kitchens and rest

Since I seem to have loads of extra free time now that I'm only allowed to swim, I've been catching up on blog reading.  Some of the expats around the country are sharing kitchen photos and I'm jumping on that particular bandwagon (since it is the only jumping I'm likely to be doing in the near future).  I'm really having a hard time with this imposed "rest" as I should be in a huge build right now, training 15 to 20  hours a week and all I think about is how my ass is spreading and how life is going to suck so badly going into the IM half assed.  Blah, blah, blah.  But really, I'm very disappointed.  Not sure if I'll go back to the doctor Friday...

So, back to kitchens...  Here on the peninsula, most all kitchens are outside.  It really is quite logical to have all the heat producing outside your sleeping area and whenever we go to Cozumel and stay in a house I'm once again reminded how weird it is to have all your heat producing activity inside the house where you want to be cool.  But then again, I'm always FLOORED at the shock of warm water coming out of a faucet anywhere, so there is that.

The kitchen is at the back of the palapa  (keeps the dust and dirt and malathion or DDT or whatever they spray) a bit removed from the food.  Actually when the spray trucks come by, we cover most of the kitchen with towels and move the moveable stuff (anything on counters) into the girl's recamera.  The big white fridge is not dirty - that is rust and, yeah, likely some dirt also.  Funny story about that fridge.  We had a very small (for our family) 6 cubic foot or something fridge and a neighbor was upgrading their fridge so they put that one out on the road.  It might have been there 10 minutes and I grabbed Jamie and we wrestled it into our palapa and 4 or 5 years later it is still working like a champ.  We have only one shelf in it though, so all the tall stuff goes there.  We really needed a 2nd fridge as, with 4 kids, you can imagine we needed more than 1 shelf for fridge space so we got the silver fridge on deep discount at Sams.

this is what is the other side of the counter looks like.  We (obviously) have no doors on the cupboards - how would the jungle animals get their snacks or the cockroaches get their homes or the spiders get their meals?  We're thoughtful that way.  Down here it just doesn't make sense to have cupboard doors as stuff inside the cupboard will mold and rot without the air flow.