Caribbean
I keep thinking I'll have no access to the web, but then I do. P (uncle, who I'm staying with here) has brought me a laptop home from his work, so I can play on that, which is brilliant, otherwise it would have taken me about 3 days just to catch up with e-mails and entries when I got home.
So, this morning I got up at 7.30am. That's so mega-early for me when on holiday, but it's so hot here that it's really hard to sleep in much, and it's actually nice to sit on the balcony at 7.30, because by 9am it's really hot. So I got up, sat on the balcony and drank orange juice while trying to overcome my grogginess (another effect of the heat) and then made real Jamaican coffee (P went to Jamaica last week for work and brought some back, it's amazing) and ate breakfast sitting out there in the morning sun, watching the green parrots fly overhead squawking. There are green parrots constantly flying over, usually in pairs, and they're so noisy.
Last night we went for a walk around the savannah, which is a huge grassy area in Port of Spain, so big that the distance around the outside is 2 and a half miles. We walked at about 6.30pm, much earlier than that and it's too hot to walk that far. Much later and it goes dark, something I hadn't even thought of. I'm used to long evenings in the summer, but here pretty much all year round the sun rises around 6.30am and sets around 6.30-7pm. Also, the sun sets so quickly, in about 15 minutes. One minute it's just getting a bit dark, the next it's almost pitch black. After our walk we got cold coconuts. They hack off the top with a huge machete-like knife, and you drink out the coconut milk with a straw. Then they hack it into pieces and you scrape out the gooey white coconut. If they're left to ripen, the gooey white bit becomes hard, and the outer shell falls away, and what's left is what you normally think of as a coconut, the brown ones you can buy in the supermarkets. We've also had fresh mangoes, watermelon, and star fruit, yum.
I've been swimming in the sea, which was gorgeous, a proper Caribbean beach with white sand and palm trees. Also, unlike the freezing British sea, it's cool when you go in, but doesn't chill you to the bone, and you don't have to run madly for a towel the second you get out. I love swimming in the sea anywhere, but it was especially good here.
And obviously I've had some rum punch, because you can't come to the Caribbean and not have rum. Heh.