When living in the jungle, you expect that there's going to be some differences to living in suburbia. There are things to adjust to, for sure: giant insects so big they have faces, near constant rain and humidity, the sound of howler monkeys in the distance, the occasional predator in your general vicinity.... The point is, you expect rougher living to a point. What I was not expecting though was just how that translates to real life. One of the things that I continue to be surprised by and struggle with is food storage of all of the random things. So I've alluded to the fact that our refrigerators here are not as big as American fridges. They're too expensive to import and because humidity here just degrades all appliances and electronics quickly, the cost is just not worth it for people. That, coupled with only one upper cabinet in my whole kitchen means that my food storage options are fairly limited.
I've got one food cabinet. My dishes go in drawers because I've got plenty of them. My coffee mugs, bowls, plates, serving dishes..... They all go in drawers. My glasses however are too tall to go into drawers so they have to share the one upper cabinet I have with my food. This means no buying in bulk really.
One of the first real issues of our houses here is that they were often built with what I would say is different than the typical American home experience. We don't really have insulation, the walls that I see on the inside of my house are the boards that enclose the house from the outside. This is super typical here and often times posts or columns are a tree trunk that's been smoothed and polished. The aesthetic is awesome, but it means that things are not as tightly fitted as you find in American houses. We don't have drywall here, as it would mold. So we have hardwoods, and those are the aesthetic inside and outside. I have a western style house, meaning that my kitchen and living area are enclosed in the house. Because it is so hot here, most of my walls in every room are windows that are screened. We don't have a lot of glass in this house and I can't close the windows. All of these things mean that often there are little gaps and spaces where critters can and will come in often.
Near constant rain means humidity. And while I grew up in New Jersey where summer humidity, especially late summer was pretty significant, I never had to worry about mold growing on everything. Here, we have a dry room. It's not exactly a dry room... it's a drier room. Which is to say I have two dehumidifiers running 24 hours a day in that room. That is my walk-in closet, it holds my clothes, electronics we're not using, some herbs, vitamins, powdered mixes, important papers and other things that we don't want to lose. But pretty much everything else that you don't put in there gets fucked up. So books don't last very long here. They get moldy and mildew and warp. If you want to keep it, it needs to go in a dry room. Games get moldy very quickly. Game boards warp almost immediately, and wooden games grow mold even in between a week or two of playing them. Every time you use something that you haven't picked up in a while, you're going to have to wipe it down for mold. Our clothes, even in the dry room, if we haven't worn them in a while, they're going to be moldy. Not just smell like mold, actually have mold spots on them. Anything leather is going to grow mold very quickly. I came here with a coach black leather purse. It's been in the dry room ever since. About once a month I have to take it out wipe it down with vinegar and water and let it dry in the sun to kill the mold.
So what does this mean for our food. To come back around full circle, all of our food needs to be put in containers. Sturdy containers. Our critters are not opposed to chewing through cheap Tupperware containers. Ideally, everything that can go into glass should go into glass, or at least heavy duty Tupperware. This is especially true for food that comes in cardboard. Cardboard attracts cockroaches. And we have two kinds here. We've got the big fat jungle cockroaches, they're slow moving, are kinda cute, and really aren't a nuisance. They take care of the leaf litter in the bottom of the jungle. The second kind are standard kitchen German style cockroaches. They fly, they are plentiful and the second the rains come, you are battling them. I made the mistake of keeping my tea bags in their boxes, and almost overnight I had quite an infestation. I could not figure out where they were coming from until one day when I went to go get tea. When I tell you there's nothing as gross as like 30 cockroaches crawling out of something...I am not lying. Lesson learned.
The ants here are as plentiful as they are varied. We've got everything as tiny as sugar ants that are smaller than a gnat, and are so small they remind me of the little red teeny tiny bugs you sometimes see in books all the way up to bullet ants that are about an inch and a half long each. The sugar ants get into everything. They crawl on everything including you. They are in the bed sheets sometimes, they are on the countertops, they're in the bathroom, they're sometimes even on the toothbrush. They're everywhere. And they are so small that you really need to concentrate and focus in order to find them. If you leave food out on the countertop for more time than necessary they will find it and swarm it. When feeding my cats, we have to put a saucer beneath the food bowl filled with water so they can't cross the barrier and get onto the food. Snack foods in particular because they have sugar are a big draw. Everything here is individually wrapped which is nice, but it's not enough so snack foods go into a heavy duty Tupperware container in the cabinet. Even with all of the work to keep our food secure, it is not unusual to see army ants scouts or something else in the cabinet searching for a quick and easy smash and grab.
The other issue we have to juggle is that because things cost so much to import, a lot of the American brands only come in bulk here. For example, you can only get American brand pancake mix. Costa Ricans scratch cook almost everything. There's not a lot of convenience foods here. So pancake mix is bought in bulk. My two choices are Bisquick or Krusteaz. The bulk bag is too big for my food cabinet. So it used to sit on the counter until something ate it. Then, next bag, we got smart and put some of it in a heavy duty Tupperware, and the rest went in the cabinet. And then something ate it. Third bag, still stored some of it in the Tupperware and the rest went into the freezer. That is our current system. But that bag takes up a quarter of one of the two shelves in the freezer.
In theory, the food systems should be easy to follow. In practicality, there are things that I forget a lot. We go through a lot of rice here. A lot of rice. Rice is bought in bulk bags and glass jars take up a lot of room. It is not unusual for me to have five glass jars full of rice in the cabinet which means that there's now not a lot of room for anything else. So for a while I filled three jars and kept the rest in a bag in another bag in the cabinet. The good news, we didn't lose it to critters. The bad news, the second half molded because it wasn't stored properly in a glass container with a tightly fitted lid.
Between the mice, cockroaches, jungle rats which will put almost any New York sewer rat to shame, the occasional larger mammal like the possum that came to visit us this morning, the ants, the mold and the space considerations we have, this is a constant struggle. I would love to tell you that after a year I've got it locked down and that we never lose anything. I would be lying. We have it mostly under control. Especially now that I have learned my lesson about cockroaches and cardboard. But I occasionally forget, my daughter will not close the corner of the Tupperware that stores the snacks, or the jungle will throw us a curveball like my possum friend.
It's funny when we first got here, the second there were ants on something, I threw it away. Every time I saw a bug in the food cabinet, I pulled everything out cleaned it out, put everything back. Now not so much. The food cabinet does get cleaned completely every couple of weeks. Everything comes out, gets a wipe down, it's checked for uninvited guests, then the cabinet is thoroughly disinfected and everything is put back. It doesn't matter how many times we do it. It's just part of life in the jungle.
So back to the possum. He was just as surprised as my husband this morning. About 5:00 a.m., husband woke up with the jungle, opened the food cabinet to make himself some breakfast. I don't know which one was more surprised. And in a move that made me proud because I would have done it too... Ryan simply took the pictures, and then closed the cabinet. We have cats, and he didn't want any animals to be injured. He gave it 20 minutes. When he opened up the cabinet again, the little Houdini was gone.
Jungle life :)
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