Pixie in Paradise

I’ve really settled into this tropical Caribbean-style life. I describe all of us locals as “dirty hippies.” We all walk around with unintentional beach waves in our hair, a golden sheen to our tans, no matter the shade of skin and this faraway look in our eyes. For me that look represents the magic of this part of the world and means, regardless of the moment we’re currently in, we’ve all seen true happiness – and we found that feeling somewhere nearby. For me, it’s this place, Playa Negra.

While all the details of my time on the little island in Belize have not been revealed yet to you, believe me when I say the peace and contentment found at this sweet little resort near Playa Negra was absolutely what I needed. It was the only thing I needed after the “challenge” renting the first space in Puerto Viejo. I will even be so bold as to say it was good karma, giving me a delicate, magical hug after some of the recent experiences I’d gone through that felt less like a hug, and more like a big swinging bag of dicks to the face.

My first stay here in November and December I assumed a few small voluntary assisting roles. I tried to take the hammock down before it would rain: I failed a lot. I was also in charge of turning specific pool and exterior lights off/on for the evening. Again, not expert level at that and even last night when I tried to figure it out, I would not grade me at an A+: maybe a B-. The duty that I’ve absolutely mastered is feeding Mo, the cat. He gets his cat crunchies and a side dish of oat milk twice a day and I never screw that up. In fact, he actually gets additional feedings when he screams for it, or when he’s extra cute, or when he just lets me pet him. Basically, Mo gets fed around the clock!

Once the resort owner left followed by her son a few weeks later, I sort of felt like the unofficial den mother. Each evening after the property manager left for the day until arriving the next morning, I paid more attention to what was going on in our little resort in paradise. For example, our front gate stays locked between 6 pm and however early one of us leaves for a morning outing. (It gets locked that early because in this part of the world daylight is basically from 5:30 am to 5:30 pm). If that gate is locked and someone doesn’t have a key, they have to ring a large bell that can be heard all the way at the back of the property. I’m a very light sleeper so I hear the bell ring every time. Usually it’s ringing because a guest has locked themself out because they left their keys behind. 

One time the bell rang it was a couple staying here, they had left their keys behind and also didn’t speak English. Let’s not even get started on how many times people ring this bell because they’ve left their KEYS behind. I laugh about it but just in shock over this because in my Type A, detail-oriented, Capricorn, anal-retentive mind this is the equivalent of putting your bra on backwards under your shirt, tucking your dress purposely into your undies in the back, and walking out the front door to go to a big job interview. You are unprepared for life! Go back and try it again, dear one.

I don’t remember my whole conversation with that couple now, but I do remember being very surprised that I was able to keep up in a fully Spanish dialogue for that long – and I think my part made sense. Now I’m helping out the property manager here at the resort a bit more and he is not only from Nicaragua but speaks no English. His accent and word selection is different from other Latin American countries, specifically the accents and Spanish language from places I understand more, like Mexico, Costa Rica and seemingly Panama – the part I was in anyway. Each region can have slightly different pronunciations and slang too so I’m at a real disadvantage in trying to keep up in a conversation but we are giving it the old high school Spanish try! I will never stop preaching about how the two most valuable things I’ve ever been taught were Spanish and Typing, both introduction level classes in high school. I took a couple of semesters of Typing class which we learned on computers armed with WordPerfect software – yes, that far back. And, I took two or three years of Spanish, just enough to learn present tense verbs but not how to conjugate the rest. I feel like a grown woman with the Spanish language skills of a 5-year old.

Now that I have returned to this place, a few additional responsibilities have been bestowed upon me in exchange for free room and board. This is pretty much the experience of a lifetime so I thought it in my best interest to try and make it happen, so we did and here I am. My job entails light duty errands, maybe a little laundry folding, greeting guests after hours or, on Armin’s day off, easy things to make sure the train doesn’t fall off of its tracks so to speak. The essence of this position is to really be a back up if Armin just needs an extra human that is able to work well with him. For now I’m just pretending to be the hostess with the mostest.

First, I had to make an excursion to a hardware store in the opposite direction of town. I don’t recall ever seeing this store and there were five “ferrerias” (hardware stores) listed online. Confirming the right one and speaking with the owner and Armin first, I needed to head to this store and ask for the right kind of door knob – with keys too – and a “factura electronica,” with the resort name on it which should be in their client base. We also needed four signs that said, “Do not enter,” for the main house. After looking up all of these words in Spanish, saving a few sentences as screenshots on my phone in case there was no internet, I walked one mile north in the rain to the hardware store. No one spoke a single word of English and the procedure to find, pay and walk out of the store with my door knob is so completely different from what I’m used to in the US. What a process! Since they didn’t have the door signs we needed I also went to three stores in town to look for them. I found them two days later at one of those three stores but that’s a boring yet frustrating story we don’t need to retell, and another shining example of why I need to get fluent in Spanish quicker!

Another of my duties in the first five nights back was to stay in the main house and prepare things for a family of four that would be guests staying there the following week. The main house had never been rented out before, it had only housed the owner and her family. My job was only to tidy the kitchen so the burden of preparing the whole two-story space did not fall on my shoulders. The main issues were that due to the tropical climate here, we battle a lot of mold, mildew and bugs. Roaches love to poop in kitchen drawers and on dishes, so I had to empty every shelf and item stored in the kitchen and wipe out the spaces, followed by bleach or vinegar. In addition to that task I was to pay attention to anything that we could do easily and quickly that would enhance their stay and make the place look as pleasant as possible.

And here’s where I discovered amongst all of my other quirks that OCD is one of them. I deliberated off and on for two days cleaning, arranging and rearranging these dishes and was not satisfied until we had an order by shape, size and color, that I could live with. By that point I had climbed up and down on counters to retrieve all these breakable items, taken before and after photos and could give two shits if anyone else understood the method to my madness. In my mind those dishes were arranged in the absolute most perfect way they were going to get. 

I realized how important it is to try to keep things in logical places for guests and to anticipate what they might need – currently that is a blender and mosquito nets! The other great thing about living on an intimate property like this is you really get to know guests and can give them individual help if they need it. When I came back almost three weeks ago now, one of the guests that arrived a few days after I left in December was really hoping we had a blender for her. I heard her ask for this and remembered that in the casita next to mine, the last guests would run a blender around 9 am every morning. I wasn’t sure if it belonged to the resort or was a travel sized blender they brought with them but I took a peek next door and saw a big glass blender there. I happily handed off the blender to our guest who was extremely delighted to be able to throw her fresh fruit in there whenever she felt like it. I, on the other hand, realized the main house didn’t have a functioning electric tea kettle or chorreador and the guest with the blender had both that she was willing to “trade” for that blender. We all walked away happy that day and I promised to make mental notes of the wheeling and dealing so that I wouldn’t confuse Armin later.

With many of the lessons I’ve learned while living abroad, an extra layer of mindfulness seems to be the overarching theme with most of them. Meaning, I should take the time to be more mindful, put more thought into my experiences whether that is cleaning, preparing meals or trying not to end up in a corner of a foreign country where I wished I hadn’t ended up. While cleaning and arranging I was also supposed to weed out any dish that might need to be retired or thrown away, or didn’t belong anymore. When I was handling and scrutinizing these dishes, getting to look at each piece, I wanted to make sure the items that were kept were not only useful, but an asset to the collection. All kitchen cabinets including the island have red doors on them, making it a very eye-catching, fun space in the house. There were many different types of dishes but I was able to find several groups that looked like nearly full sets. I arranged two different white sets – circular and rectangular – a blue and white set that look like Italian spode, a black set, white coffee mugs and a tea set, plastic dishes for children and a cabinet all on its own full of every shape glass for any type of alcohol you could hope to drink. 

I thought about how all of these dishes were either purchased in Costa Rica or possibly shipped here, most likely from the owner’s country of Norway. Each set was bought with a design idea in mind or out of sheer necessity for this small resort of six casitas, needing full kitchen sets for each of the three that have kitchens (the three smaller ones have an outdoor shared kitchen). 

Some of the dishes felt really special in my hands but I had no attachment to others. While staying here the first time around I was in the casita on the end; it’s the best rental on the property in my opinion, and also has a kitchenette of its own. As with many of the rentals I’ve been in that weren’t part of huge hotel chains or conglomerates, Casa Vikingo has kitchens with dishes that don’t match each other, including random silverware and utensils. This is part of the charm but also proves to be challenging when things aren’t organized in a way you think it should be or you don’t know what you’re looking for. Because of all of the odd shapes and mismatched dishware in this little kitchen, I discovered that I prefer arranging food and eating off of square or rectangular dishes. I’ve been eating off of round dishes my whole life and have no idea why eating on a rectangular-shaped dinner plate makes me so happy!

The combination of this and trying to be a good host reminded me of a very special plate that my mom made us use on our birthdays when I was growing up: the red plate. The red plate was very bright and shiny and had the words, “You are special today,” written around its top and bottom edge. And she was – and is – truly the hostess with the mostest. Oh, the stories I could share about my mom entertaining our family for holidays. Her dressing up as clowns or elves or whatever she thought us kids were into at the time a birthday party came around was common. She created delightfully decorative and delicious meals over the years and apparently has a huge fan of her homemade pizza in Uncle Kevin, who claims it’s the “best frickin’ pizza ever.” Bless Kevin, he’s from a small city in Wisconsin and if homemade pizza is what gets his blood pumping, who are we to judge? These delectables of hers do not include the red and green bread she dyed for Christmas – too much food coloring makes things taste awful! Besides, it was a little embarrassing getting to school and opening my lunch bag at noon around friends to find red and green (Christmas) or pink and yellow (Easter) bread around my tuna fish salad or turkey meat. 

I will never, nor do I want to be, that kind of host. It’s not in my blood. Let me briefly pause and reflect on what I would like this image of ‘hostess’ to look like. I envision myself more with the appearance of a Bond girl (or even Blanche Deveraux from The Golden Girls), sauntering around in a tiny bikini under a kimono offering people shrimp puffs on a silver tray. This is different from real life, as I found myself two days ago straddling a toilet backwards, elbow deep in dirty, slimy tank water, reconnecting a broken rusty tank chain to itself.

Yet another issue that soon arose requiring translation was this plumbing issue. It was a toilet issue – not mine – and assuming all of the plumbing was going to run smoothly in Central America was short-sightedness on my part. I’ve already learned this lesson the hard way, a few times in the last six months! Instead of wondering how someone is going to poop for the next 24 hours until Armin comes back from a day off, I thought I’d try to find a solution to the problem. Living in this part of the world has taught me how to be extremely resourceful but I’m also getting better at asking for help. Looking everywhere on our property and not finding a single pair of pliers I was in complete shock. Where are the tools?! I found a few wrenches, a screwdriver and a great machete, but none of that was going to help me fix the shitter. The only way to fix that toilet was with pliers and I had to go hunt some down, two of them preferably. But, I also needed to know how to ask for them in Spanish. See, every errand that I run requires quick translation research if the scope of the conversation is out of my repertoire – not hard to be. Pliers are “alicates,” however I really needed needle-nose pliers, a pair of them. Hunting down odd, specific words can be quite comical because not everything is literal, but I think it is translated to, “pinzas de punta de aguja.” However, when I walked to the nearest resort that was open on Sunday (my chicken wing resort), all they had were regular pliers, but had a pair of them.

This is where the image of myself as a Bond girl became more like James Bond (or MacGyver), as I balanced half the toilet tank lid on my forearm, standing in a tiny bathroom with a guest hanging on to the other half of the lid. I balanced both sides of the chain, lid, pliers and went elbow deep in dirty, slimy toilet water to reconnect this thing. It reminded me of the years I spent working in the emergency room saving lives and performing some fairly acrobatic procedures that required fine motor skills. Well, I fixed this toilet enough to temporarily function and bought us some time until the real talent could properly fix it.

Far beyond my skills as a proper hostess or handyman, Armin takes the lead on landscaping, swimming pool and all-around maintenance, cleaning and just making this place look spectacular. Armin is the Nicaraguan property manager and he’s been here for five years. He can do anything from cleaning, laundry, repair anything that’s broken and no one at all can make a bed look better than he can – don’t forget the towels that he folds into the shapes of swans and sailboats! He knows this property better than anyone, but we are working together while only using Spanish. It’s amazing how much I can pick up sometimes but other times Armin just looks at my face and smiles and shakes his head laughing, realizing I understood next to nothing. I use my phone a lot for translation websites and apps to assist us in communicating, but even then some things get lost in translation – really lost.

The highlight of that week was not only being 20 feet from a sloth who visited our trees by the pool, but I got to greet guests by myself for the first time. We were hurriedly putting finishing touches on things when I looked out the front door and saw the cutest sloth across from me! I stopped everything to capture a video and have a conversation (one-sided) with him. It was one of the best experiences so far, being so close to such a beautiful exotic animal. The tropical animals will always be wondrous and exotic to me because we don’t have sloths and monkeys or dart frogs in the US, and certainly not in the desert where I’ve been living. Asking Armin if cats kill sloths was yet another question I needed to quickly translate into Spanish, as I knew that Mo was lurking around somewhere waiting for his third breakfast, or maybe by then it was his second lunch. The funny thing about feeding Mo is, he has always gotten his cat kibble in a shallow gray cat dish, but when I feed him the extras – milk, canned food, table scraps of chicken – I’ve always given it to him in a little red bowl, his special plate.