Ready…or not?!!

Mostly, I love island life. It is largely slow and relational, with people and relations much more important than tasks and time. This is just a normal difference between warm climate and cold climate cultures. Me, being from a cold climate, has had to do much adjusting over the last 5 years, but it has slowly evolved into my frustrations and amazement being generally less frequent. Well, I am still floored at times by what can happen in what seems like a no-brainer, can't be misunderstood situation. For instance, on Saturday evenings, we as a team like to "go out" for dinner to a local 'restaurant'. This gives us one night a week off from cooking. In the process, there have been times where we have waited up to an hour for our food, and that has discouraged us, to say the least. It is not a restaurant like you are used to, where you are seated, and someone brings you a menu to choose your preferred meal from. This is where you show up, hoping that someone is there with the doors open at the 'usual' time for business. There is no menu, you just ask "what are you having tonight?", although there are standby's that you can always count on, like our usual choice of baleada's. Well, Kathy and I have volunteered to pick up kids for the Young People's Program at church every Saturday evening, so we are much more time conscious than we had to be previously. In order to speed up our dining event, I sought out the cook, and let her know that we would love to eat there, but would need our food at 6pm, because we had to leave by 6:40pm, and for what reason. She assured me this would be no problem, asked how many baleada's we wanted, and repeated the time we would be there. So, a ½ day later, we are walking down to the restaurant, and see her walking the other way! She says, "no problem, it's all ready, I'll be right there". Thinking there must be someone else at the restaurant in her place, we go on up….to a locked door at an empty restaurant. After waiting about 10 minutes, I find the owner, who had just come in from fishing and had no idea. Fortunately, she eventually calls the other gal, who says she's on the way right then. Another 10 minutes goes by and some other girl rushes by and says something about getting the key. She opens up, and begins preparing the food….only the baleada bread had been made. Well, we got our food at about 6:40, eat one quickly and put the rest in foil to eat later. On our way down the path around 6:50, we see our cook, sauntering on up the path, who then greets us cheerily and asks "how was dinner?". I just smiled, said fine, thanks, and go on with our evening plans…