The last time I was not quite finished with the salon part! So, I figured I could make a second part and next week the third to cover the removal of the bench on the port side. For this week, I made a couple of videos that cover a fraction of the weeks of work it took, but it gives a good impression how I spend my days in April and May of this year.
The next video shows the dust that appears when I do the sanding of the steel. This dust is the cause of my dirty appearance these days.
The next video is about regular sanding and hammering, I made it two days ago and it kind of exploded on YouTube. Really interesting to see that within one day we had the most views ever! And we more than doubled our subscribers! From 10 to 23 (today)! If you like our blog, our videos or if you want to support us in any way: watch our videos, and like, share and subscribe! It would be awesome if we could earn a bit of money with the free content we make. In order to be eligible for this, a Youtuber has to have at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch-hours. We are still far from that, but all the small bits help. Many thanks in advance!
And in case you are interested, this is how it shows on YouTube:
And yesterday I made this video, more about the work in the bilge and the hammering. I ended it with 10 minutes of a beautiful sunset when I was painting there, just south of the Saltpier.
I tried to get a grip on how much time it would take to finish the salon. I divided the boat in parts, I described the work that I had to do and estimated how much time it would cost to finish it. I estimated the treatment of the steel inside the salon would take about 24 days. This was quite an exact estimation and I finished it almost completely before I started the yoga-teacher training. I even surprised myself with this, since I am a very bad time-estimator.
During this time we were living at Jörgs place (see our blog post ‘Making a blog – Part 3: Thinking long term‘) and the structured life we had there really helped with getting the work done on the boat. I started around 9 am after breakfast, worked until lunch, had lunch with Peter and then got back to the salon and worked until 6 pm when they closed the boat yard. And now we are fortunate that Jörg is back on the island! It is a short time, but still very nice to spend some time together. We have the 8:30 am breakfast on Sundaymorning again together with Martha, go out for diner with some lovely conversations and we help each other out with some small stuff. Martha actually lent me a very inspirational book, that I want to recommand for everyone with a busy life. It is called ‘The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down’ written by Haemin Sunim, a Buddhist monk and a professor in Buddhism at Hampshire College. It is very much in line with the philosophy of the Yoga Sutra’s and it really gives some practical advice and insights on slowing down and be more conscious about the world we live in. Very interesting!
Throwback Thursday, a familiar place
Tala Lodge is very close to the spot where I initially lived when I arrived on Bonaire in 2020. I had applied for a job in the hospital in January 2020 and could start in April 2020. During this time, Covid-19 started to become a pandemic and all the flights were cancelled. I was very lucky I was a pharmacist and I could travel with the last plane that only took medical professionals to Bonaire to help with the covid-crisis. If I would have a different profession, it wouldn’t have been possible to travel to Bonaire and I would have to spend the time in the Netherlands and wait six months until the flights would go again. I was very lucky! The plane even got mentioned in the news at that time, although they didn’t mention the rogue pharmacist that was on board.
Extra doctors from Amsterdam to Bonaire
Eleven medical specialists from the Amsterdam University Medical Center are leaving for Bonaire this week to assist the hospital there in the fight against corona. They will remain in joint quarantine for two weeks after arrival.
During the quarantine, they make preparations and write protocols, tailored to the local situation. After this, they will be ready for support together with the other doctors in the hospital. The help is needed, because the Netherlands requires the Caribbean islands to be able to handle a “worst case scenario”. This help is guaranteed with the support of the extra specialists. At the moment, no infections have been registered on Bonaire.
In the plane I had the area from the toilet to the next toilet for myself. A very unique experience!
As it says in the news article, I had to be in quarantine for the next 14 days. The weather was great, the appartment was really spacious and I could sit outside. I followed the unraveling of the pandemic with surging numbers across the world, while I was inside an appartment on a tropical island. I did do some yoga, walked around the parking lot a bit, and I studied the protocols, pathophysiology and treatment of covid-19. I had to call every day to Public Health about any symptoms (I didn’t have any) and my temperature. I think everybody was very afraid in the first months, but luckily I stayed healthy!
This was at Kaya Finlandia and that is just around the corner from Tala Lodge. When I finally could leave the appartment I went to the closest beach immediately. I went there a couple days ago again for the first time since when I used to live on Kaya Finlandia and it brought back all those memories.
So I was walking on the beach, enjoying the sunset and watching the small fishes in front of me, and then! I think I spotted a juvenile Mantis Shrimp! Those are pretty amazing shrimps, from Wikipedia: They are thought to have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom and have the most complex front-end for any visual system ever discovered. And they have a sort of claws, ‘smashers’, that can produce the surface-temperature of the sun when hammering. I made a video from this encounter.
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