DAY 73 - Sober Roberts

After some snide comments by everyone about the inexplicable huge smiles on our faces this morning we did our work for today and then got ready to hitchhike towards Maku’u, because I’d had a Christmas package sent to Judy’s ages ago and had been wanting to pick it up from there for a while now. Hitchhiking was quite the pain today as it was still raining on and off and no-one seemed to go anywhere near Maku’u, meaning that we had to hitchhike with about five different people, including some hippies in an ancient bus with a very complicated door mechanism and a very nice male nurse. 

Being back at Judy’s was surreal – Subaja recognized us immediately but everything looked a lot cleaner than how we’d left it and it seemed at first like nobody was home, until Jai Dev poked his familiar towel-and-headphoned-head out of his room and happily greeted us. Judy wasn’t there so we had to navigate our way through the house following her instructions via phone and soon had my package, as well as some of my trousers that I’d forgotten, and then left again quite quickly. We needed to buy some groceries in Pahoa as well so we went to Longs Drugs with the person who’d picked us up, and ran into Austin and his girlfriend there (from ages ago, we watched ‘Pirate Radio’ at their house some time) They were going to Uncle Roberts straight afterwards so even though it was quite early we accepted their offer of a lift there and were soon on our way, after having stocked up on the usual beans and nuts. After arriving I was quite hungry, and we got some pizza while I finally opened my package, filled with various Swiss Christmas deliciousnesses like cookies and chocolate as well as art materials, tic tacs and tea – I’ve got the best mum ever :) (Hab dich lieb Masschen!) We weren’t drinking tonight so everything seemed a bit subdued; we met a bunch of people there again including pretty much all of our crew from the centre – Stephen had evidently been nipping on the wine again and could not stop himself from telling us over and over how awesome we are. We also met this awesome dude called Dave who was absolutely entranced by Sarah’s shawl:

 We were quite up for just a quiet night in so we got a lift back with Cedar quite early on. At home we hung out in the kitchen for a bit, me enjoying my Christmas cinnamon biscuits, when Mick and Stephen came back and engaged us in a most surreal conversation that was as hilarious as it was uncomfortable - mainly just hilarious though.