Still hot hot hot

It's 33 in Willemstad today, and with the humidity it "feels like" 38 or 39.   All I can say is that we can manage about 10 minutes outdoors before we are reduced to melting pools of lava.  Our bodies stick to everything - the bus seats, the sidewalk benches, each other.  True togetherness.  This morning I joined my beloved on the golf course, just as a ride-along, as I wanted to see what the course was like.  This was RJ's fifth game and fortunately he knew where we were going, because the signs on the golf course were about as helpful as the street signs on this island.   The fairway was equivalent to our "rough", the "rough" was basically long jungle grass with nests of biting ants.  The greens kicked sand with every putt.   Having said that, the basically arid nature combined with daily dumps of rain make it possible to have impressive botanical gardens like this:

Not a friendly environment to find an errant golf ball, but definitely lovely to look at!  To set foot into this terrain is to cause a frantic scurrying of the reptilian tenants - big, little, they all looked uniformly insulted and royally pissed off at the intrusion. The cart path, euphemistically speaking, was like a dried mud drag-strip of moguls and wash-outs, deep potholes and anthills.  As always the driver was relaxed and in control, while the passenger held on with a catatonic grip, clenched jaw and muttering a few Hail Mary's as we careened around the high cliff holes.   Fun stuff.  Here's the signature hole.  I think he double-bogied it, but my memory could be faulty (sorry, honey). One in the ocean, right?

We are winding down to our last few days here, and that means mining the fridge of the Must-Go's.  Chef Peter made a zesty Caribbean dish of rice, beans and all bits and pieces of leftover meat - turkey burgers, salami, smoked ham.   It was a culinary melting pot, and delicious!  After lunch we braved the heat again but not for long, for a quick visit to another supposedly air-conditioned shopping centre (it wasn't) with purely Dutch stores.  Lisa disappeared into the European baby supply store, both boys migrated to the candy shoppe, and my thighs remained firmly stuck to the bench under a feeble fan.  For fun I laid out all my Dutch coinage and stuck them to my thigh, then tried to figure out the florin/guilder hierarchy.  I gave up.  Who cares?  I am quite sure the shopkeepers are used to sweaty Canadian women offering a fist full of Antilles coinage for their purchase accompanied by a quizzical and friendly smile (read: please don't rip me off), all with deep bench marks carved across the legs.