We have been here a week and two days now, and in some ways it’s feeling like home, in other ways we are definitely living in a foreign country. Our house itself is becoming our home, in the sense that we are comfortable here, the boys love it, all our stuff is here, and we have started work on it. We have started weeding the back lawn to encourage the grass to grow properly, replaced lightbulbs, cleaned stuff and so on. The foreign parts are more evident when it comes to leaving the house for a drive around the country or a quick trip to the shops. A shopping expedition can leave one feeling vaguely depressed, considering the kind of shops we are used to (Menlyn!!). Food is very expensive here and one has to go from shop to shop to find all the necessary items. Also, there is not one shop which tends to be cheaper than the others – you need to buy some things at one place, some at another. For groceries we shop at Spar (there’s a friendly Spar wherever you are), Thorpe’s grocery store, or Queen Mary’s. For hardware there is Solomon’s DIY, the Emporium and Queen Mary’s. For personal items there is Warren’s, Spar and Queen Mary’s. For linen you have Queen Mary’s or Victoria. Queen Mary’s pops up a lot in this list, but it’s a tiny shop with many items all on top of one another. The frozen section in QM’s is a little freezer (like an ice-cream freezer with the glass sliding tops) which is directly opposite the groceries and next to toiletries, followed on by hardware, paint etc. It’s terribly difficult finding what you’re looking for, you almost have to examine each item to see if it’s what you want as there is often only one of each item. You don’t lock your car doors when you go anywhere. I feel silly putting a packet of groceries on the front seat and walking away to the next shop without any form of lock, but that’s the way it’s done. Enough about the shops.
We took a drive to the beach this morning. The beach is in Sandy Bay and it is about a 40-minute drive. Not because it’s so terribly far, but because you can only drive on a straight road for about 200 metres before the next hairpin bend. The roads are more suited to 4x4 driving and less to an old car which rattles and clunks and wobbles. You can’t see what’s coming around a bend, and the roads are mostly single lane, so you hoot going around a corner to alert any oncoming cars of your presence, then proceed blindly in the greatest of faith. Sometimes the bends are so steep you have to crane over the steering wheel to see where the road is bending to. Nick is quite confident driving, but I think it will be a long time or a great occasion of necessity before I venture to those parts! That being said, the countryside is unbelievably beautiful and lush, at parts you are driving through forest and jungle, with clouds falling over the tops of the mountain peaks and mist blowing about. Other parts are barren and brown. One road we took had cacti on one side and palm trees on the other! The beach itself was mostly pebbly with a small section of sand, which was black. Not dirty, just black because it is black volcanic rock which has been broken down over centuries. It’s quite weird. We did enjoy ourselves clambering down rocks to the beach, then sitting on the smooth rocks and pebbles and throwing them into the sea. The wind blows gusts all the time, and the sea drags pebbles back with it, so there is constant noise. Black crabs were sitting on the rocks, but disappeared quickly as soon as they saw us. It was a really unique experience though, which was enjoyed by all. We found a sheltered alcove and had flasked coffee and juice and a packet of tennis biscuits. The boys sit in the boot of the golf (no back board) or on the backseat, and think that’s quite funny. Seatbelts are optional on the island.
This afternoon after the boys slept and some pop-in visitors had left, we took a walk around town, because Caleb decided that he wanted to go for a walk. We walked down our road, along another one, up a steep hill past an old-age home, down a hill past some shops, and all the way almost to the waterfront. We went into “Castle Gardens”, a very pretty area of gardens and trees. You can go in there for a picnic and sit on the grass, it’s very well kept and colourful (dad, you would especially appreciate it!). Walked all the way back up the hill to our house. It was a good outdoor outing. The wind blew and we felt some drizzle, nothing unusual. Have had a good dose of sunshine today (at least ½ hour).
Now the washing machine is working again, so there is a load spinning and waiting to come out. I am going to go on-line now to try to find a good recipe for butternut soup as a butternut was donated to us and I don’t see any other way of getting through the whole thing, so soup it must become.
No comments:
Post a Comment