St. John Talk Blog

In some countries, it’s really easy to be a billionaire.  Some currencies are worth so little that is takes a thousand units just to buy something simple, like a pack of gum.  This is a photo of my first 1000 Swiss Franc bill.  Now unlike those other countries I was referring to above, this baby is essentially worth one thousand U.S. dollars at the current abyssmal exchange rate (thank you Dubya) and is the first one I’ve seen in my 2+ years of living here.  This came from part of the apartment sublet income when we were on St. John.  Now, I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to break this one, but it sure is fun thinking up ways to piss off some Swiss cashier.  I’m thinking of maybe buying a single stamp at the post office or the local paper (which I can’t read anyway) at the newsstand.  Any other good ideas?

I was leaving work today when I noticed this 2008 Suzuki Grand Vitara parked right outside my office building in Zurich.  Now, I have never seen a Suzuki in Switzerland before, let alone the exact same car as the one we got in January on St. John.  Now, I’m not trying to be a snob or anything, but on St. John you sort of get what’s most practical, what is easy to get parts for and what is cheapest to maintain.  However, in Zurich, the land of Audi, BMW, Mercedes (yes, I realize they are German not Swiss, but Germany is only about 40 minutes away) why in the world would anyone CHOOSE a Grand Vitara?  Especially considering that ours on STJ averages only 10.3 miles per gallon (it’s the hills that kill us kids, the hills).

After three months away from Switzerland, we arrived to find the Swiss are still weird.  The office secretaries left me a lovely card welcoming me back to Zurich, along with a small box of Sprüngli chocolates.  This is some of my favorite Schoggi  (Swiss German for chocolate) in all of Switzerland.  These chocolates were designed to look like a maybug, or Maikaefer in German, also known, please don’t ask me why, as a cockchafer (shouldn’t that be what the palm of the hand is called?).  These ugly bugs come out for a couple of weeks at the end of April, beginning of May here in Europe.  Lord knows why one wants to celebrate these once-abundant agricultural pests, let alone make and eat chocolates that look like them.  Look at these two photos.  Incredible.  Almost impossible to tell the difference between the chocolate and the real bug.

The real bug photo came from the Wikipedia article which, if any of you are buggy enough to read, can be found here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockchafer

P.S.  Since we’ll be in Zurich for the next two months, we can easily start posting back on our old semi-retired Zurich blog www.inderschweiz.blogspot.com, instead of this St. John blog.  If anyone cares enough to have a preference, please let us know.

Well, American Airlines might know why we fly; however, I have my doubts it knows how to fly.  Our flight Thursday night from New York to Zurich was supposed to leave at 5:25pm.  We did not lift off until 10:02pm.  That’s over four and a half hours late.

A late flight is one thing.  In this case, we were locked in the plane for those nearly five (5) hours.  We pulled out onto the tarmac.  We waited in line as if we were to take off on time at 5:25pm.  When we were the next in line to take off (after waiting about 30 minutes), the captain announced that we were going back to the gate because there was a cooling issue in the cockpit or with the computer equipment.  Once at the gate, we waited and waited and waited.

Then, they couldn’t get additional fuel to the aircraft.  So, we waited over a half hour for that to be resolved.

We were supposed to land at 7:25am.  We didn’t land until after 11:35am.  Ugh.

This whole scenario is particularly disconcerting in light of the thousands of flights cancelled by AA in the past weeks because AA failed to maintain its wiring.  Is there any reason to think it manages its fleet of 767s any better than it manages its MD-80s?  I don’t think so.

So, we left St. John on Tuesday and spent the next couple of nights with my sister, Karen, and her family in Putnam County, New York before flying off again to Zurich.  Here is a typical New York City highway scene on the afternoon we drove up there from JFK airport.  Having been on St. John for three months straight, it was a pretty stark contrast between the little island roads and the VanWyck Expressway (can you tell which is which?).  Luckily we were heading north as the traffic was mostly southbound as you can see from the photo. 

*St. John road photo taken from Flickr search, username: atpcz

We are off island for about two months, clearing out the apartment in Zurich, and planning to do the final ship of stuff down to St. John.  We’ll be back on-island probably late June or early July, certainly before St. John Carnival on July 4.  In the meantime, check back as we may be posting from Zurich on here.  Rest assured, Casey is on call at the house, looking after things and answering phones.

No, it’s not Stingray City. It’s just Dennis Bay on St. John. In addition to the turtle we saw (see video from yesterday), we also saw this beautiful stingray right after we hopped into the water:

Cool, huh?

Yesterday we took the new boat over to Dennis Beach to do some snorkeling. We saw a stingray (picture to come). However, we also saw a sea turtle. Here’s a video of it:

Again, be patient. It takes a while to load. Enjoy.

Probably the biggest news item this year, for us at least, was the party we had on the evening of Saturday, April 5.  This was a combined housewarming and 40th birthday party that was in the planning for at least six months.  Now, I won’t tell you who turned 40.  If anyone asks me, I still say “27.”

It has been a very busy several weeks here with many visitors coming and going since the end of March.  Some of our dearest friends braved the friendly skies to join us down here for the party.  The award for farthest travelled goes to Tom and Stephanie who came from Zurich, Switzerland.  Second runner up award to Paul and Alex(andra) from London.  And third place is a close tie between Irene and Maria from San Francisco and Kris and Stephen from Los Angeles.  But honestly, everyone who came down (friends from Houston, Philadelphia, New York and Boston) as well as St. John locals all deserve a hearty THANK YOU for being part of the wonderful unforgettable celebration.

I was reminded to post a blog entry about the party by our devoted blog-reader and good friend Andrew, who emailed me the other day and wrote, “We had a fun time at your party. I thought that it might rate an article on your blog” which of course made me feel terribly guilty that we had not yet posted one.  This is partly because we had no photos of the party as we were completely dependent upon the photographic skills of others.  We were too busy scrambling around, trying to be the perfect hosts.  Any guests reading this?  Did we succeed?  In any event, here is a link to a bunch of party photos taken by our friend Irene:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hthphoto/sets/72157604594938055/

Irene did a terrific job trying to include everyone at the party in her collection of photos.  From what I can tell, the only guests omitted were Irene herself and local friends, Cindy, Paco, Hilarie and Jason.  If anyone else is missing, let me know.

THESE are flamingo tongues, a type of sea snail, that Matt was referring to on his post below.  These are the very ones we saw snorkelling yesterday, taken with my trusty little Canon IXUS 60 (the European version of the PowerShot SD600 – bought it back when we still lived in Switzerland) in it’s underwater housing.  Matt took the photo.  He dives down better than I do while snorkeling.  I don’t like the pressure on my ears.

Well, it’s not really a toy.  But below is our new purchase in St. John.  We went out on it for the first time yesterday, out from Coral Bay for some snorkeling.  We saw a couple nurse sharks (see Howard’s post), a bunch of sea cucumbers, a jellyfish, a number of flamingo tongues, and other things.

But, to the point, here are a few pictures of the boat:

Yes, it is what you think…a shark.  Actually there were two of them, nurse sharks.  They’re usually of the “you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you” variety.   This one was just sleeping on the sandy bottom.  Matt dove down to snap this face to face picture.  Needless to say, he came back up, face intact.

This was the scene outside our living room patio this morning after last night’s very heavy rain.  Seems that the termite nests get flooded in the trees, causing them to flee and seek dry bright areas.  So, not only were these critters all dead by our screen door but we had about a dozen of them in the living room flitting about one of the lamps.  Don’t really know how they got there.  Must have found a way to shimmy their little bodies in somewhere.  (They all died too, mostly by my squashing them).