MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Home for Christmas

Quite a change- me enjoying the sun last week.  Compare to the picture of where I am now...:)

It's COLD here!

My boy's class had to finish a worksheet that asked them to match phrases with Celsius temperatures- for example, 0 would be matched with water freezing, 100 with water boiling. Uniformly, they matched 55 degrees (130 degrees F) with "a cool day" and 20 degrees (68 degrees F) with "a warm bath." This just illustrates the point that Belizians like to take cold showers. My housemates and I have not yet adjusted to this way of life, so we wimpily purchased an electric water heater for our shower. Now, this is not something that is luxurious, by all means, so we still consider ourselves missionaries and not tourists :) The unit fastens on to the shower head so water runs through it, warmed as it moves by a hot coil. As I mentioned, it is electric, which is counterintuitive to all the warnings we've ever been given about not taking your hairdryer/radio/whatever into the bathtub with you. We've managed to avoid most shocks- as long as you don't touch it while the water is running, you are usually fine. Yesterday, however, our landlord came in and (for some unknown reason) replaced the plastic faucet in the shower with a metal one. Now, the electric shower has the annoying habit of suddenly turning off in the middle of a shower (resulting in a sudden stream of COLD water), which can usually be fixed by turning the faucet slightly. Last night when this happened I got a good lesson in conductivity. The metal faucet gave me a nice shock when I went to adjust it. So I remembered the lesson I taught on insulators last year, and spent the rest of the shower banging on the faucet to adjust it with a plastic shampoo bottle.
On a different note, last night I got a cooking lesson from a neighbor, and made tortillas over a fire!