Return to "normality" – Blog with Coffee

( Part 46 )

The time of ‘confinement’ in the houses passed after a month. At will, it was possible to leave the house for shopping. Unfortunately, there were still restrictions and one could only move individually. My husband went back to work and the children still stayed at home. At first, they introduced remote teaching until the situation normalised, and the time comes for the children to go back to regular class time. The school year passed with a slow return to normality. Although it’s hard to call it normality when you had to walk around wearing masks and with restrictions at every turn. The only good thing was that you didn’t have to sit in lock-down anymore.

The holiday season had arrived. Due Covid, we couldn’t leave, so we decided to make good use of that and explore the island this time. We planned to go around it, exploring as much as we could. Various events are organised on the island during the holidays. Unfortunately, in Covid’s year, they were very truncated.

Extracted salt

At the beginning of July, we went to see how salt is harvested. This is the island’s natural wealth, and the best time for harvesting is late July and early August. That day we had to get up very early, at 5am. We gathered at Sandy Ground at 6am with the people we go to a Sunday Mass. We had buckets, gloves, shorts, and shoes in order to avoid any scratches. We went deep into the pond to extract salt. The substrate of the entire pond is fossilised salt that is just being mined. The water is transparent as in a tap and you can see the substrate. Such a sheet of ice under the water. We had to crush the salt very gently with sharp tools and pick it out slowly not to bring the dirt with the mud that is underneath. Immediately after extraction, it is washed gently with salt water from the ocean of any dirt, and then spread out on a sloping surface so that the excess water drains away and the sun dries the salt. Once dried, the salt is suitable for consumption. It is a natural salt used in cooking as well as for other purposes. Although we had to get up very early in the morning, and were very tired, such an experience brought us a lot of pleasure, and at the same time we were able to learn a bit about the local culture and traditions. In Anguilla, the Salt Festival is celebrated during the summer holidays. In 2020, it was 23-25 July.

Learning to extract salt 😉

To make it less colourful, as you can read here, I will tell you that our pump broke down and we had no hot water. As if that wasn’t enough after 2 weeks, some garden pipe broke when I wanted to water our vegetables that I had planted with the children, and water started pouring everywhere. It was very stressful because I didn’t even know where to turn the valve to cut off the water supply. It was nowhere in the house, in the storage room too, at the pump suddenly five different ones, now be smart and choose. I turned the first one closest to the pump, it cut off all the water, but after a while the pump started turning on and off every so often, even though the valve was turned off.

Our Caribbean vegetable garden 😁

In addition, this was accompanied by fireworks coming out of some strange black thing next to the pump. For me, at least, the atmosphere of fireworks did not add up, quite the opposite. I was annoyed to the max. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this pissed off. I think I’ve accumulated too many faults of this house, which were supposed to be repaired since mid-December, and it was already after mid-July and nothing had been done. Can you believe it!!! Nothing!!! Unbelievable. I asked at the beginning to install nets in the doors and windows. I was told that we had to wait for the wheels which had been ordered and had to arrive. I waited and waited until I eventually moved out, and the mosquitoes bites us every night without mercy. Not to mention the dishwasher, which was supposed to be repaired, and instead it served until the end as an “ornament” for the kitchen cabinets, or in other words as an extra place for dust to accumulate. The windmills in some rooms reached the speed of a snail or a turtle, hmm, I don’t know myself which is slower. Windows abound around the house. The problem was that most of them either didn’t close or didn’t open, and when they did, you had to stick a piece of wood to stop them closing. That’s the bonus. The doors, all multifunctional. Entrance doors and exit doors as many as – Attention!!! – 5, plus 4 exit doors to the terrace. And why multifunctional? Let me explain. The doors in our house are used as: entrance-exit doors, ventilation doors as they had such gaps between the doorframe that you could put your finger in, and decorative doors, because some of them couldn’t even be opened. Probably from old age. Plumbing. Waste of time. I won’t even describe it, because it’s a shame to spoil the mood. I’ll just tell you that you have to spend a fortune on a pipe clog remover products and other similar ones in order to function properly. There were pipes everywhere. Even in the garden for who knows why or who needs them for, they were lying on top of the ground, half buried, along the fence, in the middle of the garden. And why do they need them? The owner himself probably doesn’t know, but they are there. Perhaps under that swimming pool that the owner promised, when signing the rental contract with us, to put in the garden, which the children were very happy about. Of course, they didn’t live to see the pool, unless the landlord was referring to that wonderful ‘seasonal’ pool in our living room, which was created every time it rained. The water poured down the walls, so we had a pool in the living room on the floor, and as the drains were failing, the water had nowhere to run, so it stood in the passage halfway down the corridor where all the water ‘operating brain’ was. Once dry, we had a lovely green sludge that didn’t smell very good. Not to mention the gate, which just happened to be there and was supposed to be on a remote control. Admittedly, we did get the remote control, but it had been lying in a drawer all this time.