odysseyone

May was mostly a month of settling into island life including water outages, tasting weird island fruit, learning to eyebrow read and discovering the legalities of piracy (not the pirate kind).

I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that there are few street names here and no house numbers, so explaining where you live can be a bit of a nightmare. We dubbed our house the Palace but apparently some of the neighbours call it the Muslim house because it looks like it should be in the Middle East, not in the tropics.

I could blame my busy life on taking another 2 months to write another blog, or I could admit that some of that ‘island time’ has rubbed off on me and maybe I’m taking a little longer to do things than I used to.

Week two….

Kia Orana means may you live long. If I can ever get my tongue around it, the local greeting seems much more of a personal, meaningful greeting than the no frills ‘Hello’ we say in English and other language translations. When perfect strangers say Kia Orana to you each day I think ‘yeah, thanks, I hope I live long too.’ It’s just a pity my tongue mangles it and I can’t say it back!

In my part of the world when we talk about the weather, it’s not usually because we have nothing else to say. Water is a popular topic, normally because there’s not enough of it. Things have changed a lot in the last few weeks and while water is still the topic of choice, it is now because we have too much and we’ve stopped praying for rain and started praying that it will stop.