Of Grease and Caprice

Well, as mentioned on Friday, the long Easter weekend made for ample opportunity for some rather unique experiences, recounted here.

There is a Kittitian tradition of spending Good Friday cooking a lunch of Salt Fish and Fritters while the kids go outside and fly kites in the mild early summer weather.  I took part in the festivities by visiting a friend in Trinity, the next village over from my home, sharing an afternoon meal and enjoying local company over board games and dominoes.  (In fact, don't spread this around too much, but I actually beat a couple local friends in a dominoes best-of-three contest, and they take their dominoes very seriously! /needless whispering)  A good time was had by all, and I was able to get my mind off of being the only guy in the office that day who didn't know that Good Friday was a day off.

Saturday I got to try out a new technique for keeping in touch with family.  In the way that only he could come up with, Dad set up the Scrabble board in such a way that the webcam on their end was looking down onto the reflective letters on the board and on my stand, and the four of us together played a couple rounds of Skype rock-'em sock-'em with letters.  A truly novel experience, it made for a pleasant evening that followed a day otherwise dominated by ennui.  But now that Easter weekend is over, I do anticipate more of my friends from home being available for Skype-ing.

I did attend church on Easter Sunday, naturally.  And apart from the overtly ornamental garb worn by the clergy and the use of the Easter-only passages in the BCP, there wasn't too drastic a change in the Eucharistic service.  Which was fine by me; on a hot summer morning in a stone building filled with warm bodies and no A/C, I didn't particularly care for the service to go over the requisite 2 hours.

Monday, on the other hand, was a day like no other before.  It started with the trappings of a beautiful early summer day, inviting those of us that had been cooped up in our 328 sq. ft. apartments all weekend out into town, into the sun, onto the ferry dock, where the community was holding its annual Greased Pole Walk for Easter Monday.  The rules are simple: walk out onto an anchored telephone pole that has been slathered with pink engine grease, keep your footing long enough to reach the suspended ham at the end, and untie the ham whilst still clinging to the pole.  I took good video capture of all of the goings-on, and compiled it in the highlight reel for this month.  Spoiler alert: the whole event only took 8 1/2 minutes before the eventual victor nabbed the prize.  So our 2 hour wait in the sun was nearly for naught.

But we had that in hand, too: afterwards, to cool down, we trucked over to the Bird Rock Hotel beach, and soaked up some Easter Monday sun and shade.  I was lucky enough, while there, to make friends with a Ross student interested in a lot of the same things that I am.  She is on her two week break before summer semester begins, so she has lots of time to pal around with my PCV friends and I during that time – just long enough to share in our planned Cinco de Mayo celebration!  (Don't be the guy that asks when that is...)

Oh, and despite all the busyness, it seems I have the highlights video ready a little earlier this month: