Today, as we said we would, we did a lot of cleaning. Cleaning of clothes, cleaning of our house, and cleaning of the car! We started off by doing our laundry. As Ben was taking our laundry basket out to the car so that we could drive to the laundromat, he felt a sudden burst of pain on his head. To his surprise, a MANGO had fallen directly onto his head!! He brought it inside the house with a few other 'street' mangoes that he picked up from the road. We call them
'street' mangoes because, well...they are from the street. We have a few large mango trees in our yard, and lately more and more mangoes have been falling into the street and today Ben had the rather unfortunate, improbable, interesting encounter described above. All in all, we collected 8 this morning from the street. We cut them up, some to use in blended drinks and the others just to eat.




After the street-mango incident, we went to the laundromat to wash our clothes. While they were in the washing machine, we went to the local 'farmers market' which is held at the Manoa shopping center several days out of the week. We picked up some beans, lemons, onions, and a new 'morph' of papaya. When we got home, Ben ate the papaya and we realized that there are so many 'morphs' of papaya and only one taste. However, with mangoes, there are so many different flavors! Even
mangoes from the same tree taste unique! And no--this is not because they are 'street' mangoes that have picked up the 'street' flavor. We've picked a few as well, and they taste drastically different even though they look the same! We have 2 different types of mango in our yard, yellow and red!




Street flavored fruit aside, we had a pretty good day and accomplished a lot! After the laundry, we came home and cleaned the house as Stacy will be here on Wednesday! That took us over an hour, and at the end we realized we still had to clean out the car so it was off to clean the car at the gas station! If you recall from our previous postings, there are no self serve gas stations here, so we used the vacuum at the gas station to clean out the inside of our car. We did all of this
after we took our bottles that we have been saving to the recycling location. In Hawaii, there is a $.06 charge to all bottled drinks. We have been buying a lot of bottled water, gatorade, etc. so we figured we'd save the bottles. ANyway, of that $.06, you can get $.05 back by taking the bottles to a recycling station. This was a law passed earlier this year to try and get Hawaiians to recycle. So far, we've collected $10.25 from this...that's 205 bottles! When we got to the station,
there were TONS of people recycling their bottles and it made us realize just how much people waste! There were thousands of bottles all being loaded into the trailer of a semi-truck and this was just our LOCAL recycling spot...it was hard for us to imagine that just on O'ahu there were probably a hundred of these locations, each with it's share of people claiming their $.05/bottle refund...if this didn't exist, these would all be going to the land fill...that's a LOT of bottles and we're on a
tiny island in the middle of the pacific!




Anyway, after that busy day, we just lounged around the house for the remainder of the day. After dinner, we went for a walk and made note of how well behaved peoples dogs are here. We're not sure what it is, but you NEVER hear a dog bark and they never come running up to the fence yapping at you! Perhaps it is due to the restrictions of ownership and the piles of paperwork and permits to own them, but people keep their dogs very disciplined here and we aren't complaining :)




Sleep well everyone, be sure to watch for falling mangoes!!!


Ben & Ashley