Hurry up and Wait

 Girl at a Kava Ceremony on the island of Truk. The beautiful, remote Pacific islands of  Micronesia  are  strung across the Pacific between Hawaii in the east, The Philippines in the west and Papua New Guinea in the south.  I was there for a series of films called The New Pacific , a political, historical and cultural look at the Pacific nations from the US West Coast to China as the centre of world economic focus changed from Europe to Asia.  Stone money, Yap. Nobody steals it because everybody on this tiny island knows who it belongs to. I wrote a short story based on my travels in Micronesia. The missionary station was actually based on a mission in Papua New Guinea, but the way of going about things, and the fish, is Micronesian: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/featured-fifty-fiction-the-long-pig_b_3293789 World War II shipwrecks, Truk Lagoon. World War II tank, Saipan Yap men with their Betel Nut bags. Betel Nut chewing was, and presumably still is, w...

The next random pack of slides out of the box is a karaoke evening at the US army base in Okinawa. For the full story of this awkward situation, see  my earlier post   With the US Army in Okinawa .  Or just look at my expression here... This was January 1984. None of us in the UK had heard of karaoke, let alone a karaoke-singing taxi driver. The first karaoke bar outside Japan opened in LA in 1982. Karaoke taxi driver Karaoke scoreboard