Was Over Cappuccino and Cola

Monday, February 23, 2009

I Like

I like how no matter where you go in the world the taxi drivers are all the same (outside of the "developed" world that is).

I also like how I know I would be exactly the same as they are. They drive around in barely held together cars that some how keep moving forward. No shocks. Ratty seats. Dents and dings. Black exhaust billowing out of the exhaust system. The cars are all pretty beat up. But inside the car!? A very expensive looking sound system. Now its not a sound system that rivals the fools back home who spend thousands and thousands on their care audio system but these are nice stereos. The only thing in the care thats not falling apart is the stereo and you get to listen to it the entire ride too.

I also like how here all of the taxis have written on the passenger side dash board (the left side dashboard!) "Fasten Seat Belt Pliz". I like that the drivers are never wearing their seatbelts. I like that I can never find a seatbelt to "pliz" fasten. No matter how hard you look there are no seatbelts available to fasten.

I like how we saw that really nice delivery truck exclaiming that they ship your goods "foward".

I like seeing the homemade sign exclaiming "Pot Plants for Sale".

I like that by government decree all taxi drivers had to lower their starting price by 50 cents. Gas prices went down. Taxi fares go down.

I don't like knowing that a lot of people here are paid under $2 an hour.

I don't like how my "boss" told my patient that he was going blind and there is nothing we can do about it. It might be true but it should have been said with a little more compassion and tact. That's ophthalmologists for you though.

I don't like how I forgot to put sunblock on last Saturday and I'm all burned now.

I don't like how our work place and our home has been invaded by tiny little ants. Leave anything out (especially sugary substances) and soon it will be covered in ants.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Five weeks?

Sorry for the lack of updates.

We've finally gotten internet at home. We have a modem that gets its signal over the air so we're still trying to figure out the best place to put it. Depending on where it is the signal is good or bad and the quality of the signal may be good or bad.

If we find a place where the signal is great the quality of the signal may be poor so we have to find the place that has the best combination of signal strength and quality.

We plan to buy a wireless router so that we can leave our modem in its ideal place but use our computers anywhere we want. This will also allow both of us to be online simultaneously.

We enjoy being online at the same time because it allows us to communicate without actually talking to each other.

We just finished our third week of classes. It has been difficult but we think that the students are doing alright. We have a bunch of work to do this weekend but didn't do any today (Saturday).

Rather than work we decided to explore our home city some more. We finally walked to the ocean and walked and walked and walked. The ocean here is not for swimming. Its for looking at. Its, apparently, also for throwing garbage in.

Convenient.

We are very happy with our new house. Its very convienent to everything. A 10 minute walk and we're in the city center. A different 10 minute walk and we're at the ocean.

While walking along the ocean we came across the "Country we live in" Museum. In front of the museum is a nice garden. We walked through the garden and took pictures and sweat and struggled to breathe. It was hot. So hot. But we were happy to see the sights.

We continued to walk along the ocean eventually running out of steam. We then turned 180 degrees and headed back to town. We were overheated and needed something to drink so we stopped at the nicest hotel in the city - The Holiday Inn.

Thats right The Holdiay Inn.

Nicest. Hotel. In. The. City.

We sat and had drinks.

We had nachos.

With sour cream.

Which isn't available in the stores here. No sour cream for two years! I cry a little every day.

We stopped at this hotel because its on the edge of town AND it has air conditioning going full blast.

So cool.

The food was on the expensive side but not out of the question expensive. A word of advice; never order drinks when the prices aren't labeled on the menu.

I had a can of coke. Nicole had a virgin pina coloda and a bottle of water.

The pina coloda was reasonably priced.

I can buy a can of coke in any store in the city for $1 local currency. A bottle of top quality of water the size Nicole got at the restaurant is a little over $1 local currency.

When the bill arrived my coke was $5.60 and the water was $5.80.

CRAZY! But the air conditioning was so necessary after our multi hour walk.

After our rest stop we continued on to town where we got some last minute fixings for dinner as well as some placemats and a bath mat.

Fun.

We came home watched some TV and played some Wii. Good times. Now I'm sitting here writing this. Tomorrow is work, work, work.

I wrote a semi-whiney email and sent it out to various people the other day. In that email I indicated that we were struggling to find continuing education. That same day Nicole came across a conference in Maui in December. Its a good enough number of education hours and it starts the day after graudation so we should be able to make it. Now we need to get our "employers" to pay for the flight and we'll be golden.

The funny thing is that if we go to Maui we'll arrive in Maui 12 hours before we leave here. Futhermore, it's Nicole's birthday the day we would leave. This means - now, don't be jealous, that she would have a full two days of birthday! A two day birthday? Lucky chick.

Here are some pictures that we took during our walk. Enjoy.

Home

View from by our house

The Closest Coffee Shop to our House - a mere 5 minute walk

My Lil' Nicles

One of the Many Buses we see Daily - a direct import from India

That's right, its good enough. Not the best, good enough

Nicole's favourite coffee shop - they only sell free trade coffee

Garden

Our Island

A broken boat

Our path

After seeing this we want to go home - the white things are little crabs

Our rest stop

$5.00 coke

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Our first weekend: shopping

It's nice to have a little bit of internet time today. If I had more internet time (they just give you 30 minutes) I'd tell you more about our house-hunting experience, our job experience so far, and so on... but instead you just get to hear about shopping! Sorry! Maybe later on in the week.... (oh, excuse the grammar, I didn't re-read this and it might be terrible)

This weekend is the first weekend when one of us is NOT sick so we actually got to get out and do some shopping for our place. We needed to buy almost everything for our place, except furniture. We have "loaner" stuff until next weekend.

We found a really cheap place called "rups big bear" where we had our very own personal helper the entire time we were shopping! He followed us around with the cart! So funny. I would tell him what we were looking for, and he would just take us and take care of our cart. Then he went and “tested” all the small appliances we bought (iron, toaster, electric kettle) to make sure they were working before we bought them. I don’t know if we were supposed to tip him or not…Tipping doesn’t really happen here it seems like.

“Rups” was cheap, but that meant that stuff was pretty ugly or just really bad quality (expect for the small appliances we bought – they seem great – and made in Japan!). But dishes, towels and sheets were not any good from there. So we went to a place I read about on the internet that is supposed to be a Costco subsidiary! We walk into this place and it feel like we just entered a warp zone and are back at home! It was so similar to Costo – except for the yummy polish dogs. It’s called “Cost U less”. No membership required so that was nice. And they had all the yummy things of home, like Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, miracle whip mayo, low fat popcorn, etc.. you name it, they probably had it. Now this was a great joy for us since our other grocery store was very lacking in “American” food. They seem to just have a lot of one thing…like an entire isle of biscuits/cookies… anyhoo, that was a real joy for me as you can imagine I went down every since isle and “ooh-ed” and “ahhhh-ed” at everything. Now if we were super rich we could have anything we wanted form here.

We did splurge and buy taco shells, low fat popcorn, trail mix bars, Earl Gray tea, pasta sauce, pasta, and that’s all I can remember. And I say “splurge” because groceries really don’t seem cheap here. I guess I never realized how cheap things are in the States until I started traveling…stuff costs a lot more overseas it seems like.

One last stop of our shopping adventure was our usual place. A mall that has the grocery store we usually shop at. On the second floor you can find clothing and household items. We ended up spending $200USD there on towels, sheets, silverware, plates, cups, and one pyrex dish. It seemed a little overpriced, but the stuff was good quality and should last us our entire time here no problem.

We were exhausted from all the shopping so the rest of the day we just rested. Matthew watched the Rugby 7s tournament and I just sat around or unpacked our goodies. It was a great Saturday.

Now it’s Sunday and we are having our usual internet time here at a coffee shop in the centre. We walk down here from our place, just about a 15 min walk. We usually go shopping afterwards for groceries, so we must take a taxi back. Today I’m making Matthew go back to the stores to pick up a few more things we didn’t get yesterday…poor guy…so much shopping on our first real weekend! Fun for me though ☺

Swell

Week 1

Well here we are. We’ve been gone from home for 2 months. Here in our new country for 3 weeks. We just completed our first week of real work. Teaching. Organizing. Doing what we’re paid to do.

Things are a lot different than we expected. In some ways worse, in others just different.

Upon arrival, as all of you are tired of hearing, one of us or the other has been sick. This is the first weekend that we’ve been healthy and it’s been a good weekend albeit short.

The week that was? Well that was in no way short. A long week. We were led to believe that the lectures that we would be giving to students were well planned and laid out and ready to go. We would just need to study them, review and go teach them. This has proven to be false. In our, not so humble opinions, the student manuals and materials are poorly put together and lacking. This has required a lot of work getting lectures together. We still have not been shown the proper computer folder with last year’s assignments and materials. That is a battle for another day (its on someone’s computer that we don’t have access to and she claims that it isn’t on her computer).

As you all know as well we were told that we are expected to see patients. We said, “What!?”

They said “Just a few to start with.”

We said, “What!? I guess we will but not five days a week.”

We saw patients five mornings last week last week. In addition to teaching and planning and doing our other work. Everyone else in the office? I have no idea what they do. We also don’t know who we can talk to about stuff. We’ll get it figured out eventually.

Here are some pictures to show you where we are and where we live.

Enjoy.

Two Year's Worth of Stuff