Fish, Burundanga, Smithsonian

The local fish market finally had fresh fish today. I bought all the snapper and stocked up on kingfish. The locals had never heard of the trick of freezing fish in water. You can freeze fish indefinitely in water, the ice prevents freezer burns. I bought a lot of fish; I'm not running out again.

Burundanga

The word this week is burundanga, which is Panamanian slang for "sweet". It can be applied to candy but is now frequently employed to refer to a particularly attractive woman.

I bought a couple of Eskimo pies for a couple of the local woman, one of the them said "Gracias pora el Burundanga." Ice cream is helado. "What is Burundanga?" Before Nikelda could say junk food, one of my running mates spied a pair of lovelies coming our way. "That is Burndanga!" I was the only one not laughing.

Burundanga is a kind of voodoo powder obtained from a Colombian local
plant of the nightshade family, a shrub called barrachera, or "drunken
binge". Used for hundreds of years by Natie Americans in religious ceremonies,
the powder when ingested causes victims to lose their will and memory, sometimes
for days. (This drug is also known as Nightshade or "CIA drug").

When refined the powder yields scopolamine, a well-know drug with
legitimate uses as a sedative and to combat motion sickness. (Mengele of
Nazi fame also had and experimented with scopolamine as a truth serum).
But in Colombia, the drug's most avid fans are street criminals. Crooks
mix the powder with sedatives and feed the Burundanga cocktail to unsuspecting
victims whom they then proceed to rob - or worse.

Doctors here estimate that Colombian hustlers slip the odorless,
colorless and soluble Burundanga (pronounced boor-oon-DAN-ga) in food or
drink to about 500 unwitting victims in the city each month. About half of
the city's total emergency room admissions for poison are Burundanga
victims.

Off to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Hot and not a lot to see this time other than a lot of iguanas and a caiman.

While we were there our guide expressed the fact that we might be able to bother one of the researchers. Spanish is a limited language. Bother, annoy, pester and many other words translate to molestar. I entered the research room, a graduate student was preparing anemone for DNA testing. "The guide seems to think it's ok if we molest you." The German student had a sufficient command of Spanish and English to understand the attempt at humor.

It seems two different species will interbreed, produce fertile off spring both the genomes propagate in an interesting manner and one form will revert to a state in several generations such that all of the foreign DNA is no longer present. "You do PCR and sequencing work here?" He looked at me quizzically, "No we send it off to Panama for that."

We checked out the poison arrow frogs, green, orange, yellow, red, blue, purple, spotted. I covered this a long time ago. Nobody knows why these frogs of the same species exhibit different colors in close isolated proximaty on the various islands of this archipelago.

Back to town, more mingling, we had our fish fried and baked, teased the burundanga and generally had a low key evening.