Superbowl and Sleeping In

This past weekend was Superbowl, and while I am sure many of you pictured us
poor Peace Corps volunteers hunkered down in some rural village eating
tortillas and wondering who was even in the game, I am here to tell you that
I just had one of the best Superbowl weekends in recent years. Not paint
your face blue and orange and throw beer cans at the TV kind of partying,
but a good friends + good friends + just the right amount of cold beer kind
of weekend. Marianne & Darren, the coolest married couple in Belize, managed
to make it out of Monkey River (which just happens to be the place where I
thought I was going before I came to Belize) and Ken, from Seine Beight,
joined us as well.

Saturday evening Marianne had the genius idea of making Lasagna. So while
the boys went to the distributors to get a case of Belikin, we went to every
grocery store in town to gather the necessary ingredients. We found Lasagna
noodles, tomato sauce, and onions at one place and ricotta cheese,
mozzarella, and eggplant at another. After 3 or 4 beers, some music, and
some group work in the kitchen, we had our lasagna. It was amazing, to say
the least and fed us for a late Saturday night.

Sunday I woke to the smell of French Toast and fresh coffee. I don't think
anything is better than Sunday mornings spent in your PJ's with a bunch of
friends. We hung around until noon when Nurse D came by with our flu shots,
a foam cooler, and some medical grade ice packs. Now that we were all
immune from the flu and had cold beer, all that was left was BBQ for the
game. Darren and Matt went looking for charcoal while Ken and Jeff built a
makeshift grill on top of our cement water tank using concrete blocks and
the rack from our oven. Lacking lighter fluid was no problem since Ken was
able to make a hot box fire starter using a used caramel corn tin. The lady
across the street hooked us up with some marinated chicken and the local
Rasta, Gormier, found us in time to provide us with some mean tofu burgers.
All we needed now was some football.

We all now how the game went (and if we don't then I'm sorry that we either
lacked access to TV or that we purposely shunned this American tradition).
Even though the Seahawks didn't make it, I still enjoyed the game, and even
won $5BZ in a pool. Monday came too quickly and I gathered up the
left-overs and found my way back to Blue Creek.