Living in the tropics

It surprising how familiar and American things feel here. Every now and then something will catch you off-guard and remind you that you are living in a foreign country.

For instance, I was looking at some locally produced yogurt in the super market the other day. It looked lovely, but yogurt can be deceptively caloric. So, I went to look at the breakdown of calories. It contained 408 kJ of energy. At that I decided, it just wasn't worth looking at the labels any more. I'm already converting Celsius to Fahrenheit, kilograms to pounds and kilometres to miles. I can't keep another conversion factor in my head. Plus, I asked google and it delightfully told me that my yogurt had over 120K calories in it. And I'm still hungry.

I'm not fully accustomed to living in the tropics yet. I don't have glass in my windows, just shutters. There are bugs everywhere. My desk at work has tiny flies and spiders, I keep all of my food in the refrigerator because there are ants in the kitchen. To my surprise, I haven't seen the big scary bugs that could kill me, it's the little ones that are bothersome.

Last night I went with my team members for Mexican. And we asked the waiter if the beans had meat in them. He said it was the most ridiculous question he had ever heard. Who doesn't have pork in their beans?

Oh, and I'm very glad I brought my sweaters, it's been getting down to ~60 at night. One prediction unfulfilled.