Pat and Keri's Super Holiday in Belize Extravaganza!

Well we hope everyone had a great holiday season! While ours was a little different than in the states, we had a very festive time with new friends!

For Christmas we cooked up a pretty traditional American Christmas dinner and invited over some other PCV’s here in Belize City. Amazingly, we were able to find everything we needed (even fried onions for the green bean casserole). We did add a bit of Belizean flair to some of the dishes such as seasoning the turkey with Ricardo (a central american “season all”) and using callaloo instead of spinach in the dip, but kept it just like “back home”! Pat even made a fair batch of the Belizean version of egg nog called rum pope.... very tasty and a new Robison household Christmas tradition!

Keri received a comal (special pan used to cook tortillas) and a tortilla press while Pat scored a mighty cool BBQ grill! We opted to wrap our presents with the local newspaper and medical tape from our PC emergency kits!



For New Year’s, we ventured over to Caye Caulker to hang out with some fellow PCV’s and ring in the New Year. Caye Caulker is a short 45 minute boat ride away by water taxi and we stayed at a quaint little place called Ignacio’s. The cabanas were lifted up on stilts and somewhat spartan in their amenities, but the view was worth a million bucks! Plus the price was only US$20 a night, and on our current budget that is a fairly important consideration. Anyway, we had a super busy day on New Year’s eve.... we went on an all-day sailing/snorkeling trip that took us out to the reef and made three stops. We have experienced plenty of diving/snorkeling in Florida but were truly impressed with the barrier reef here. The abundance of fish and wildlife was amazing! We saw sharks, grouper, snapper, turtles, rays, and innumerable other tropical breeds. Another member of our group had an underwater camera and we will post some pics when we can. After seeing all those fish, we splurged for a nice dinner of whole snapper and a filet of grouper! We hung out with the other PCV’s but opted to ring in the new year on our own on a deserted stretch of the coastline leaning against a beached local fishing boat. It was a New Year’s we will remember forever!

We missed you all and hope everyone had fun! Good luck to everyone in 2010!