Mini Update Part 1: The fence, the dog & the rooster

Welcome to another episode of Pieces of Eights: As I seems to write rather lengthy blog posts I thought I'd try to split the latest one up into a few mini updates that I'll post successively over coming days.

Today was day 17 of construction on the Great Fence of Palau

progress pic from a few days ago

. I'm happy to say it appears to be FINALLY near completion. The guys have had one day off since starting on the 5th of July but at least their working hours have decreased from the 13 hour days they were doing early on. This hasn't really stopped my frustration levels as it's still been constant noise, concrete dust & welding smoke all around our home. The fence has now taken shape as a chain link fence with 3 lines of barbed wire on the top. This only goes around 3/4 of the building, so is COMPLETELY pointless (and not to mention unnecessary). 

Now onto the dogs & roosters: It all came to a head last Monday night. After night after night after night of poor sleep due to constantly being awoken by dogs late night then roosters early the next morning it finally got to me. The neighbours dog was barking & howling endlessly at around 2am, I finally cracked it and bellowed a massive SHUUUUUUUUUUT UUUUUUPPPPP! Which of course did absolutely nothing, the dog gave me a cursory glance then kept going. No one else seemed in the neighbourhood seemed to stir. 

I was pretty much at my wits end with the constant lack of sleep. So I ended up going out for a drive in the early hours of the morning. Mostly I just found lots of stupid dogs sleeping on the road (no I didn’t kill any) but I did come across a late model Honda HR-V on its side at a main intersection in town. The cops and a towy were all around it with no driver to be seen. Watching the cops and the towy attempt to right the vehicle was comical. Twice they managed to drag it sideways along the road before they got lucky and managed to get it back on the wheels. They seemed to miss the concept of needing to pivot it off the two wheels that were touching the ground.

taken soon after sunrise

Anyway back on topic, after having some of our closer Aussie friends over for dinner & drinks on Tuesday night we discussed the noise problem and were informed that electricity doesn’t cost as much as we’d been quoted. It sounds like the $200 per month that we were previously told is if you leave your whole house air conditioned constantly. One of our friends gets $140 bills and that is with some significant air con use. So since then we’ve run the wall banger aircon unit in the bedroom at night. Even on the low fan setting it’s quite loud so we aren’t hearing anything from outside. Each night since we’ve been sleeping better and it’s making a big difference.

Ok that's enough for now, stay tuned for my recap of my best day in Palau so far: A trip to the rock islands & jellyfish lake.