Movin' On Up

We moved into our house this week! We moved into our house this week! We moved into our house this week! As you can tell, we are thrilled to be the brand new tenants of Quarter No. 37 on Tauguw Heights. Our new digs are about half a mile from work, near the top of one of the many hills overlooking Colonia. Getting here was a bit of an ordeal, and one that isn’t quite finished yet, so let’s back up for a moment.


Three months ago, Quarter No. 37 was in rough shape. The walls were still standing, but the jungle was moving in quickly. The trees sprouting through the vent in the roof no doubt made it cool and shady inside, but we were looking for something a little bit more cosmopolitan. Fortunately, at the time of our arrival an apartment was available at the highly coveted Yap Cooperative Association. The YCA apartments are directly above the biggest store on island. During the week the bustle is surprising. It wasn’t a bad place to be for awhile, but after a month or so we were ready for a change. Luckily, the contractor finished work on Quarter No. 37 only 3 weeks behind schedule, and we got the keys near the end of last week.

And boy, did we get keys! There are eight doors in the house, all of which have keyed – and incompatible – locks. The result is a keychain that would make any janitor proud.



We’ve done what we can to minimize this collection. Our day-to-day keychain, while still large, at least no longer has its own gravitational field.

While you’re here, let’s take a quick tour of the house. Come on in and set a spell…



As you might expect the setup is quite different from back home. The main living area is an open L-shape, with more windows than wall space. The windows are louvered, and with very deep overhanging eaves, we’ve been able to leave them open in all but the fiercest rainstorms. We get pretty good breezes in our hilltop location, and between that and the highly reflective tin roof, it isn’t too unbearably hot most of the time. In any event, the master bedroom (there are 3 bedrooms in all) has a window air-conditioner that works quite well – KC thinks too well – to bring the temperature down at night.


The kitchen is in the center of the house, and is unfortunately still a work in progress. The housing office, despite three months notice, decided not to look for an oven and range until the day we were to move in. None were available on island, and so we’ve been making do with two camp-type butane stoves, both of which bear this helpful warning label:


Luckily, the kitchen is well-ventilated, and so we haven’t suffered any ill effects. The gas stoves are actually pretty nice. They’d be great for car camping, and we’re hoping to be able to hang on to them once the stove is installed. In the meantime, the equipment hasn’t hampered KC’s cooking talents too much. Her attempt to fry brownies wasn’t much of a success, but the fresh tuna, long beans, and mashed potatoes came out wonderfully.



Our first, and probably only, big home improvement project has been to paint the main room. It was blindingly white when we moved in, and so we went to the hardware store to try and find some paint that was on sale (retail price for paint here is nearly 40 bucks a gallon). Luckily, the store had a couple of returned gallons that weren’t too awful, and we picked those up and went to work. We still have some touching up to do, and the color scheme is probably not something we’d choose at home, but it works pretty well in the tropics. In any event, it’s nice not having to wear sunglasses indoors anymore.



So far, our only bad moments in the house have come courtesy of the resident population of tropical insects. We have theories about how the above-ground nuclear testing in the nearby Marshall Islands may have contributed to the rise of a race of super-bugs in this part of the world. The worst moment came the other morning, after a huge rainstorm had pounded the house for much of the night. KC woke up to a tickling sensation on her leg, and bounded out of the bed with a shriek of terror. The tickling sensation was a cockroach, big enough to have its own zipcode, that immediately jumped off of KC and onto our brown sheets. Matt, with no eyeglasses handy, had to resort to picking up a magazine and bashing anything that looked like it might be moving. After a few swats, the roach was history, as was the magazine, which the roach had bitten in half following a glancing blow. Ok, that last part isn’t really true, but it wouldn’t have shocked us all that much. We’d like to say that no bugs can shock us anymore, but that seems to be asking for trouble.




That’s all for this week. We’ll post again soon!