Feather or Dot?

I have mentioned it a few times before; Belmopan is not exactly the centre of the world and there is not much excitement here. We don’t even have traffic lights. Not that those are exciting, it’s just to illustrate the scope of this capital. Anyway, in places like this you have to create your own fun and luckily for us, we are pretty good at that. We have revived the Belize Hash House Harriers (you can check it out at www.belizeh3.org) and Michael has set up a thing called ‘Belmopan Bravo’. It’s a weekly get-together TGIF idea, every Friday in a different place. In Sri Lanka we had Colombo Charlie, same idea, go for happy hour with a group of friends. This first time we proposed it here, a few weeks ago, we were five people, now there are twenty to thirty people weekly! A nice mixture of Belizeans, Europeans and Americans. It is supposed to be a 6 to 8 pm thing, but we never reach home before 11 pm and that is because we have to drop off our baby sitter.

Last weekend we had a party. It was hosted by Richard, a colleague, at our house. He had thought of a theme: Indian, and he had made a couple of curries with yellow rice. It was a costume party, which the British call a Fancy Dress but that only created confusion as the Americans thought they had to dress in an evening gown. For Micheal and me it was easy because coming from Sri Lanka I have a pretty sari and he has his Bollywood party costume. For other guests it was less obvious however, as people started to ask: what do you mean by Indian? American native Indian or Indian from India? In other words: do I wear feathers or a dot on my front? It did not matter, I just replied: come in whatever you look most sexy. And interestingly (and understandably), most Americans and Belizeans came with the feathers while the Europeans wore the dot. And that is how we ended up having a party with pretty girls in sari’s, sensual Zen masters, a cool-looking Indian casino worker, an American ambassador with feathers and finger paint on his cheeks and even Ghandi himself appeared in his self-made diaper made of white towels. Who says you need to go to bars and clubs to have fun?