What do you see when you look out into your front yard? I bet it's way different than what we see ON A DAILY BASIS. First of all, let me paint a picture of what looking out front means to us. Picture this . . .

The front door wide open, no screen door on it. It gets opened first thing in the morning, along with all windows, and curtains pulled back. It's hot here every day so it's that or run the air conditioning non-stop . And that's just a no.  

We do as the Palauans and leave the door open all during the day, when we are home. We don't have neighbors across the street. It just drops down into tropical jungle, so the view is pretty great.

So back to the cool things we see out our front door, which opens right into our living room, by the way. Here are some of the fun things we see on a regular basis.

There's a lady who walks by with basket on head. She just passed as I am writing this entry.  The basket is filled with all sorts of things, from fruit to groceries, to laundry -  and she never uses her hands!

There are a few guys who walk by several times a day. Each time they pass, they look into our living room, and yell out, "Hello, " and wave as if we're life-long friends.

When we hear a scuffling or tiny feet moving about out front, we often look up to see roosters and chickens running across the yard, down the street, or just hanging out.

They are everywhere all through this country. You hear them every morning too, starting at about 4 a.m.

Other  times it's random dogs running past our front door. Some are owned by neighbors, most are neighborhood dogs, not owned by anyone.

And occasionally a cat passes through the yard. One day we saw one walking down the gutter. Our gutters are more like foot and a half deep moats running alongside the road, by the way. Makes sense, since the average rainfall in Palau is 150 inches a year.

Our neighbors, who are also our landlords, are outside often. Sometimes we see the father, the mother and their twenty-something  son, out as a family beating betel nut out of trees. (More on betel nut another day. That's a whole separate posting.)

Other days it's just the husband and wife - the  husband with a basket, wife with pole, getting papayas down from one of the many trees all around us.

We also have big banana trees all over the place, with bananas in varying stages of ripeness. They just grow along the roads, in the jungles, in yards. I'm wondering what will happen if we go cut some bananas down.