Alone Again

My roomie left to go home for the holidays this morning.  She had to leave at 3 a.m., which meant that I was able to see her off since I was still up.  So I have the place to myself for the next few weeks.  We'll see how that goes.  I'll probably alternate between gleefully prancing around in my undies, and ruefully banging my head against the wall, lamenting about how frigging lonely I am.

At the grocery today - oh wait, that's something else - supermarkets are called "groceries" here.  And if you say you're going to the "market", that's an entirely different thing:  an open air market where local vendors sell their produce, kind of like a farmer's market back home.

Where was I - oh yes, at the grocery today I realized I hadn't yet mentioned the ever-present security guards.  Either by choice or a lack of technology, places like banks, malls and groceries employ security guards instead of using video cameras.  It freaked my shit out at first when I walked into a bank and saw a guard standing there with an enormous automatic rifle hanging casually in his hand, but I'm kind of used to it by now.  Well, scratch that.  I'm used to seeing the security guards in their smart uniforms and cool-looking berets, but I'm not used to the guns.  It's really bizarre to be in such close proximity to something that dangerous, like they're casually walking around with a bunch of bombs or grenades or something equally death-bringy.

Today's Trinidad Impression:  Last night my roomie's driver was telling me how, when the economy first opened up several decades ago, and there were only a few companies that had their products on the shelves here, the resulting monopolies caused people to identify products by their brand names - laundry detergent was referred to as Breezy, bleach was referred to as Clorox, etc.  Kinda like Band-Aids, Kleenex and Roller Blades back home.  At any rate, almost as if to prove this point, today when my air conditioning was getting serviced, one of the workers asked me if I had any "Squeezy".  After asking her to repeat herself a couple times, I finally discovered that she meant dish detergent.