Belize - Should I stay or should I go?

It has been over a week since I arrived in Caye Caulker. The blue green seas have not left me feeling any reason to leave. I do feel very much like I am staying where I belong to an extent and I do feel some affinity with the local situation here. For years I couldn't understand why my dad's carpentry skills were so poor. As a child there seemed no explanation for why his woodworking was quite so bizarre and now it seems relatively clear. He must have been Caribbean in a past life. The standard of all the hotels, where you can get a rather ramshackle little room for $25.00 Belize a night (about six pounds fifty sterling). It does remind me of the rabbit hutches that my dad made in the 1970s out of whatever 3" x 2" timber he could get his hands on. I kind of wait to be fed and watered like one of the rabbits but that hasn't happened yet.

There seems to be similar left wing politics in Mexico as there has been over the last thirty years in the UK. There is a push from the right to privatise much of what seems to run quite well and there could well be success in doing this. I assume similar politics are prevelant in Belize. Most of the locals here seem to support the socialists who I presume will try to stop this. I don't know how successful they'll be with this type of action. I actually feel so lazy here that I haven't really worked out what is going on to much of a degree.

It is better having been in the same place for over a week in terms of the reaction that I get from the staff in shops and in terms of the general service although I really should have done more than make a couple of snorkelling trips and lie in the sun on more than one occasion. Laziness is probably something that westerners want to explore here in the Caribbean than anywhere else. Loafing is an interest of mine and has been for as long as I can remember. As a Briton, we don't like loafing within our own culture, we tend to want to loaf in a more cosmopolitan manner whether it's through Buddhist mediation or Belize styled Creole culture. We should loaf and be proud, but alas we don't.

It does feel reminiscent of 1970s Birmingham hearing Creole styled accents around Caye Caulker and to an extent, I must admit that I think there is a very nice reminder of the phase of settlement in the West Midlands of the Black population. I used to go to Coventry City Centre to be reminded of 1970's architechture that I knew and liked in Birmingham, maybe if you do that and like it then possibly come to Belize to be reminded of some West Indian culture that is being forced underground.