As the last four days, consisting of a go-round of Peleliu and Angaur islands warrant a long entry of their own, I’ll start us off with a potpourri of random stories which may be of interest to some, and less so to others. We’ll start on a cultural note, since it’s always fun to occasionally talk about Palau in this blog. These range back as far as July 4th, so that is how well I’ve done at keeping up-to-date. Where memory fails me, I shall fabricate awesome lies to impress and amaze you – that way, in years, when I look back on this journal, I won’t be able to tell fact from fiction… and neither will you.
The expatriate community continues to be outstanding here – though it borders on racism to say so out loud, there is something about being European/American/Canadian/etc that brings people together in Palau. Everyone talks to everyone, is friendly to everyone, invites everyone to social events… it is just a far friendlier place than America. The Navy guys here (the CAT team… Community… Advocacy… Team… or something redundant like that) are great, everyone’s just… nice. I don’t know how to explain it other than that. Palau is so small that you see the same people EVERYWHERE you go – one day, I saw the Minister of Health 3 times at the hospital, then we wound up going to the same restaurant for lunch, then we saw him at the same restaurant as us for dinner, and then again at the track. Being a fairly unique face in the area, it’s not uncommon for people I meet to say “oh, I’ve seen you at the hospital/walking across the bridge/the supermarket/playing Frisbee/screaming like a small child at a giant insect/being generally awesome.” When I’m looking for Jodie, I just ask if people have seen the short, blonde, skinny American girl and usually they know who I’m talking about. It’s great. The Palauans are very friendly, as well, but they are not as embracing as the other foreigners on the island.
On a side note, why would ‘Palauan’ be a valid word, but ‘Palauans’ be a typo, according to Word?
The thing is, the expatriate community turns over every 6-12 months. People come here on 6 month-1 year contracts/deployments, enjoy their stay, do some good work, and then leave, leaving Palau to have to train new people, get them up to speed… only to have them leave again. This, I am told, is a very frustrating issue for the Palauan workers who stay (understandable), but the pay for jobs in Palau is extremely low compared to what one would make in, say, the rest of the world. The government does not have much money to pay more, and what money they do have they would prefer to put elsewhere, so this won’t change – and as such, a large percentage of Palau’s legal, medical, and engineering professionals change every year. One of our IHOP assignments asks us to provide the contact information of individuals who have been helpful. I can’t even do this much – every single one of them will be gone by next year (most of them are leaving by November, even), be they doctors, PAs, lawyers, epidemiologists, or otherwise. The UW’s primary contact here, the one we were sent here to work with, is leaving before I do by a couple of days – most of the people Jodie and I would call friends here are leaving by November… and if not by then, then by next June. The only one who might be staying is Mihnea, the vet, and even HE might choose not to renew his contract. How Palau gets anything done with a situation like that is just slightly beyond me.
July 8th, I believe (though I could be humiliatingly wrong as to the actual date - I don’t have internet right now or I’d JFGI) was Constitution Day. As their actual ‘Independence Day’ happens much later in the year, I’m not really sure as to the difference between the two – I’m told Constitution Day is the celebration of their independence from US administration in 1994, when they formally became their own country. They have a fair each year, with a few fair-type games (the ones that are impossible), tons of food stands (fruit bat for $8 and I missed it!), lots of influential speakers, none of whom Jodie or I could understand because they were speaking Palauan (wtf anyways?) and then various stands from foreign groups doing work in Palau – in particular, a large Taiwanese stand that shoved lots of medical propaganda into my hands and then fed me star fruit juice to keep me content (it worked). In general, it was fairly uneventful – it was mostly interesting to wander around the Prisoners’ Shop to see the various storyboards (which are really intricate wooden carvings which are supposed to depict a legend of some sort) that the prisoners made (instead of license plates). They were a bit expensive for my taste, but now that I think back on it, I realize that buying from the Prisoners’ Store would PROBABLY have been less expensive than what I’m going to have to pay to get one from a gift shop before I leave. We didn’t have time to really wonder about the wisdom of purchasing at the fair (my experience with American fairs is inflated prices – apparently not the case in Palau), because we only had 45 minutes to an hour to check out the entire place before me, Jodie, and Mihnea went to meet Richard and Rita to go sailing (more on that later).
I’m going to wax a bit political here, so bear with me: it’s nice being in Palau because it’s a country where it’s still “cool” to be an American. These have grown relatively few in number over the last eight years, for reasons I shan’t deign to explicate, but few would argue that our standing in the national eye has fallen dramatically. Palau, having received so much aid from the United States, is an exception to this rule – many Palauan students travel to the States for college before returning, the US military retains both a protective and a constructive presence here (and the CAT team guys are some of the most popular people in Palau, believe me – even moreso than visiting doctors), and the US liberated them from unpleasant Japanese rule. Needless to say, these are 20,000 people who are pretty stoked about the States – an integral part of our coalition of the willing, if you will. I’m not really the type to sew Canadian flags onto my clothes or something to deny my heritage, but it’s definitely nice not to catch flack for being American (as I have heard of many friends getting in Europe, Latin America and, yes, even Canada).
But, then, who the hell cares about Canadians anyways, AMIRITE?! (With apologies to both people who care about Canadians).
Anyhow, I only bring this up because July 4th is actually a fairly significant day in Palau. There were signs up wishing America a happy birthday, lots of smaller July 4th parties, and then one big one hosted by the CAT team up at Camp Kutuu (I believe is how it’s spelled) in Airai, north of where I am, on the island of Babeldaob. My theory is that the Palauans use Independence Day like we use Cinco de Mayo or St. Patrick’s Day – an excuse to drink (not that we, or they, have ever needed an excuse). I spoke a bit about the party in another post – the President and Vice President were there, tons of expatriates were then, tons of Palauans were there to join in the festivities, they had live music, tons of American cuisine (read: burgers, hot dogs, processed cheese, and Budweiser) and two giant cakes in the shape of American flags (which was both sacrilegious and delicious – sacrilicious!) Pretty sure consumption is not proper flag etiquette – but hey, I’m not military. There was also an impromptu and hilarious game of drunken volleyball, and a smattering of live classic American tunes (the opener being Surfin’ USA, apparently the iconic American song). People ate, people drank, people were merry – but a grave miscalculation on the part of our Palauan hosts led to the removal of the beer (and thus, the party) at 8pm. People stayed until 10, 11, but festivities and sobriety are inversely proportional, and it quieted significantly about an hour after the beer vanished. No number of small, plastic American flags or mishaps during drunken volleyball could suppress the lucid doldrums of sobriety. And there were no fireworks – a fact which greatly disappointed a number of us, as it’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen a good July 4th fireworks show (I was in Calgary, of all places, last 4th). Combine that with two years in Costa Rica during the 4th, and then a number of years holed up in apartment complexes/dorms studying for tests where I couldn’t see the fireworks, and there has been a paucity of harlequin explosives in my life the last few years.
As I implied in a previous issue, much of the Palauan ‘cultural’ displays are reserved for tourists. This is embodied no better than in the various dance performances that occur at Palau Pacific Resort, of which my wife and I are proud members. Every Sunday night, there is a group of girls who comes to do various ‘islandesque’ dances which really aren’t Palauan in nature, but are your typical hula-girl type dances that you might see in Hawaii (I refuse to give that rogue state the benefit of an apostrophe and an additional syllable if they’re too good to even float on over and join the mainland. Assholes.) or Samoa or any of the other myriad Pacific islands. There’s two groups: the first is an adorable group of, say, 6-10 year-old girls, who have obviously practiced very hard for their performances, but the youngest of whom simply lacks the fine motor development just yet to match the grace of her elders, and thus looks a bit listless and clumsy out there (only adding to the girl’s Cuteness Quotient [CQ]) in comparison. They perform a variety of hip-swinging, pom-pom waving, gourd-tapping dances in hula garb that, quite frankly, seems a bit out of place on 6-10 year-old girls, to the sound of an assortment of soothing island tunez, and the onlooking tourists laugh and applaud and ‘aww’ as they do, and talk about how amazing island culture is. The second group is rather ambiguous, age-wise, some seeming as young as 12 and others seeming to be over 18 (do you think ‘seeming to be’ will suffice in court?), and they do the more coordinated and complex dances of the bunch, though they lack the adorable miniature props of the first group. The elder group has an interesting habit of performing these really loud, high-pitched, Both are enjoyable to watch, no matter how many times you’ve seen the performance, but there is this infuriating hula song they always do at the very end – their coup de grace, if you will – that is this poppy, lilting song whose main refrain is “sophisticated hula… is the talk of the town.” The application of the modifier ‘sophisticated’ to the ‘hula’ dance is a bit odd to me, but not enough in and of itself to catch my ire…
Until I hear it every damn minute of my life for the next three days.
It’s not just while I’m wake. Oh no. That would be tolerable. At least then, the blissful embrace of slumber would save me from this waking nightmare. But it follows me to bed, serenades me while I sleep, runs on endless loop through my mind, no matter where I go and what I am doing. I can’t escape. It’s enough to drive a man to insanity, I say. IT’S IN MY TEETH!!!
Following this, their penultimate ballad, they do their typical touristy “thank you and goodbye” in both Palauan and English, and then it’s time for the most anticipated part of their performance. The encore. The ultimate in aural entertainment. They perform the national dance of Palau – the most recent dance fad, newly arrived from the States… and they pull the luckiest of the lucky -with the nasal but much-ballyhooed announcement “and now, everybody to the dance floor” - from the crowd to learn this sacred groove.
They do the Macarena.
I have said many times how we have imparted much of our culture onto this nation – we have also imported our obesity and hypertension and diabetes into Palau via our food products. We have, it would seem, also managed to curse them with our tacky ‘80s fads, excluding (mercifully) the mullet. The Macarena is not just danced here, it is... dare I say it… popular.
The best part is watching the Asian tourists learn this ludicrous dance – since, mercifully, it never became the smash hit in their nation that it did in ours – and the looks on their faces belies their disbelief that anyone would engage in such an inane activity.
“Achy Breaky Heart” is also a popular karaoke song in Palau, further proving my theory that pop culture here is a near carbon-copy of ours, circa the 1980s.
On Wednesdays, PPR has happy hour – consisting of free drinks (beer, wine, and coconut juice and rum in a coconut shell) and some local entertainment. I took this opportunity to get my much-coveted coconut drink and some prime photo ops, but the most noteworthy aspect of the experience was the “local entertainment.” Colloquially referred to as “thong dancing,” there was a group of five or six teenage boys wearing red loincloths and carrying various simple percussive instruments who performed what, to me, seemed like ancient Polynesian battle dances. Heart-pounding percussion seems to be a staple in all dance performances here in Palau and makes what otherwise might be a rather lazy and relaxing event into an adrenaline-packed thrill ride, but I digress.
The main point that I’m trying to get at, here, is that these dances weren’t the slow, graceful dances I described above, but erratic and loud and powerful performances filled with shouting, flailing arms and limbs, and animalistic roars, interspersed with chanting – it reminded me a lot of Native American dances I’ve seen performed in the past. In between each session of fearsome frolicking, one of the performers would explain what the next dance was supposed to represent – and it was always something extremely banal and undeserving of such an impressive dance:
“This is to tell you guys about how we used to row the, ah, canoe.”
“This is to tell you guys about how we used to build house.”
“This is to tell you guys about how we used to weave basket.”
I swear they performed the exact same chanting, shouting, and roaring with each of the above performances, the primary variant being that you could see them pantomime whatever activity it was they were telling us guys about – of course, the chanting was in Palauan, so there was absolutely no way for anyone who was watching to figure out what they were saying, so we just took their word for it.
I mentioned the “juicy bars” in an earlier posting. They are, on the surface, karaoke bars. What I have learned, however, is that “karaoke bar” means many different things in Palau. There are “karaoke bars” where, literally, you just drink and sing karaoke, and it is like any karaoke bar in the States. There are “karaoke bars,” however, who DO have karaoke, and that IS an attraction, but they also have a cadre of “karaoke girls” (or “juicy girls”) whose job it is to sit with you, talk to you, be nice to you, get you to buy drinks (for yourself or for them), and cuddle up to drunken strangers. Drink prices are reasonable ($3 to buy yourself a beer), but if you buy the girl a drink, it’s substantially more ($10, say – though if the girl likes you, she can charge you less) – and you’re essentially paying for a more ‘affectionate’ karaoke girl. They’re not prostitutes – and most of the “juicy bars” are not sex bars or anything of the sort, but suffice it to say that people don’t go there “primarily” for karaoke. Karaoke and dancing are just pleasant diversions. These bars (from what I have heard – I’ve only been to one thus far, and would be fine keeping it to that one) vary as well in their… shadiness, for lack of a better word. The one I went to was recommended to me based on the fact that it was clean, the girls were nice, and the environment was friendly. I’ve heard stories, however, of others where the story is a bit different – to quote a friend “you feel sticky just walking in the door.”
This friend has been exploring the various bars of Koror, and when I asked him which ones to stay away from, he told me about one joint in particular where they call it a “karaoke bar” but he suspects it’s a thin cover for a whorehouse. They had “karaoke rooms” – private rooms in the back where you could take your karaoke girl (and your friends and their girls or whoever) and they have a karaoke machine. But the “wink wink, nudge nudge” part is that it’s, well… a private room. In some of the more upstanding joints, these really ARE primarily for karaoke. But when he asked about them… :
“What are those rooms back there?”
“Those are karaoke rooms, sir.”
“And you can take the girls back there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what do you do back there?”
“Anything you want.”
To be fair, maybe they just meant that no one will judge you for singing all the Celine Dion your little heart desires, but somehow, I doubt it.
There’s a whole messed-up system in place with the karaoke girls that I don’t really care to get into in such a public venue – as it is, I feel like I’m skirting the lunatic fringe of my comfort zone here.
But enough about Palau. Let’s talk about ME.
After a week off from Frisbee due to the Belau National Games’ track and field component, I finally got back out on the field on Tuesday. It was nice to give my legs a rest – my shins had been killing me, and though I’d managed to get it under control with lots of stretching and warming-up plus some liberally-applied painkillers, I was pain free and ready to play.
So, naturally, I turned my ankle HARD on the second point of the game.
Play stopped for precisely thirty seconds – long enough for me to kneel and rub at it a bit, curse luridly, and then hop back to my feet and begin to limp back to my endzone so that people could play and I could walk it off. I ended up playing out the rest of the game (and actually did well – I should get hurt every day), but by the evening it had swollen up so big I could barely get it inside my shoe. Today, Thursday, the swelling has gone down quite a bit, but it’s still really sore and I can’t turn my ankle outwards – a local doctor I’ve been following called in a free X-ray for me, which I’m still waiting to look at with him just to make sure I don’t have any tears, but nothing’s broken. I’m walking a lot better today, so I’ll probably (stupidly) give it a go at Frisbee tonight, break it entirely, and then be forced to sit the rest of my stay in Palau. Dr. Graney would be SO pissed at me. I wasn’t even wearing goggles.
The one thing that this injury SHOULDN’T stop is diving – flutter-kicking my way through the water doesn’t turn the ankle at all – so as long as the swelling goes down enough to fit into my fin, I’ll be going out with Keith again on Saturday, and hopefully we will finish up the diving portion of my Advanced OWD course. There’s still some book-reading and knowledge review stuff to do, but I’m excited to finish it up. Vivi and Jirka are going, and it’s always fun diving with friends – and it’s Vivi’s first dive since she finished her certification (also with Keith), so it should be fun. I’m hoping to get a chance to do a wreck diving specialty course here, too, but we’ll see if I have time to drag Keith out to do that one. James is interested in doing it, too, as is Jodie – but she’s leaving soon, so who knows?
On that note, I was out diving with Keith a week or so ago, and got to do two more new dive spots. The first was a wreck dive, the Irou – which was a Japanese oil tanker, sunk off the coast of Koror by American planes during the Battle of Palau. We didn’t go inside the wreck very far (because the four of us that went weren’t really good enough divers to go around inside the ship without completely kicking up the silt bottom and ruining visibility), but we did swim along the entire length of its deck, explore its exterior, and go in a little bit. Highlights of the spot:
At the bow of the ship, Keith tried to get me to do the Titanic pose with Riley. I declined. Riley, and Keith, were very disappointed. I did go over the bow and down the side of the boat about 10 or 15 feet to check out the coral – the thing is basically one massive reef by now, but the size of the ship is tremendous – you feel like a bug crawling along it.
The ship’s deck was covered with old beer bottles, encrusted with reef by now, that were apparently a favored beverage of the ship’s crew. I didn’t catch the actual beer name, and it’s not terribly important, but the sheer quantity of them was astounding. And, there’s something cool about holding a beer bottle that some soldier drank 65 years ago while you’re underwater on the deck of a sunken ship.
Keith found a crocodile fish – which really wasn’t terribly exciting, they’re not very pretty, they’re pretty well camouflaged, and it was just sitting there hidden under a bit of metal… but it was something new. Apparently, that fish is always in the exact same location whenever Keith finds it – though he has no clue where it goes the times he can’t find it.
Not really a highlight of MY trip, but apparently Keith and one of the other Navy guys (Ski, I think his name is), saw a cuttlefish – which is uncommon for that dive site. I saw Keith gesture towards it, and write down ‘CUTTLEFISH’ on his little underwater slate, but I missed it entirely. So… I saw the word cuttlefish at the Irou, but I did not cuddle with the cuttlefish. Carmen loves the things, so I made sure to tell her about the cuttlefish I… didn’t see.
The engine room was open, and we were able to go down inside a little bit and see the thing – objects look larger underwater, so it’s hard to say exactly how big the engine was, but it seemed the size of my garage back home. I’m almost certain that’s exaggerating, but it was a gihugeic piece of machinery
We went inside one open door, down a hallway, and took a look inside the second door on the left – and found some of those porcelain squat-style toilets the Japanese use. Or, at least, I am told the Japanese use. Or used. I’m not really clear on the status of their utility. I know they exist and they are Japanese. That is enough for me. The porcelain was actually still visible and white – or, at least, it –looked- white against the grays and greens of the reef and the ship.
The second stop on our trip (I ended up getting to go to both places I wanted because no one else would speak up) was Blue Holes, which is RIGHT next door to the more popular Blue Corner. Blue Holes is so named because it consists of four holes in the coral reef which lead inside the massive formation, you swim around in the caves, and come out a large opening at the bottom some 60’ underwater (the entrance holes are right under the surface of the water). It is apparently connected to an extensive network of caves ominously dubbed the “Temple of Doom” that is another dive in and of itself (which Keith has claimed he will take me on before I leave, though whether or not that actually happens remains to be seen). Highlights of Blue Holes:
The natural scenery on this dive was amazing. You dive down into the cave, and the light dims, but there’s enough filtering in through the surface holes that you can still see. You are surrounded on all sides by coral teeming with life, and the sunlight flickering in through the four spots in the roof gives this eerie, but incontrovertibly fantastic cathedral-like effect, with these columns of glowing light piercing down into the darkness of the surrounding cave. It’s needlessly prosaic, I know, but it was just unbelievable. As the kids say, it was the “cat’s pajamas.”
Reef fish naturally swim with their bellies towards the reef. As a result, the fish on the cave were swimming and living upside-down. This isn’t really a terribly remarkable thing to see, but it WAS kind of neat.
We saw a nudiebranch (I still am not sure of the proper spelling of that, though I’m sure Melissa will be happy to inform me) about a centimeter long (that’s right, I went metric on that shit) and was pretty brightly-colored and neat. Since I didn’t really see the one Keith found for Jodie, this was a pleasant first for me.
We saw a disco clam – if you can look up a video of one of these things, I’d encourage you to do so. They’re really weird-looking on the outside – or, at least, the one we saw was – with lots of little spiky-lookin’ things and various brightly-colored bits. But the reason it’s called a disco clam is because when you shine light on it (as Keith demonstrated), some weird sort of electrochemical reaction occurs which sends light skittering across the mouth of the clam (it looked like little lightning bolts, or one of those electric orbs when you touch it). Plus, not only was it pretty, it has the most entertaining name of any underwater life I’ve yet encountered. It sounds like a nightclub. “Hey, guys, you wanna go grab some beers at the Disco Clam?”
Hmm… I just had an idea for a business venture…
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