealand in terms of transporting perishables. I have no idea why the butter is shipped around the world to Belize. That butter is US$6 per pound but sold in only half pound blocks. I think this is an export opportunity for a dairy farm in Wisconsin...

It's just as well that I did not find milk in the city. I had a three hour (scheduled as two, but allow for three) bus ride back to my jungle home and no cooler with me. Still, I purchased a pound of butter that was only US$3.75 and came from Florida. It's the only time I've seen non-New Zealand butter, and such a price. Ok, I confess, I got two pounds. Butter freezes well.

I was in the vicinity of the bus station for my ride back to Cayo, I thought, but the streets and their little shops mixed with houses, mixed with fences, and all crossing the canal, look alike to me. I thought I was a block away when I asked a man who had a tent pavilion and clothing rack in his yard selling clothes.

Belizeans give directions that only Belizeans can understand.

"You go so (pause) and so," the police officer 7 blocks back had advised me with hand motions indicating straight on the first "so" and right on the next "so." How far straight and how far right? If I would have asked he would have given me a confident nod as though to say, "You'll know how far." and would simply repeat his hand motions with "so (pause) and so."

This Belizean, in the yard with his rack of clothing to sell, gave me the hand motions but was clearly uncomfortable with the "so (pause) and so" type description, recognizing that I would not understand.
"Wait," he said, finger to the air, and came around the fence from the other side of the yard.

"Do I go straight down this street?" I began.

"Follow, I will show you," he said.

Oh my, he was going to escort me to the bus. It seemed unnecessary and - unfortunately - it caused me to wonder if he was going to ask me for money. But, no. It's just that it was a tricky three blocks and he was a neighborly man. There was a "double road" (boulevard, as we would say) and both lanes ran along the canal, but I was to turn before crossing the canal because on the other side were fences or other obstacles that would have made passing complicated. As I walked behind him on a narrow just-built sidewalk with a 12-inch drop into the gutter, which I kept thinking I was going to dip into by accident as other pedestrians squeezed past,  I learned that he has been to Milwaukee, in my own state. And now his relatives have relocated from there to St. Paul. I tried to express with interest that *I* was from the Twin Cities (I lived there long enough to say it that way, I think). This either did not register or was irrelevant as he pointed out the bus station and the line up of recycled school buses waiting to lurch and jostle me all of the way back to the jungle side of things.

What kindness of this man. He took a left to head back to his yard full of clothing racks and I dodged a biker turning left into me as I was turning right, to skittle across the canal and then the double road to a yellow bus waiting for me.

The buses in Belize are primary transportation for everyone. They are cheap - I think I paid US$2.50 to go 70 miles - and they will stop anywhere. God forbid you should get on a bus just after work hours or when school lets out. There are people squeezed three to a seat and others standing belly to back from the back door to the money collector hanging out the door on the first step into the bus. In those cases, the bus may stop every mile along the way from Belize to Cayo. 70 miles, 70 stops. Maybe I exaggerate (but I don't think so).

I was pleased instead to find a "non-stop" bus to Belmopan, the capital city (about 2/3 of the way home). This doesn't mean it doesn't stop, it still stops every 5 or 10 blocks within the city, but once you're out of the city, it only stops for...friends of the bus driver, probably. There were a few times we stopped. Still it was an hour quicker than a regular bus. I was fortunate again in Belmopan to find a "non-stop" bus to San Ignacio. This one was pulling away from the curb as I exited the bus station.
"Is that going to Cayo?" I asked a man sitting on a bucket by the burglar bar gates of the bus depot. I think he has a role to play in the bus arrivals and departures. He waved his hand toward the bus and gave me a nod suggesting I should run for it.

I saw two other people crossing in front of the moving bus and hopping on. It was dusk already and I didn't want to take the Longer ride that would come next. I also didn’t really want to run in front of a moving bus at dusk. But he stopped at the sight of me and my shopping bags crossing into his headlights. Then 45 minutes of 1970s love / heartbreak songs on the radio later (I'm sure I heard some voices singing along...I've noticed this before on the bus to Cayo, people singing along in public), I debarked in San Ignacio across from the newly cobblestoned welcome center with a 10-foot Christmas tree lit against a backdrop of water fountains, shooting into the air from newly placed fountains in the plaza floor. I walked through the plaza, into the mall, up the winding stairs, out onto Burnes Avenue. Fabio was serving gelato across the street to tourists and I was home.