These past couple days

May 4, 2026.

May has arrived—the month when the heaviest rains begin, the plains flood, farmers move their cattle to other areas, the river overflows, and orchids bloom. I was away for the entire month of April and neglected the site, but only for a little while. April was a month filled with installing software, spending more than my salary allows on printing, recordings, and photo shoots, dealing with hypocritical professors, and so on—a typical month in the graphic design career.

But anyway, let’s leave depressing topics like college behind. I want to share some pictures from these last few days, when I took the chance to de-stress a bit, watch some k-dramas, and sleep until noon.

These are from last weekend; it had been months since it had rained this much or the sky had looked like this. It rained for four days straight, from Friday to Monday. While April can be extremely hot and rainy as well, May is officially the month when the rainy season begins. I live in the intertropical zone of the planet, so we don’t have the typical seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter—but honestly, I’ve never been jealous of other places in the world that do have them, lol.

I mean, where I live it’s hot—imagine if we had summer! The highest temperatures here are 33 degrees Celsius (about 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit); imagine if it got up to 40 degrees or more like in other countries—I couldn’t handle it. Plus, not having seasons means you can have both hot and cold weather in different parts of the country at the same time. Here we have rain from May to November, roughly. If you go to the Andes, you can see snow during that same time. Likewise, during the dry season, you can go to the beach, and if you’re a tourist with plenty of money, you can head south to the jungle to see the clear scenery. In short, I love the versatility of living in a tropical country.

Then on Tuesday, if I remember correctly, I took these at my grandmother’s house, in the backyard. This backyard brings back so many memories, because it was my enchanted forest when I was little.

old trunk — This trunk was once a huge avocado tree; it grew the best avocados I’ve ever eaten—and I’m not even a big fan of avocados.

clear sky — It was really sunny that day, and the sky was incredibly clear.

Two other trees in the backyard of my grandmother’s house: a coconut tree that scared me when I was little (for some reason, lol) and a mamey tree (Mammea americana). When my cousins and I used to play in the yard, we’d use the leaves from this last tree as money lol. These days, I wouldn’t take part in a game like that unless the leaves were already on the ground—at my age, I don’t really feel right about just mindlessly plucking leaves off trees like that. It bears a fruit that tastes like a peach, but I’m not really a fan, to be honest.

The staple: a mango tree. This tree was pruned almost two years ago, and it still hasn't produced any mangoes :((

The staple of a Caribbean household is the plantain tree—not the banana, but the plantain. We usually say that a banana is the fruit, and a plantain is the vegetable (even though both are fruits); a banana is sweet, and so is a plantain, but plantains are eaten fried or boiled, and some people make desserts with them. In general, they have many uses, but to be honest, I only like them fried. These particular ones are still growing, so they don’t have plantains yet.

It makes me laugh that when I was little, I thought of this place as my enchanted forest—an enchanted forest that was very much my own, to be honest, lol. In stories and movies, there are always oak trees, a little deer, goblins, and fairies, but in my enchanted forest, the oak trees were mango and plantain trees, and my companions were iguanas, the occasional toucan, fruit-eating bats, and, if it felt like it, a monkey that had escaped from a nearby house (animal trafficking, of course, monkeys are not pets).

To wrap things up, here are some photos from my birthday, which was on Thursday, April 30—yay!!—so now I’m officially an adult everywhere in the world, or so I think. It was a simple but fun day—nothing too fancy, to be honest—but that’s just how I like it.

chinese fried rice — My friends invited me to eat Chinese fried rice—or should I say, *Venezuelan-style* Chinese fried rice—which tastes different from other Chinese fried rice around the world. I’d say it’s the best food in the world; it was delicious. We also had *lumpia*, but to be honest, those had a lot of vegetables in them. Overall, though, the food was really good, and the best part was that they paid for everything lol