12/10/12 Eating Bugs

12/10/12

Laura and I spent the weekend at Jake’s site. He’ll be going back to the States for Christmas, so we won’t see him for a while. It was a good visit; we the entire time reading, napping, cooking, or playing Scrabble (I won three of four games, no big deal). It’s great living where I do in terms of convenience—I’m close to town, the airport, the ocean, have electricity—but it’s really fun to go to Jake’s side of the island for a while and enjoy being bush. Swimming in a river beside the black palm trees; watching huge fruit bats wing their way across the pink sunset; looking at the red glow of the volcano through the trees, with the Milky Way lit up overhead and tiny phosphorescent bugs flitting through the darkness, like stars drifting loose from the sky; these are the perks of Peace Corps service on a tropical island.

Also, we ate giant praying mantises, fried with salt. They were pretty hard to bite through, but the taste wasn’t too bad, as is true of most anything fried with salt.