2 months on the island

Camera shy Fat Charlie hurries back to his hiding spot

April 29, 2009

It’s Wednesday night and I’ve just hobbled in from exercise class. The instructor is an ex-marine and an ex-gymnast. To say the class is tough doesn’t do it justice. A Jacuzzi would be nice now but instead, a glass of scotch will have to do. Johnny Walker may not be a licensed masseuse but tonight he has the job of soothing my aching muscles.

Two months have come and gone since I first walked off the runway. Things have settled into a routine. Work fills the weekdays. After work on Mondays I go to yoga class which is taught by one of the ex-pat college instructors from 5:30 to 6:30. On Wednesday, its exercise class. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I usually head to the track and run.

After the class or the track, I head home for a shower and dinner. Given that roaches thrive in tropical climates, a thorough post-dinner kitchen cleaning is in order to ensure I haven’t left any inviting crumbs on the counter, floor, or table. By the time the kichen is cleand, only a couple of hours remain before bedtime and they are usually spent reading or writing.

All and all it’s pretty pleasant. I don’t have a phone yet but even if I did, I’m sure no telemarketers would be using it to pester me. I don’t have internet connection at the house. It keeps me from checking this or that fact and uploading my blog entries but on a positive note, in the past I would waste away hours tracking down meaningless trivia just because I could. Like everything else, having a TV can be both good and bad. I did learn a lot when watching PBS at home but I also spent hours getting getting caught up in the make believe lives of fictional people.

The weekends have their own routine. Saturday mornings Edwin and I go to what passes for the local gym. Afterwards I go to the office and use the internet connection to skype Wenonoa. Saturday afternoons and evenings seem to drift by like the clouds in the sky. Sunday afternoon I meet up with the ex-pat hiking club and we go on an excursion to here or there.

In this way the two months have flown by. I am excited that on Friday I’ll change the calendar page and be able to tick off the days of May. On June 1st I’ll leave the island temporarily and be relocated with Wenonoa. I’ve always admonished others for wishing their lives away whenever they express a desire for Friday to come but I would gladly give up the month of May and fast forward to June if I could.

I could not imagine enduring this two month separation without the constant contact that e-mail and skype provide. Of all the technological advances I’ve lived through, the ability to communicate in real time with no real expense amazes me the most. In 1984-5 I lived abroad. Back then e-mail didn’t exist and a call to the U.S. was over a $1 a minute. Even if cost were no issue, those were the pre-fiber optic days and a call was a frustrating exercise of trying to understand each other when you could only hear half of every word and there was a pause between each syllable.

Wenonoa and I e-mail daily and skype when the bandwith here allows us to. Still, the on-screen camera is a poor substitute for being in another’s presence. Though I am grateful for skype, at times it can make my heart ache. On screen I see Wenonoa sitting on our office chair. She is so close and in a place so familiar that I feel as though I can reach out and stroke her cheek – and I do. I put my finger on the screen to touch her but of course the element of human contact is missing.

My own personal experience of seeing my wife on screen but not being able to touch her leads me to ponder the more global issues of a world in which much of our human interaction now takes place in cyberspace. I spend time pondering this and other issues. The distractions of the internet, television, telemarketers and the such occupy no place in my little world (I should note that internet and cable TV are available on the island – I just don’t have them). When I don’t feel like reading or writing, I’ll spend my couple of post-dinner hours just pondering.

As the weeks flow by, this and that keep me amused and smiling. Little things happen that keep me chuckling to myself, sometimes for days on end. Last week it was the surprise visit of a stealth kitty.

The day was particularly hot so I had opened the front and kitchen doors while I was cooking some tuna. Screen doors have been ordered but haven’t arrived yet and usually the doors stay closed lest some roach, rat, or other unwanted visitor mistake the open door for an open invitation. Like a spectator at a tennis match, my head rotated back and forth as I tried to keep an eye on the doors as I cooked.

I had closed the doors and was sitting at the table enjoying my tuna when a small cat jumped onto one of the kitchen chairs. Not having a pet, I was not expecting to see a ball of fur fly through the air so imagine my surprise. As forcibly as the cat jumped onto its chair, I jumped off of mine. It seems logical to me that I was surprised but why the cat seemed surprised by my reaction beats me. When I jumped out of my chair, it jumped off its and headed down the hallway like a thoroughbred coming out of the gate.

With the doors now closed it took a while to get the cat out of the house. When I followed the cat into the bedroom it ran back to the kitchen before I could open the door leading to the balcony. When I followed the cat to the kitchen, it ran back to the bedroom before I could open the kitchen door. I was a little hesitant to leave the kitchen door open while the cat and I retreated to the back of the house(who knew what else might wander in, especially as my tuna and dirty pan were still out) but eventually I relented to in order to save the window screens from the cat’s claws.

The cat was a temporary visitor. The geckoes live here. They startle me every now and again but I’m getting use to them. After repetitive contact with a few of them I decided the only polite thing to do was to name them so that I can greet them formally when we run into each other.

Fat Charlie lives in the kitchen above the cabinets. He (or she) is impressive in both length and girth. Coach Potatoe Paul lives underneath the couch in the living room. He (or she) is just a twig of a thing. The couch is a little too dirty looking even for my taste so Paul will have to relocate when I have the landlord remove the couch. Bathroom Betty is the anti-Cinderella. Rather than spending time staring at the bathroom mirror, she (or he) spends her time behind it. Every time I swung the medicine cabinet door open, Betty and I would be face to face (face to whole body, actually). I’ve since learned to keep the cabinet door open and I’m not sure where Betty’s new home is.

So last week a cat gave me my laugh of the week, a couple weeks before that it was a young dog. I had stopped by someone’s house and, prior to entering, took off my zorries (flip flops to you Americans) as is the local custom. When I left a short time later only one zorrie was still there. Two friendly dogs had greeted me upon arrival and the younger of the two was immediately identified as the likely culprit. Since the dogs generally considered a three-house radius to be their home territory and since it was a dark and rainy night I had to consider the zorrie lost and hop to my car. It was a cute dog so I didn't take the loss of my zorrie personally.

My chuckle for the week hasn’t happened yet, but its still just Wednesday.