DAY 44 - New Years!

The power situation was a little better in the morning since the solar panels could secure a tiny bit of electricity, but we had to be super careful with it all day. I finished Kali’s mural and since the washing machine could obviously not be used anymore, we decided to go to Pahoa and do all our laundry today before travelling on to Kona in two days. As we were about to leave, an older woman came over to buy milk from Jai Dev so we asked her whether she could give us a ride there and she agreed even though she requested two dollars payment for her services, which is behaviour we have not come across before. As we were on the road just before Pahoa, Sarah suddenly whispered to me ‘She’s falling asleep!’ and sure enough just as I turned to look at her, the woman’s head flopped to one side and only through Sarah’s immediate reaction in grabbing her head and slapping her lightly did she come to her senses again and shrugged the entire thing off very casually, but we were for sure very happy to get out of her car very immediately afterwards. Sarah left me in charge of the laundry to go and get her eyebrows done (a terrible mistake since I immediately screwed this simple task up by completely forgetting to wash one of the loads of clothes). I met a cool old guy called Tony and was given some free Chinese food from a woman also waiting for her laundry, which led to my shameful failure as a vegetarian because I could not bear to see all the (free!) pork bits go to waste and MAAAY have had some. Sarah returned shortly with a pizza and after we sorted out the forgotten bag of clothes and squeezed another wash in just before closing time, we went home. For New Years Eve we had decided to go to Uncle Roberts again but had been spontaneously invited by Quanah Christ (or as Sarah calls him, 'that Christ guy') to come to a party in the neighbourhood and go to Uncle Roberts afterwards. He picked us up with two of his friends, a white-haired man called John and a slightly full-on girl called Ally and we went on our way to the party at someone called Leslie’s house. Not much was going on there when we arrived and despite Leslie’s constant efforts to bring some life to the party by bedecking everyone with glow sticks and flickering glitter hats, we got bored very quickly and when every new arriving guest turned out to be older than the last we persuaded John and Quanah to drive us to Uncle Roberts. They happily obliged (John spent a very long while whining to us about his lack of a female travel companion, and when asked why he couldn’t just go with one of his mates he replied with the fail-safe argument that he didn’t like dancing with men) and so soon we were at Uncle Roberts once again, where a bunch of small children were setting off fire works in a manner that the Health & Safety department back in England would not have approved of. We didn’t see as many of our friends there as we normally do because there was some sort of DJ night going on at the same time (20 dollars entry though!) but we did run into Dreadlock-Alex from our night at Jeffrey’s and Keahi the fire-fighter. We were also introduced to ‘Big Joe’, a local celebrity here because of some sort of boar-hunting TV show that he is in, a well as his completely unintelligible co-star Mike. We were dancing and watching the fire works all night, Sarah had a great time with Keahi while I tried to keep to myself and escape the advances of some Brazilian guy who insisted that he could show me the lava flow really close by if I just followed him out into the darkness, something that did not sound like a good idea. Keahi arranged for us to get a lift back with  a friend of his, Isaac, and so we got home safe and sound. Happy New Year!

'Don't be a retard' used to be on the list, but apparently that's offensive.