Claude's Cafe

Well, another month’s past and all of a sudden it’s 2018! Happy New Year! The passage of time is a bit confusing to me because the seasonal weather changes are much more subtle than in New England. Seasons are essentially marked by the presence of trade winds from the east and quantity of rain, and the intensity of tides marks the lunar cycle. I noticed that I’ve started to pay more attention to the moon than the actual calendar date. The moon and tides seem more relevant to my daily life at the moment. By far the most prominent event since my last blog post is Christmas. Christmas here is essentially a multi-month celebration that peaks on December 25 with singing and marching at each town’s church. I started my Christmas cultural experiences with a concert on Christmas Eve at the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. A significant portion of SDA people also work at Green Banana Paper, so I was in a pretty familiar crowd. Since they were all singing, I mostly quietly played with their yo...

Hello from Kosrae! Happy December! My days have been full of dreamy waterfalls, lots of banana paper, and all sorts of adventures. Each day brings new excitement and projects, it’s slightly overwhelming to decide where to start with this blog post. Some things are quite consistent though, like quinoa and veggies, 6am sunrise and 6pm sunset, and the lively factory during the week. The holiday season is off to a strong start, the trade winds are beginning, and the sunrise is eye candy in the morning. Matt welded a trailer and we’ve been out in the boat on surfing and sunset missions. There are endless projects at the factory everyday, and spiders weave prominent webs between banana leaves. The moon is full once again, and thus the tides are more intense now and crabs roam around at night. I have been here for nearly two and a half months now, and each week seems to fly by faster than the previous one. I am looking through my notebook for blog material, and there are just so many stories...

Hello from Kosrae! The past few weeks have been wonderfully full of surfing, scuba diving, local culture, laughing with the girls in my efforts to learn Kosraean, bananas, banana bread, banana fibers, banana wallets, and a few coconuts. Most mornings I amble out of bed to the colorful, expansive Pacific Ocean and let the waves and sun wake me up. However, last week brought the surf, dive, surf rhythm to my days. One morning I heard, “Claudia, Claudia, surf bus is leaving in ten minutes!” Sunrise surf sessions are a super duper way to start the day. I've been loving scuba diving since that first spontaneous encounter (story in the previous blog). I went diving in Lelu harbor at two of the shipwrecks! Apparently there are four ships and two or three planes from World War II. Much of WWII was fought out here. The visibility was very poor because the bottom is silty but swimming around was wild! We swam over the deck, as if we were walking around the ship. The best word I can thin...