APARTMENT CHALLENGES

excerpts from TRINIDAD, WEST INDIES (see Aug 31,2010)

My apartment in Bamboo Village, Trinidad, was on the second floor.  There were two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen.  The shower was on the back porch.  The first day I moved in I had to remove a hornet's nest from the ceiling of the shower.  I also had to wash down the walls and floors because black soot had drifted in from the burning of sugar cane in the fields nearby.  Bats swooped down from a hole in the ceiling of the bedrooms and traumatized me on a regular basis.  The legs of the wooden cabinets, which held the food, were placed in cans of gasoline to keep ants from getting in the food.  Lizards ran up the walls of the kitchen on a regular basis.  Every morning we could hear a chant of "shrimp for 50 cents" outside and since I loved shrimp we ate it often.  I had a banana tree and a mango tree in the back yard so fresh fruit was always available  There were no screens on the windows so insects visited at their leisure.  One night I recieved 50 mosquito bites from my wrist to my elbow.  I learned that there was a coil you could burn to keep mosqitoes down to some degree. BUT THE PEOPLE WERE LOVELY!