Hawaii Revisited?

July 19, 2011

On Sunday, I went diving with two Malay discos. All went well after I protested being left on the beach with six tanks, gear and two girls who’d never dived before while the boat went off 15 minutes away for two dives. I don’t care that the divers who want to go 15 minutes away are friends of the owner. If I have a problem, or God forbid, an emergency, what am I supposed to do? CPR on a desert island under the tropical sun with no oxygen for two hours?

Then during the surface interval, I painstakingly kept my mouth shut while they retrieved mostly dead jellyfish from shallow water. Those ended up as soup later that evening (they’ll eat anything, I swear). Back at the resort, I stopped keeping my mouth shut when one of the guys indicated to me that the sea grass growing on the aquarium wall makes for really good eats then went to ask the front desk for a plastic bag. My brain finally processed what he was intending to do and I put an end to that.

Yesterday, the zebra shark that they keep in the fish farm enclosure which I’ve never been to visit for the explicit reason that if I ignore it, I don’t have to think about it, got moved to the aquarium. At least he has a little more room in there, but now I have to think about it. And Ryan’s point that at least it’s alive whereas if we went rogue and freed it, it would probably be caught by a fisherman within a day – that point, that’s pathetic!

Today, the manager of the resort asked Ryan if he knew anything about the new Polish divemaster telling the same idiots from above that they can’t harass the turtles. He got he distinct impression that management’s attitude is to let the customers do whatever they want. I could have told him that.

Today, Ryan asked me where we could go if we quit. Now’s not the perfect time to be asking this question. I have been depressed over this place pretty much since we got here. I think I’m done with SE Asia – we’ll spend another winter here if it has to be that way, but otherwise I’m done.

The way I see it, there are two options – either we commit to a country and we wage a war and probably consider some jail time in our future. Or we go somewhere where the environment is respected and protected. Somewhere where the dive shop you work for will back you up when you put a customer back on the boat no refund because they harassed a turtle. Somewhere where the senior staff of the dive shop doesn’t put you in awkward and potentially dangerous situations.

This morning, Ryan was told that on the 21st we would start teaching five Chinese students, two of whom don’t speak English. The part of me that’s been the one to deal with every Asian student that we’ve been given thus far wants to say, “it’s Ryan’s turn.” The part of me that enjoys a happy boyfriend and doesn’t want to deal with three days a moody grumpy boyfriend knows that I should probably do it.

This morning we had a job interview with Jack’s Diving Locker in Kona, HI. Five months after going through this with Maui, we pulled out the old bank statements, calculators and craigslist to do math and budgeting to figure out if we could viably make it work on a different island. What’s the difference between Maui and the Big Island – about $500 a month in rent for starters. I pulled out a cost of living website which places Maui well above the cost of living of San Jose, while placing the Big Island well below. We asked about pay and cost of living before anything else simply because there was no point in going through the interview process if the result was going to be exactly the same as with Maui.

So why Hawaii revisited again? Hawaii (or Floriduh for that matter) continues to be the perfect balance between doing what we love and living a more normal life where at the end of the day there’s an apartment with a kitchen and a fridge and a grocery store. A life with health insurance and health care that doesn’t suck. A life with a five day work week and weekends to relax and enjoy. A life without visa runs every three months. And a life where maybe our friends and family occasionally come to visit us.

Now we are waiting to find out if they will offer us positions. We should hear at the end of the week.

In the meantime we are meant to be making plans for a visa run at the end of the month. Both of us are procrastinating, I think. Every time I bring it up, I get Ryan’s stock answer, “this is so stupid, why do we have to do this.” It irritates me because he knows the answer. Despite my enthusiasm for finding frogfish, I’m procrastinating because I’m not sure that I want to come back. Again, in the spirit of being a grown up and making decisions that are thought out, we should come back. But in the spirit of sanity, we should go elsewhere. But where? We’ve moved two times in 5 months. And it’s typhoon season in PH!

Do I sound grumpy? I don’t mean to sound grumpy.

Peace xoxoxoxox