What I learned from shopping at a dutch grocery store is that a lot of the items they sell don’t translate correctly when I use google translate camera (Carrot chase tail). I think it was trying to say “carrot cake”.
It got a little bit harder when I was trying to buy bread. The nutritional tag showed that it had ingredients flour, rye but no percentages, and the name was “Goudeerlijk Boeren Tijger Tarwe“. It translated into something like tiger wheat bread. Had to imessage my friend Steven to tell me what it meant, and he was so excited to help me. Told me that this was his favorite bread.
On this day we had the slavery museum and the walking tour. This ended up being a full day in pietermaai because of the tour docent having a family emergency on sunday.
We walked all the way to the museum, and the weather was very beautiful. There is always something I enjoy about walking on a beautiful day. How the colors of the light baby blue sky, with a bright sun lighting it up, and the sound of waves crashing, and the smell of fresh ocean air creates a perfect peaceful moment. I imagine this is what heaven would be like.
Our itinerary for the morning was going to the Kura Hulanda Museum, it is a museum dedicated to educating people about the slave trade, and also an african artifact museum. It is a very somber museum, where after the first room that gives history of who lived on curacao, it is a historical timeline of the slave trade. How the slave trade went through curacao, when I looked at the wrist and ankle chains they had hanging around, it made me feel so sad for all the slaves.
They had a recreation of the bottom of a slave ship, where young boys would be housed 20-30 of them would be on the bottom of the ship. It was dark and very cramp down there, only Naomi didn’t feel cramped, she enjoyed walking around climbing up and down the stairs.
The museum eventually near the end talked about the Civil Rights movement in the USA, and how there were a lot of people who worked to get black people rights. So I did not end up leaving the museum feeling like there was no hope for ending racism.
In some of the pictures I put up , you can see there is a mural on a wall showing how families lived in their houses back in the day in curacao. The area that surrounds the museum is a very small town square.
For lunch, we looked for a restaurant in the area that served more traditional curacao food. The other places around seemed a little bit more like tourist traps type of restaurant that served what looked like overpriced seafood that did not look like it would taste good, or fast food restaurants. We ended up eating at a more hole in the wall looking cubanita / curacao place. The red snapper was delicious, the only thing I did not really enjoy was the tutu. (the brown cinnamon looking mush bar) It is a very dense food item, so I really only ate like 1/5 of it.
Then we waited for our walking tour of curacao. Naomi fell asleep, so Sherri and I had a nice 1 hour date eating ice cream sitting in the fort shopping mall area.
We then went to the walking tour. It was interesting seeing how in curacao, there was only 1 couple from the east coast, while the rest of the people were from netherlands ( 12 people). Sherri had a hilarious quote, when they were asking everyone why they went to curacao. Sherri said “I hate cold weather like finland”, not thinking that everyone else from the netherlands were essentially from the same area and were looking at her.
As for the tour, they were mostly talking about the art and history of how Curacao. How as a country, they were able to bring Caribbean, West African, and Dutch culture together to create a new language. They also use this as a way to unify everyone together.
One of the cooler things about our trip is watching Naomi grow. She has been able to eat so much of the food that they have out here. We were nervous that she would not be able to eat anything, but are pleasantly surprise that she is willing to eat anything we eat.
I just felt so happy and relaxed out here just enjoying the warm weather and eating outside at night. Listening to the swaying of trees and local music.
