i made it to palau

It’s kind’a hard to believe that I’m actually here. The travel time to Palau from HNL was not so much fun, but I’m done traveling for a while. We were greeted by our “host” families at the airport late last night. They gave us good food for breakfast and I was given a lei my host, Naomi. The guys then piled into a Palau Mission Academy(PMA) bus and headed to our homes at PMA.

Walking into our new apartment was a total shock for me. The place is gigantic and really nice. We have a large entry area and living room space with nice couches. The kitchen is good sized and we have two fridges so we aren’t cramped for space. We also have a washer and drier in a room off the kitchen. So, no coin-op machines for us. There are two bathrooms and three bedrooms for four guys. The other guy here for two years and I have our own room all to ourselves. I have a hard time believing how lucky I got.

Friday was a time for a lot of firsts. I started out the day by exploring the campus with one of the guys and found out why we didn’t find a wifi access point the night before. Two breakers in one building had gotten turned off or tripped. The ones that powered the room that the AP was powered from. That was my first bit of work for PMA done. Pretty easy. We then checked out the covered gym and shot a few hoops. I decided to finish getting the wifi access setup, so I wandered up to the main office came out with a handful of keys. After a bit of work, I got everything setup and everyone registered into the filter system.

Next up was a trip into town with ten guys crammed into a car that normally seats seven. This is where it started getting a bit exciting. Oh, I forgot to mention that it had been raining all day and it never stopped. We stopped by the school to drop off one passenger that rode in with us to pick up another vehicle. We ended up picking another one up for ourselves. I’m guessing that since I am the oldest here by three years, the driving fell on me. The vehicle I got to drive is lovingly known as “the beast”. There is no passenger side window on the left. No, left is not a typo. This is a right hand driven vehicle that gets driven on normal right hand side roads. This van can easily seat twelve people and feels a little top heavy. So I had a fun time driving this around town while we got lunch at an awesome bakery/restaurant and picked up groceries and other necessities for the weekend. One more fun aspect was that whenever we went through a good sized puddle, my leg and foot would get splashed. Found out there was a decent sized hole in the floor near my door and was thankful that I was wearing my flops.

I’m going to cut here even though there is so much more I could talk about, but I’m thinking I should get some sleep and I’ll probably mention it some other time.

cheers!