Katie and I flew down here Thursday flying through Houston's Intercontinental Airport. We flew Cayman airways which was a great airline and Houston was much better than Miami for connecting down here. We did immediately get our first taste of Island life. The flight was due to leave at 2:10, around 2 O'clock I started getting nervous that no one was doing anything and we hadn't boarded and there was no announcement. At about 2:15 they called for Turtle club members and then some time passed and no new announcement but people kept getting in line and boarding the plane. After a while I realized that they weren't calling rows you just got on when you felt like it. Katie and I boarded and the flight left about 45 minutes late apparently because hey that's just the way it is. The service on the flight was great and the flight itself was smooth, we highly recommend Cayman Airways from Houston but dont be surprised if things run very casual in the boarding process.
We got in and went through immigration. Katie got her work permit stamp for 3 months but mine still needs some kind of letter so I was allowed into the country for 30 days, my permit is OK they just couldn't stamp it (I don't have to leave to get my stamp which is all I really cared about anyway). We got the rental car, a very small Daihatsu Charade with the wheel on the right side and the turn signal and wiper controllers backward from US cars. I kept humming a song from many years ago "Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side" to remind me to stay left, the song sounds like it is about the happy weed smoking but I remember seeing one of those I love the 90's shows on VH1 and it is actually some kind of kids toy in Jamaica. Anyway it is a handy way to keep reminding me. Driving on the left is a lot like when I was 17 and just learning to drive you have to really pay attention and you cant rely on your instincts because they are wrong, plus every time I went to turn at first I turned on the wipers not the blinker.
We got to Elsa's house to get the key to the apartment and learned that the heavy rains had flooded the front room of our apartment. I had brought down a load of stuff in April and the linens that I left in the front room along with several books and other items were soaked. The apartment also needed a cleaning so instead of unpacking we decided to just get a few clothes out for Friday then go shopping for cleaning materials and other stuff we would need. We also started drying out the stuff that had been soaked. We headed down to Fosters and got groceries, cleaning implements, some pots and a pan, a broom, dustpan, dirty clothes basket, trash can etc. With the prices down here you don't want to know how expensive that first grocery run was. We got in around nine and decided to put the groceries away, nothing on the floor and nothing exposed then went to sleep.Around 1:30 it started raining and Katie mentioned to me that it sounded like it was inside. We turned on the light and walked into the main room and saw that it was dripping from two or three different spots. We used some coolers that were left over from a previous trip and a bucket we had bought to catch water. We also saw a seven inch long centipede meandering across our floor looking for somewhere to hide, with our suitcases out and the most likely destination and the poisonous nature of most centipedes, he had to die. It took three shots from my hiking boot(and a good squishing) but we ended the life of one of God's little creatures and flushed him down the toilet. Then with nothing else we could do we moved everything to the east end of the apartment, the apartment slopes west and the water was migrating to a corner where the front door, front room closet and front A/C vents were, and called it a night.
We woke up at 6:00 a.m Friday, the Caymans don't have daylight savings and are really in the Eastern Zone even though right now they are the same as Central time so it gets light out at 5:30 in the morning, of course that also means its dark here by 7 in the evening. We walked up Hirst road waving good morning to everyone we saw and generally had a great morning exercise/walk. We then drove to Fosters picked up some breakfast in their buffet (all the supermarkets here have buffets for each meal at around 4 dollars a pound for whatever you put in your container) and came back to the apartment to eat. We went in to work around 8:15 and worked until noon. I felt like a deer in the headlights learning everything new and for the next several weeks I am sure it will feel that way until I learn all the aspects of my job, it feels just like my first weeks as a lawyer. Katie has been doing her job remotely for a couple of months so her transition will be a lot easier.
At noon we headed out trying to get the most use out of our car. We knew about a sale at Cox Lumber and also wanted to find the other home stores and the other grocery stores in George Town proper. They have a supermarket like a Costco called Kirk's that sells bulk items and we will be using that when we want to take the 25 minute trip each way(only about 7 miles away). The island is small but traffic is heavy and with small one lane roads that wind around a lot you can't get anywhere fast. This trip, we got lost a couple of times and went through the same intersection no less than 6 times but eventually found what we were looking for and bought a plastic chest of drawers, some rolling carts (you can't have anything on the floor not just because of flooding but because of our little critter friends). I told Katie we would make a wary peace with the spiders who stayed up high since they would kill the mosquito's but it will be war with the ants and centipedes.
We proceeded to do a massive cleaning and move in, we actually got everything into the back room and closet, quite a feat when you consider we planned to use the front room as our walk in closet but until the leaks are fixed that room is unusable except for some storage of empty suitcases on the bed at a spot where there is no leaking. We finished the bathroom and bedroom using a Swiffer which swept and mopped the tile floor. We have an infestation of some kind of worm that looks like a sunflower seed in its cocoon and had to clean those out. We destroyed any spider webs at eye level and below and announced to the remaining spiders they could stay if they ate their quota of mosquito's. The rain has no where to go on the island and there is standing water everywhere. We bought bug spray that first night and use it every day. While we have no refrigerator or kitchen sink, the stove works so we made spaghetti for dinner and it tasted great after all that work. To celebrate really feeling like we had accomplished something cleaning the apartment and getting all the suitcases unpacked we went down to the Haagen Dazs in Savannah and had two ice cream cones.
This morning we had intended to get up at 5 and go watch the sunrise but it started raining around 3 a.m. and another session of putting out buckets and coolers ensued. It was still raining at 5 so we decided to sleep in. I then ran down to Fosters got some milk and cereal, while KT finished cleaning and putting away all the kitchen items, and we had breakfast. We are using the refrigerator in the teachers lounge so before each meal I run over and get what we need then either during or after take the stuff back. We were waiting on the construction man
to come look at the roof but he had not arrived by noon so we decided to head out and get the last immediate need stuff from the home stores particularly stuff for our hurricane kit. After another drive through George Town (Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side) we came back to the apartment unloaded and headed east for a beach. We found Heritage Beach in Cottage and went for a swim.A rain storm chased us back to the apartment where we met the construction man who hopefully will fix our roof though it will be next week at the earliest so some nights of bucket duty await as at least two tropical storms have bands hitting the Island. That's what you get when you move here during rainy season and right at beginning of hurricane season. There is a reason tourist season is November to April when it isn't hot, muggy, rainy, windy and the bugs aren't going crazy. Still after just two days this is beginning to feel like home. We have already talked to a couple of relatives on Windows live messenger with web cam and are signing up for AOL Aim and some other services to talk or chat with other relatives so let us know what capabilities you have and we can try and talk.
