Friday, October 23, 2009

More Houses





The first three houses are next to one another near our chapel. The purple house is new and the fence hasn't been built yet.

Homes in Aruba






All the houses are built out of cinder or concrete blocks. Then they add stucco to the outside and paint them. They love bright colors--blue, lime, purple, yellow, mustard, and burnt red especially. The fences around the houses are all different and unique. They too are painted bright colors. I loved the lime green fence. The house with all the palm trees is more upscale. Other than at the highrise hotel end of the island often you find a rundown house next to a very nice house. Often the people work on the houses themselves to try to save some money. Everything is very expensive here. Many of the houses are small.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009


More on Desert Golf




One sister is hitting her ball which is in the rough. You can tell by the red post on the left of the picture. We didn't venture far into the cactus or bushes, so we didn't see any snakes. However, we did see donkeys and about 75 goats. It was a strange sight to see goats on the "green". Afterwards we had a barbeque at our place for all of them.

The Desert Golf Course





One of the young missionaries is teeing off on the first tee. As you can see it is pretty desolate and yet here there are no cactus or bushes as your rough. Another missionary went to retrieve my ball from the cactus. You need to take a club with you because of the snakes. The close up picture of cactus includes a dark colored flat surface that is the green. This is all sand that has been mixed with oil. You can use a carpet as a kind of rake to smooth the green before you shoot. The only trouble is that the greens smell. Also your ball does not roll well. Of course, your ball doesn't roll well on the course either. Once the ball hits the sand or rocks it pretty much stops dead. I hadn't golfed for over 40 years and this was Dave's first attempt. He didn't see why so many people get so much enjoyment from playing golf. It could be that the temperature was over 100 and the humidity high and the wind was very strong. His whole head today is very red. We had golf carts and the "kids" saved us the new cart. However, there was a lot of walking because we didn't hit the ball that far and it was easier to just walk. Hole # 1 took over an hour to play. We had a sister missionary who had never played before either and there were six of us playing together. After 3 1/2 hours we had finished 5 holes.

Fun on Preparation Day


Each week we have one day to take care of personal business such as laundry, shopping, haircuts, email,cleaning, etc. and hopefully have some time for fun. This week we decided to get all the missionaries (14) together from all parts of the island and go desert golfing. Eight of them took the bus to this end of the island and we squeezed in cars and went to the course. The well at the golf course ran dry several years ago and has now reverted to what most of the island looks like--desert, rocks, and cactus. Here is a picture of all the missionaries except us as we were taking all the pictures.