| P-MAN X Update #30
- The curves cross; bat bones Okay, deep down you knew that toward the end of the trip, the mundane stuff was eventually going to overtake the adventure. I think the curves crossed today. There was at least the possibility of continuing the interesting interview that we had to suspend yesterday - the re-scheduled one. We scheduled the follow-on to the re-scheduled interview for ten this morning. He didn't show. But we talked to a family member who suggested that we re-re-schedule for three this afternoon. Then a bit later, we re-re-re-scheduled for ten tomorrow (Saturday) morning. Think it'll happen? Please, no wagering... That freed us up to roam around town delivering preliminary reports, certificates of appreciation, and bandanas, and allowed Pat and me to take some heavy boxes to the post office to mail back home. The airlines have a weight limit per bag, and you can only check two bags, so some of us choose to pack boxes of stuff and mail them to ourselves here before we come, then send them back home at the end of the trip. It's not exactly cheap, but it's the only good way to take the kind of junk that we have to carry to Palau for a month's stay - like SCUBA gear, radios, and machetes. Because several of the people to whom we needed to deliver things work in the government, Joe was not optimistic about our finding anyone in the office. Here's the thing: today was payday for government workers, and although it's not formal, it turns out that in Palau, many government people wind up a little sick on payday/Friday afternoon, and just never quite make it back after lunch. As usual, Joe was right. Some offices were eerily quiet. But we still made deliveries to most of the people we needed to see. And here's a heads-up for Jolie, just so she won't be alarmed when she finally comes back to Palau and sees her car: we had it washed. When I picked it up later, the guy at the car wash asked if I do a lot of off-road driving. I said that the car isn't mine - it belongs to an archaeologist friend. Why? He said they really had to work to scrape all that red mud off everything, inside and outside. Man, they vacuumed it out, washed the mats, put Armor-All on surfaces that needed protecting, and did most of the stuff that a detailing shop would do to really get a car in tip-top shape. All for ten bucks. We'd have paid more, because Jolie's worth it, but that's all they'd take. Cool. We dropped report/certificate/bandana off with Rita at the Historical Preservation Office, and got from her a list of the State Historians in each of Palau's states. Funny we never thought to track them down and interview them before, but now that's on our list for next year - since it was brought to our attention yesterday by Vince, who is the State Historian for Airai. We had a nice but brief visit with Vice President Chin, who is running for President, and who gave us some campaign T-shirts and bumper stickers. He encouraged us to use them back in the states if we found ourselves lacking in enthusiasm for any of OUR presidential candidates. I can imagine that happening... Mid-afternoon, Pat and his friend Michael had a meeting with the public-health people at the hospital. When they came back, we found Laura in her kitchen, with a toothbrush, carefully cleaning the fruit-bat bones from last week's feast at Joe and Esther's. If you can imagine a kid eagerly preparing the parts in a kit from which he or she is planning to build a model airplane or a ... fruit bat, you'll have an idea what Laura's kitchen looked like.
Tomorrow night we head home... - Reid |
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