Home Thoughts From Abroad

I have lost track of the number of cars I have leased and owned. Certainly around twenty, I would figure. Very few of them have been new. I just can’t justify driving off a new car lot and seeing the value drop in half by the time I reach the road. There are more important things I want to do with my money. So I prefer used.

In Malaysia we had a 1996 Proton. Kind of like a Datson, if you can remember back that far. It had a 1.5 litre Misubishi engine in it that was in good shape, but it was nothing to look at. But at least the aircon worked, which in Malaysia was a must. Coming to the Caymans, we weren’t looking at anything better. We bought a 1996 Mitsubishi Pajero Jr. and a bushel of problems. The tires were bald, the ball joint/tie-rods were loose, the rad leaked and the paint looked like it had spent most of the last 20 years parked under a colony of very loose bowelled birds.

Tires were first, obviously. The mantra in F1 is that engine and chassis are just devices for keeping the tires connected to the road. Overstatement, perhaps, but it makes the point. Then I found a guy willing to rebuild the control arm assembly with butchered parts. The rad just needed a flush; the oil issue ditto, but the paint was an eyesore so matter which way you looked. And the cheapest quote I could find was $1500 Cayman which is like $2500 Canadian. I just couldn’t do it.

So armed with little more than a couple of cans of spray paint and some steel wool I took on the job of repainting the hood and roof, the two worst offenders. Dodging tropical storms and mosquitoes on the one hand, and my own bone dead fatigue at the end of a work day on the other, I have persevered until the car looks at least half-decent. I thought to cut myself some slack by replacing the rusted out windshield wipers arms with new, but at $150 Canadian – each! – I decided to do them myself as well. I am done, and at the end we still have a beat-up island car that is twenty years old. But it does look a little less embarrassing.

Sting Ray City was inadvertently created in the early 1900s when fishermen anchored in the calm waters of the North Sound to clean their fish and cast their unused bait overboard. These gentle giant stingrays who hunt by smell quickly discovered this new source of “fast food”. The water on the Sandbar ranges from 3-10 feet and regular visitors come to frolic with these magnificent creatures.

Some of the staff at the school arranged to rent a boat for about 25 of us to make the approximately 45 minute trip out to the sandbar. The waters of the Caribbean Sea were calm and beautiful and it was breathtaking to see literally hundreds of rays. It was initially somewhat terrifying to be surrounded by these huge stingrays which fearlessly glide around you but I eventually made my peace with them and even touched one.

From there we headed further across the sound to Rum Point which is on the opposite side of the bight to our little canal. We stopped for a swim and some snorkeling at Starfish Point where the sea bottom is littered with beautiful red starfish. The local kids entertained us by diving down and collecting the starfish from deeper waters.

We finished up the trip with a visit to Kaibo for curry fries and drinks and then partied our way back across the sound.

We have now been in our new home for just over two weeks and are feeling quite settled and comfortable. We marvel at God’s goodness every morning as we sip our coffee looking out over the canal outside our livingroom.

We love the place that we chose; it is everything that we hoped to find. Although we rented a place that was fully furnished and supposedly move in ready it has taken a considerable amount of effort to get it up to our standards. Fortunately, Steve is pretty handy with the tools and I am an experienced cleaner.

We have managed to get driver’s licences, car insurance, bank accounts, phones, internet and utilities established and figured out some of the unique aspects of living on a small island. And we have wheels!! Two sets, in fact.

There has even been time in there to get to know some of the others in the incoming cohort of twenty three new staff. As part of the orientation the staff were treated to an evening cruise on the sound and dinner at a restaurant in Kaibo. A couple of the returning staff who live down the street from us threw a great welcome potluck so we could hang out together on Saturday evening.

We arrived in Malaysia with several married or soon to be married friends. Chief among them were Bill and Kim, a couple about our age with whom we shared many evening meals. Our circle of married friends expanded to include several Malaysian couples as well, such as Rowena and John, with whom we spent our first Malaysian Christmas. But since then, married couples have been pretty much outnumbered by the younger staff, who are not only more mobile, but less inclined to while away the evening lingering over a meal or just sitting and visiting. But the longer the younger staff stick around, the more likely they are to get married themselves. Some of these marriages, like Yuri and Easton’s, have been pretty lavish affairs, with several course meals and lots of changes of outfits. At a recent wedding of one of Pam’s colleagues in Phnom Penh, we got to witness a traditional Khmer ceremony that featured eight changes of dress! We love these elaborate cultural affairs, and always look forward to learning about Asian customs and traditions. This past weekend we got to attend the wedding of Anusha and Colin, with whom I have worked in the English department for several years. Anusha’s family are Hindu, and her father took a little while to warm up to Colin, although he is fine man and will make a good husband. The wedding took place in a Hindu temple, with all the attendant rites and rituals. So on the weekend we got to go and see a real Hindu wedding. It came complete with two holy men performing the ceremony in a little canopy inside the temple, while two others played traditional Indian music. There was some parading around the icons, and some washing of faces with fire and some anointing with paint and oil, none of which we understood at all. Then we got to throw some rice at the newly married couple and adjoined for pictures on the beach at Port Dickson, where the ceremony took place. After a very pleasant afternoon sipping drinks at the Thistle Resort and Golf Course, we returned for the reception. If you know anything about Indian culture, you know that it all centers around food, so we were looking forward to the buffet. We were not disappointed. In a Chinese meal, the dishes are all brought out separately, as they are in proper Italian cuisine. With all due deference to one fifth of the human race, this drives us both nuts. Oh boy, I get to eat a big bowl of kale? Okay. What else? Just kale? Until it is all gone? Indians on the other hand like the mix of flavours that you get when you pile your plate with all kinds of things and the flavours all get mixed up and interact with each other like sensory chemical fusion in your mouth. Love it! Went back three times! Then there were the obligatory speeches, and the drinks and toasts, the mingling with the guests and some weak attempt at dancing. Honestly, aside from Bollywood dancers, can anyone do anything with those complex rhythms? We did get in one Cha-Cha, but the rest of it did not go so well. Oh well, small beans in such a wonderful, colourful, tasty and heart-warming wedding. All the best to the lovely couple!

“Promise me that you will always remember that you are

braver than you believe,

stronger than you seem,

smarter than you think and

loved more than you know.”

Christopher Robin to Pooh

One of the perks of my new job with Taylor’s is that I am no longer bound by the school holidays. This can have a downside, obviously, as I worked through much of Christmas and New Year’s in order to follow through on the launch of the website. We made the best of our time in Malaysia, and attended at very nice Christmas party hosted by the Canadian-Malaysian Businessmen’s organization, and another nice do at our friends Easton and Yuri’s new apartment. But basically it was just a lot of work.

The upside is that we could delay our Christmas holidays so that we could visit with our children and grandchildren shortly after Christmas. We could also combine that visit with the residence requirements of our Masters’ degrees in Colorado and even get in a weekend at the ISS Job Fair in San Francisco, which might open the door to a job in the Caribbean or Latin America. It took several months of planning and booking, but what you are about to read over the next few days or so is how we managed to squeeze in all of that into a whirlwind four week visit to North America. We began with the nightmare of the 15 ½ hour flight across the Pacific. On such a flight you want to hope that the babies all sleep well!