It's been just over a week and I think we have done pretty well adjusting to life in Palau. We are trying to let go a lot of our American ways of doing things and take on a more Palauan style. Let me play a bit of show and tell to describe some of the new parts of our lives.

We have running water (some Palauans don't, by the way). We live a concrete house with plumbing, but we also have a water tank out back (along with another home that is just feet away).

 

Anyway that tank collects rainwater. We can come around the back of our house, turn the spigot and get water from here, when the running water is cutoff, limited, or delayed by the government for various reasons. We get a ton of rain so this collecting and using rainwater makes total sense.

There isn't home gas service with gas lines running to the houses of a neighborhood. Instead we have a tank of propane in our little "laundry room." You can buy different size tanks. We bought 50 pounds of gas for $89.75. We're thinking that might last us 6 months. The only thing we use it for is our oven/stove.

 

A line runs from the tank into the kitchen. In case you are wondering how we heat our water . . . we don't. Now we could if we were interested. Our landlord said he can turn on the water heater outside if we wanted. We figured we'd give it a go Palauan style. It's hot here all the time, so a nice cold shower can be really refreshing. Okay, honestly, at first it was just shocking. Our shower is big enough to not be under the shower head all the time. So you get in a do your whole cleaning, shampooing thing a section at a time, so you never have to get all wet at the same time. It works fine. We've even been getting more and more used to it.

Electricity here is apparently very expensive. From what everyone says, it can run you $200 a month easily. We have an air conditioner in every room, but we try not to use them hardly at all. Again, we are acclimating. We leave our front door open starting first thing in the morning. It lets a good breeze go through the house. We do have lots of windows - a necessity in this country, I'd say. Open the door and every window and it's not bad at all. Sometimes that cross breeze sends our barely-secured curtains flying - it's entertaining.

 

We also hand wash and hang dry most of our laundry, with an occasional visit to a Laundromat.

Internet service is a serious issue here. There are internet cafes around town with prices anywhere from 75 cents an hour to $5 an hour. The cheaper ones are awful - a shared dial up connection. You can barely send 2 emails in an hour. Bring a good book to read while you wait for pages to load. You'll need it. At the Coconut Hut, you pay more ($5/hour),  but you get a DSL connection. We've been there daily. That was going to run us a chunk of change so we decided to get internet service at home.

Check this out -DSL at home starts at $450 a month and climbs to $1600 a month for the faster speeds.. No folks, that is NOT a typo. We went with unlimited dial up for . . . $100 a month. Yup, I said $100. Unbelievable. But we're doing it. Every time we go online, I'm having 90s flashbacks. [Dial tone, then seven beeps while it dials out, then hissing and crackling while it connects.] I am expecting to her the old America Online voice say "Hello," or "You've got mail."

In Palau you drive on the right side of the road, just like back home. The thing is most of the cars here have the driver sitting on the right side of the car.

 

That takes some getting used to. I kept aligning myself more toward center as I drove. Yeah, that kind of scared Shauna. Heck, I don't know why! Just because that takes her directly into oncoming traffic. I've gotten better. Shauna even gave me a really big compliment yesterday. She said I was driving like a Palauan. That means you don't really wait for big opening to merge into or turn across traffic. You just sort of go, and not a quick acceleration either. You just go and let everyone around you slow down or adjust. If you don't do it this way, I don't think you'd get anywhere. There are no traffic signals in the whole country, and stop signs aren't on the one main road and aren't always easy to see. So everyone takes it pretty slowly and "assertively."

All in all, I think we are adjusting well!