Cereal Feast

When you're away from home and familiar things for so long, you get excited about the most seemingly simple things...for example cold milk over a bowl of your favorite cereal. Yesterday the group got to talking and then salivating about our favorite sugar cereals. Golden Grahams, Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms and Coco Crispies made the Top 5, in no particular order. Rice and beans for breakfast everyday are great and everything...but after two months, some cold milk over those melt-in-your-mouth Lucky Charms marshmellows sure would hit the spot. So today, our cook having fallen ill with Dengue Fever and no one to make lunch, and having discovered that the tiny grocery store just up the street carries all manner of things American (gotta love Costa Rica), we decided to give into our urges and held a raging cereal feast for lunch. Lucky Charms never tasted so good.

Incidentally, from our cereal discussion followed many entertaining stories of childhood sugar cereal rivalries with siblings, of which I definitely had plenty to contribute. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my family wasn't the only one to have to strictly ration sugar cereal in order that it not be plundered by voracious brothers in one sitting.


I digress...so we're in Costa Rica (and the internet is now four times more expensive, so this will be a quickie). We're living in a tin shack on the beach and taking three hour shifts patroling the beach at night in search of endangered leatherback turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs on the beach. The project keeps an eye on the eggs to make sure they have the appropriate conditions to hatch and to protect them from poachers who can score a pretty penny for the illegal eggs. It's a pretty amazing site to see, we got lucky and saw one our first night out. 4 1/2 feet long by 3 feet wide, laying about 100 eggs twice the size of chicken eggs...never seen anything like it.