What an Adventure!

Sunday was probably the most adventurous day of my life. It was nuts! First of all, since we had "missed" our flight on Friday, everyone in the airport was super helpful and nice to us to make sure we got on the flight. It was kind of hilarious. The flight ended up leaving not half an hour (or more) late, but half an hour early! Hahaha, I have never heard of a plane leaving before its scheduled departure time (especially in Venezuela, of all places!). You can't really do that...or so I thought. Anyways, it worked out for us, because Curacao is a half an hour ahead, so we didn't lose any time at all! We got there super fast (it's so close!)...and then the adventure began.

The trouble all revolved around our villa. Some background: a few days before we were supposed to leave, the Powars decided that they were going to go to the US to attend 2 funerals, so they tried to change our 4-bedroom rental down to the 2-bedroom price. On Friday, our flight was delayed, and we texted our roommate Kim so that she could email our renter to tell them, since they were going to be waiting for us at the airport. Once we got back after going to the airport, we emailed them again to let them know we wouldn't be coming until Sunday. We NEVER heard back from them!

So when we arrived in Curacao, we had 2 phone numbers and an address, but no directions or a key to get into our house. We were planning on having the renter pick us up at the airport on Friday, but since we didn't hear back from them we didn't know if they'd be waiting for us when we got there or not - they weren't. We split up so that Crystal & Chelsea could call the renter, and Kaitlin and I could get the rental car. Me and Kaitlin waited for awhile and then I went back over to find them to see what was going on. They had bought a phone card and figured out how to use it, but the renter didn't pick up - on the office phone or the after-hours emergency number. My question is, why do you give out an emergency number if you aren't going to answer it? I called their office and left a message saying we needed to pick up the key. We tried the numbers again and still no answer. Even though it was Sunday, it was only 3pm and we figured that someone should be working - esp. at a vacation rental place (since a lot of people travel on the weekends). We decided to just try to find the house/office.

Our car rental company didn't have a road map (come on now), and they tried to give me a tourist magazine that had a lousy map in it, so I went to another rental company and bought a map for $3. The woman working there knew where our neighborhood was, so she showed us how to get there! We figured we'd just drive to the house and see if we could find the office if it was nearby, or just ask a neighbor.

I got to be the navigator throughout this trip, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was a lot of work though! The problem with the map throughout all of our navigation was that the island is tiny, but the map looks pretty big, so we missed a lot of turns because we thought they would be further away. Anyways, after a long time of driving around, we made it to the neighborhood, and then more driving around to find the actual house. The trouble with finding our street was that EVERY road began with the same 2 words, so you couldn't just glance at a street sign. Also, the infrastructure in Curacao is pretty bad so the roads and signs weren't clearly marked at ALL, which is frustrating.

Once we found our villa, we looked at it because that was all we could do since we didn't have the key. Thanks to Jesus, our neighbor was doing some gardening (in his boxers, awkward!), so we asked him for help. We asked if he knew the owner of our villa and if he could give us a different phone number than the one he had. He made a few phone calls and came back and told us that he got the number (his home phone actually) but that he wasn't home now, so we'd have to try to call him later. Good start. By now it was probably 5:30. I came up with the plan to find a hotel on the beach that we could hang out at, grab dinner, and keep trying to call the owner until he picked up.

We drove until we got to the bridge where we could see the city, and decided to venture down into it. The road we chose was pretty shady! It was an older, poor part of town with tiny roads...it kind of reminded us of Europe, even though we've never been to Europe. We didn't know where we were going at all, but we knew which direction the beach was in, so we just turned on roads that took us northeast. The first thing we saw after getting out of the old town was the Renaissance MOVIE THEATER! We were so excited because we had a few movies we wanted to see, so this was absolutely perfect. We walked down to the water (there wasn't a beach there) and watched the sunset, and then walked around the shops (which were all closed). We figured we could watch a movie at 8:30, and then we would decide to stay at another hotel or sleep on the beach or in our car if we hadn't gotten the key by then. We really didn't know if we would get it at all because we had no contact with the people since before our trip. Kaitlin, being pessimistic and a planner, kept talking about trying to stay at a hotel and skip the villa entirely since it was being such a hassle. The villa would have been perfect it we would have been here for a long time and had more people with us, but since we were only going to be here for 2 days, it would have been a LOT easier to stay at a hotel on the beach. However, I thought that was a bad plan since we had already paid for the villa, even though we would definitely have to resort to that if we couldn't get in!

Chelsea and Kaitlin were hungry, so they got dinner, and me and Crystal got sent on the mission to call the owner before it got too late. We couldn't find a pay phone, so we walked into the hotel lobby. We got distracted by glass stairs that had green lights on them that changed color - and then we saw the casino!! Crystal said she had never been in a casino before, and neither had I, but I've always wanted to. I remembered that I had a few quarters so I decided I should play one of the quarter machines. I was so excited to finally gamble for real! (haha I'm not a very good missionary) I got to pull the lever down...it was pretty fun. We didn't really know how it worked, but by comparing our machines, I figured out that there was $7.50 sitting on the machine that the previous person hadn't cashed!! So I cashed out and traded the receipt for 7 lucky dollars! Then we remembered that we were on a mission.

There weren't any pay phones, so we asked to use the phone at the desk. They let us. To our surprise, after all day of no one answering their phones, someone answered! The woman who picked up didn't speak too much English, but once she kind of figured out what she wanted, she asked for my number to call us back on...I reminded her, no, we are traveling today, we need to get into our house tonight. So she said to call her back in 5 minutes and she would give us the number to call to get our key. I didn't want to use the lobby phone again because I felt bad (and we would have to make 2 more calls, not just one), so we asked where a pay phone was that we could use. We got some directions that weren't very helpful.

So we wandered around for awhile looking for the phones. No luck. We even asked a security guard...he used what little English he knew to tell us to ask the front desk. We decided to try our luck there again - maybe they would let us use the phone again. there was a different guy working there, which I thought might work to our advantage. Instead, he told us that he didn't have a phone we could use. Darn! He tried to tell us directions to the pay phone again, so we asked more clearly and he gave us a map (that was absolutely no help, it just had a picture of the hotel and then white and he pointed to the white and that was where we were supposed to go). We figured we should hurry because we didn't know if Chelsea and Kaitlin would be done eating and just sitting around wondering where we were. We found them though, and they were fine. It was about 7:30 by now.

We continued on our mission. We ended up walking into downtown, where the famous row of houses is! I was excited so I took a few pictures. So many distractions! Oh yeah and we were SOOO thirsty this whole time! (We even checked the movie theater for water fountations, but alas.) The place we were looking for was just a few pay phones next to a taxi stand. We saw the sketchy men sitting around, and as soon as we realized that you could only use a credit card with the pay phone, we headed on. Fail! We saw another hotel, Howard Johnson, so we went in to see if we could use their phone. They had a pay phone in the lobby, but it was broken. We waited for a customer to check in and then asked, but she wouldn't let us use the phone. She told us to go to the taxi stand and ask the men to help us figure it out. Great, that is just what we were trying to avoid - the creepy taxi men!

However, they weren't so bad and they helped us figure it out. We were a little worried that the lady wouldn't answer our call because she tried so hard to get me to give her my number (which always means the person does not actually intend to talk to you again!) and she said to call back in 5 minutes, and it had been like 45. But fortunately she did answer! And she did have the number! So we called the renter - who we also feared wanted nothing to do with us anymore, since she already had our money and hadn't responded to our emails or calls. She picked up though, which was awesome! She was kind of mad at us because she said she waited for us on Friday for six hours! I apologized profusely and she was like oh it's fine. Whatever. Anyways, she said she would meet us in 20 minutes to drive us over the villa. We had really wanted to go see Dear John at 8:30, but if we had to drive to the rental place with her, there was no way. But we figured we could see it another night, so we were just glad that she was meeting us at all! So, after an amazing race-esque adventure, we finally got into our house! We found out that we won't get a refund for the Powars not being there and for us not coming on time, but I figured that would happen since we already paid. Thank goodness the people finally did their jobs and let us in (even though they didn't have much incentive since they already had our money) - it would not have been good to ditch the villa idea and stay in a hotel because we definitely wouldn't have gotten our money back. So everything worked out and we wish that we got to be here longer to enjoy our house and get to know the roads better instead of getting lost, but we are having fun and being thankful for our nice vacation! :)

PS We went to two great rustic beaches yesterday which I LOVED! I got to "snorkel" with my goggles and saw TONS of awesome fish!! I didn't see the sea turtles that I had heard about, but I found the Sydni fish, which is teal and purple! It had a teal eyelid and yellow eye. I chased it all around and then ended up finding an even bigger one which was so cool! Also, I raced a big 2 foot long fish, and it won by a long shot...fish are so fast! And then today me and Chelsea windsurfed. The lesson and area were TERRIBLE compared to perfect Aruba, but it was still fun to practice.