Next weekend I’m off to my sisters wedding and an old college friend will be here with Layne for the week I’m gone. We’re planning our departure for after I get back and of course the first thing is organizing Rusty’s exit papers to allow him to take the ferry to French Guyana. This is the vet: Dierenartspraktijk L.M. Bansse-Issa; say that three times fast.
I find walking up to a building that is locked down with bars, especially a vet, a bit weird but Paramaribo may be more edgy than it feels like it is. Even the laundry was locked when we went to get our clean clothes, fourteen pounds weight for US$20 but nothing is inexpensive here. Our apartment for a thousand bucks a month does seem like a good deal mind you. After finishing business we had lunch which was at last an Indonesian saoto, a dish we had long since wanted to try.
We got a side of white rice to which I added a few drops of the lethal hot sauce they use. Saoto was interesting, a bit like a ramen with crunchy rice noodles in the broth. I’ll try it again but personally I find Vietnamese pho more interesting. The restaurant below which they call “warung” in the Javanese community in Paramaribo.
We meandered home looking for a tailor to do some clothing alterations but the only one we found is out of town in China this month…so we consoled ourselves with a mango drink and went home to the as usual sleeping dog.
Paramaribo on the way home including a couple of sandy streets which Google thinks are short cuts:
Parking the beast is easier in this town than you’d think. Mornings and afternoons have lots of the usual commuter traffic but so does the noon hour as the country shuts down between 12 and four for the world's longest lunch hour.
Wooden yellow street signs, surprisingly effective and visible. I can’t pronounce them but I can read them.
The other thing I’ve noticed in Paramaribo are the power poles made of wood. What’s odd about them is they are shaved tree trunks so instead of being round they are square. Who would take the time to do that and why baffles me.
The usual Chinese grocery store. It sounds like a cliché but in Suriname all groceries are Chinese.
I see the largest concentration of white people (who avoid eye contact with us) in the two top, most expensive grocery stores, Tulip and Choi’s. I assume they are transplants from the Netherlands in some capacity, diplomats, career transfers or Dutch people looking for better weather and maybe a few descendants of residents since independence in 1975. Pure tourists like us are extremely rare.
Paramaribo is very Dutch, middle class neat and tidy. There are obviously poor neighborhoods but trash is scarce and neatly trimmed front yards are the rule.
Who comes to gamble in the numerous casinos downtown I have no idea.
The tallest building we have seen in this capital city.
The bus depot has a lot more buses than you see on the streets. Traffic is mostly slow moving cars with a sprinkling of suicide scooters.
