One of the nurses at work always speaks to me in Creoles, and I am pretty sure I always have a blank look on my face, as I do not understand the words that come out of her mouth. All the other nurses find this amusing. She tells me “ya gotta learn man” I usually respond, “I want to but you need to explain what you are saying and in what context you use it”.One of the many phrases she calls me is Flat Bird (or bord, as I hear it)…at first I had no idea what she meant by Flat Bird, I just went along with it…Then one day I was just sitting there and she came up and grabbed my head, tilted it the side, put some oil in my hair, and started braiding it.“What the heck?” ran through my mind. This is the lovely do she gave me, which everyone thought looked great…I’ll let you be the judge.
It was my intention to wear my hair like that home to show my housemates. But I couldn’t do it, the moment I walked out of the health center and was out of sight I took my hair down, braids still in place and my hair full of oil.
It turns out Flat Bird means “a girl with no style” but I think only that nurse uses that phrase because we asked other people what it meant and they had no idea what we were talking about. But I am fine with being a Flat Bird if that means I don’t get all decked out in spandex, high heels, plastic bright jewelry, and red lipstick.
On Tuesday night, since the following day was a holiday, we went out with some locals, which was good. We ended up out front of a bar/restaurant just hanging out and talking when we hear, “this is a story of two white women” Chelsea and I just looked at each other and started laughing. Let’s just say the lyrics were not really blog appropriate. We couldn’t believe what the song was implying, the funny part was people looked over at us and were laughing.
Wednesday was Guyana’s Independence Day and we were invited to go to Jubilee with some co-workers. We knew Jubilee had a water slide, which we were excited about.
We were told to be ready by 8am but we knew better and prepared ourselves for a little hammock time as we waited for the phone call. 9’oclock rolled around and we got the call to head to the shop around the corner since the bus was just crossing the bridge.Of course, we waited at the shop for a half hour before the big bus loaded with people appeared.
As the door opened I noticed there were 2 empty seats, 4 of us, and lots of items (mostly containers full of food) covering the aisle way …but we piled in and smalled up, placing bins of meat on our lap (poor Tim).
An hour and a half later we arrived at the entrance gate and we handed over our $1200 (a little over 5 bucks)/person admission fee. Meanwhile a gentleman started counting the number of persons on the bus, I think there were over 40 people, including small children.The guy said it was $40,000 ($200 U.S.) but the amount collected from everyone was $24,000 ($120) so they start hemming and hawing and arguing about how the kids should be free. Some people gave a little more money, but mostly they threaten to go somewhere else or just wait until they gave in and let us enter, without paying the full amount. Which is exactly what happened after 30 minutes of sitting there.
Needless to say, if nothing else is gained from this experience it’s definitely making me a more patient and tolerable person.
Once we unloaded the bus and found a spot to spend the day I had to take a moment, walking down to the water hole, to take a few deep breaths. The majority of the day went fine and the place was more than I expected. There were 2 water slides that dumped into a swimming pool, there were nice covered picnic tables, and the water hole had canoes and paddle boats to use.
Chelsea did however encounter a problem which was actually quite funny. She was walking into the pool area to go on the slide when they stopped her, telling her she could not wear her tank top down the slide because it was cotton, it was actually 100% spandex and there were so many other people wearing cotton. She argued but they did not listen. Determined as she is, she went back and walked up the stairs to the slide and the guy turned off the water and told she could not go down wearing her tank top. This held up the line and she kept telling them to read her tag and that spandex is not cotton, finally they listened to her and turned the water back on…way to go Chels!
Chelsea & Tim
Around 5:00pm we packed up and headed out.When we got home we were all super tired and called it a night.
I have definitely learned to expect some type of fiasco whenever on an outing. But I’ve also learned it’s how I deal with those events…
Avocado faces
Our set up
Doin' the sugar rub
