Dan and Jaye's cruising blog: Kumatage (reflections on the water)

How do you do a Christmas tree without snow, pine branches, icicles? Like this - typically Arubian.

Pop math quiz: Arubian currency exchange is 1.75 Arubian florin = 1 U.S. dollar. Gasoline is sold by the liter. So, here's the fuel we just put in the rental car. Is the price on this pump pricey or cheap compared to the U.S.? I can do metric system in my head. I can convert currency in my head. What I can't do, is two-step conversions like this one, in my head. Last time I tried I ended up paying $12 for a pineapple in Barbados!

Yes, we love this desert island in the southeastern Caribbean. Here’s your geography lesson for the week (winking at H. if she’s reading). The island is 19 miles long and 6 miles wide. Politically, it is part of the Netherlands but has a semi-independent status. As I understand it, the island is self-governing but Holland takes care of some things such as national defense; I think it’s somewhat analogous to the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The local language is Papiamento (more on that in a moment), but everyone is wonderfully multilingual and generally speak 3 other languages in addition – Dutch (Dutch is used for official business, and also there are many tourists from the Netherlands), English, and Spanish. We studied a bit of Papiamento; I love the insights you get into a culture by understanding the structure of the language. In Papiamento, the pronouns for ‘he’ and ‘she’ are the same – does this imply an underlying gender equality? There are 3 different...

Most of the reusable grocery bags in the States are green – the color claimed by the pro-environment movement, symbolic of the trees that are saved. Here in the Caribbean – doesn’t this make perfect sense? The reusable bags are turquoise blue – their biggest environmental resource is the crystalline ocean. The bag says, “Keep Aruba Clean,” and “Aruba Sweet Land.” (The latter phrase is also the title of their national anthem.)

We spent a day walking around downtown Oranjestad doing business mundanity (getting a local SIM card for our phone, and bus passes, and changing money). Got in *lots* of walking, partly because things were scattered and its almost a mile just to get to the bus stop, and partly because we kept getting lost. What we didn’t get was a dedicated internet connection. Many of the bars and cafés have free internet, so that’s where we’ll be going to update the blog. What that probably means for you, dear readers, is that our schedule will be very erratic -- we won’t be posting for days, then put up a whole slug of notes all at once. What that means for us, though, is that it will be difficult to avoid TWD (typing while drunk) since you have to be a customer of said bar or café in order to use their wifi!

What I love about Dan? Last year for his b-day we had a $100 dinner in an upscale restaurant in the Exumas. This year, b-day was sunset on the beach followed by dinner was $5 roti at a Suriname hole-in-the-wall in Noord. He was equally delighted with both – that’s what I love about him.

People in the Caribbean take a pretty casual attitude toward a lot of things. (1) This measuring cup cracked me up. If you look carefully, you will notice that the metric side doesn’t line up with the English side: you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to remember that 250 ml is approximately one cup, and 500 ml is approximately one pint. But on this cup, 250 ml lines up with 1-2/3 cups, and 350 ml lines up with one pint. The first morning we made oatmeal, this cup certainly made for a texture the Quaker Oats people never intended! Wishful thinking? But mostly I think this measuring cup should be paired with the Piet Hein grook: “Some people live in a dream of what’ll allow them to live their dream – they solemnly hold out a half-pint bottle and ask for a pint of cream.” (We later calibrated it with a bottle of water labeled 8-oz that was handed out at the parade; the metric side was closer to being correct. No problem, mon!) (2) So, the map we got from the tourism folks was ...

The grocery store has a lot of American brands, and some products for the European Union markets that were printed in seven languages. In some cases, packages were printed in other languages, but the words were so similar to the English ones that it was easy to discern the parallel, and some things I had to look at the pictures and guess. It’s a safe bet that koffi is coffee, but what’s keshi? Bladerdeeg? Pindakaas? Hanepoot? Sometimes you have to accept some uncertainty in life. The eggs had come from Miami, though, and the water is delicious to drink straight from the tap. All in all, the supermarket felt like a supermarket, the vibe was generally familiar and grocery shopping was a very first-world experience. But then you’d turn a corner and get reminded that you’re not, in fact, in the States – when we saw Carnaval masks for sale in the liquor store, or baby cribs sold with mosquito netting already installed. [photos] (for those who are reading this blog as a learning experi...

We fly … a lot. We know the frequent flyer drill – laptop out and in its bin, shoes off, liquids in their plastic bag, pockets empty of metal things. I’ve set off metal detectors with things like hair clips and underwire bras. Check, check, and check. So I was devastated when the security screener at the airport ran my purse through the X-ray machine, frowned and ran it again, then started to search it by hand. I’d already done the frequent-flyer drill … and now the screener was looking at me oddly as he pulls a pocket knife out of my purse. NO!! In some cultures, a knife is just a tool; in others, a gift of a knife implies a promise and an invitation to a more durable relationship – with this symbol of protection, it says, “I’ve got your back and I expect you to have mine.” I have a magnificent pocket knife; Dan got it from a pawnshop and gave me when we were dating. It’s good-sized (i.e., big for a “girl”) and has an wing-spread eagle etched into its high-quality stainless ste...