I = ice
Ice has a different importance here in a tropical, developing country. One of the first mornings in our villa, as I was standing in front of our living room window, a three-wheeled motorbike with a tiny flat-bed in the back came around the corner and stopped. A woman came out of the corrugated-roof shack in the empty lot in front of us with her styrofoam cooler and waited for the ice man to uncover a large block of ice and chunk off a piece for her. I realized that this was her refrigerator.
We've learned to recognize the green, plastic-burlap bags of dripping ice cubes delivered all over the city on motorbikes, and to our own house for parties at $1 per bag. We've seen a sidewalk operation of ice-blocks being transformed into crushed ice and bagged. And we've all had Tiger Beer Girls in shiny blue tight dresses hovering over us with their ice buckets, waiting to pull the melted slivers of ice out of our beer mugs to replace them with fresh, big cylinders of coldness.
Ice has a different importance here in a tropical, developing country. One of the first mornings in our villa, as I was standing in front of our living room window, a three-wheeled motorbike with a tiny flat-bed in the back came around the corner and stopped. A woman came out of the corrugated-roof shack in the empty lot in front of us with her styrofoam cooler and waited for the ice man to uncover a large block of ice and chunk off a piece for her. I realized that this was her refrigerator.
We've learned to recognize the green, plastic-burlap bags of dripping ice cubes delivered all over the city on motorbikes, and to our own house for parties at $1 per bag. We've seen a sidewalk operation of ice-blocks being transformed into crushed ice and bagged. And we've all had Tiger Beer Girls in shiny blue tight dresses hovering over us with their ice buckets, waiting to pull the melted slivers of ice out of our beer mugs to replace them with fresh, big cylinders of coldness.
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