Typical Day?

Question: “So, now that you have had more than a couple of years to become used to retirement life, what do you do on a typical day in Grenada?”

We have been asked that question many times in similar ways such as: “What do you do here?” or “How do you spend your time on the island?” or "How do you fill your time?".

We often ask ourselves those same questions at 2:00 pm when we hear the ice cream truck play its familiar jingle while we are bobbing around in the sea, or when we happen to glance up at the sun in the late afternoon and guess at the exact time within 10 minutes... Is it happy hour already? What did we do all day?

At first, we felt the need to justify our existence on the island to those nice folks who were asking, and then we would list off things that we liked to do such as snorkeling, swimming, exploring the island, walks on the beach, a little shopping now and then...

“So what do you do with your time?” and “Do you have jobs?” .....

“No, we’re retired, we stopped doing that “W” thing”, we’d reply, wondering if retired people back in Canada got this kind of grilling too.

....and then sometimes we add that we have worked hard for four or five decades and it's our turn to slow down a bit and throw away the dreaded alarm clock. No more meetings. No more deadlines. No more memorandums and business plans. No more stressful office politics. We sold everything, and we have four suitcases. We travel from place to place to enjoy our healthy years while we can.

And then we say, "you can do it too", and then we get funny looks like we're crazy or something.

However, if you live on an island, you learn quickly that everything here takes longer: lines to pay bills; bank queues; walking to different grocery stores (because one doesn’t have everything you need); having to go to the bank almost daily to withdraw money from your account a bit at a time due to ATM restrictions... If you stop in at the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine, you have to chat with people you know. If you go for lunch at one of your favourite haunts for a cool one, you might have a visit with the owner or with some friends who happen to show up at the same time as you, and sometimes that turns into a very long visit. It’s island life. Meeting people on the beach turns into a 3 or 4 beers afternoon. Try explaining this to someone who works in the hustle and bustle of the big city in Canada where people hardly have time to say hello let alone speak with one another.

Life in the Caribbean requires an almost Zen-like level of cultural acceptance at any given moment. One of the most important steps in moving to the Caribbean is time separation therapy. This is going to take some practice and begins with disabling your wristwatch and permanently setting it at five o’clock. That way, each time you glance at your watch it helps to reprogram the mind to accept the notion that it is always time for an adult beverage. After a few weeks of this therapy, your "time" anxiety is a thing of the past and then you can lose the watch entirely. We keep ours in drawers at the ready for our next trip to the great white north.

It's difficult explaining to “alarm people” that we can sit on our beach chairs for hours, having sandwiches and a few cool ones (that we carried to the beach with us), watch the boats coming and going, take joy in the colours of the sea as they change, and even be entertained watching small storms pass by on the other end of island, until the day is almost gone.

We spend a bit of time listening to the rain during rainy season (it's rather soothing to the soul), and applying sun screen when it's not.

Our daily routine is very different than it was while we were in Canada earning our pensions. Coffee and a leisurely breakfast followed by herbal tea while we check emails and surf the net. Then we might have a discussion on what to do for the day depending on whether or not our time is needed at our volunteer organization. If not, then it's off to do some shopping or explore another part of the island, or hang at the beach. Our tans are doing just fine. (At this point in the conversation, the person asking “What do you do?” gets a glazed look on their face.).

Even people who live and work here on the island don't really understand. They say they don't have much free time and then look at us blankly as if they don't understand the concept of leisure. “We shop in the morning, have a nice lunch at home and then go swimming in the afternoon or take a long walk to explore something new”... another blank stare.

We like to cook, so we shop for fresh items almost every day. We could add that we usually make everything from scratch, seldom eat out (unless it's time for a treat and then Cyndi will cook by ordering a pizza), and we only have a maid come in once a week. We do seem to spend a bit of our daily time discussing what to eat for supper, shopping for the food, preparing the meal, eating, and cleaning up.

When we first embarked on our adventure we imagined the occasional leisurely day by the pool, writing a travel blog, exercising, learning to speak Spanish, keeping busy volunteering somewhere, writing music, playing guitar, exercising some more, experimenting with new cuisine, and reading novels. Well, as it turns out, we read a lot, take a daily dip in the sea, and other than walking don't do any real exercising at all. ....music, guitar, cuisine...pffffft... not enough energy for that. We really should be learning a new language in case we need to have some of that expertise at some point in the future, but that seems to be on a cold back burner all the time.

We have found that it's sometimes difficult to commit our time to a volunteer organization. For us, being retired means not having those deadlines and meetings. We soon realized that finding a volunteer opportunity was not as much of a priority for us as we thought it might be when we first retired as they usually include those activities and issues that we are trying to avoid.

We did some painting while we were in Mexico but just haven't really focused on that activity at all while in the Caribbean. I suppose we should probably blame the rum for that as there are so many varieties to check out..., but we think the real driver behind our painting was belonging to a fun painting class with lots of camaraderie to keep us motivated. We haven't found that since we left Puerto Vallarta.

Going shopping for clothes here can be time consuming and perhaps somewhat of a frustrating experience. Local vendors fill their shops from all sorts of suppliers around the world. We have found that we need to try on and then purchase shirts that range from size large to XXXL, and then they shrink... aarrgh....

When we need to buy something special or out of the ordinary – perhaps for our volunteer activities – we go shopping to a store in the town centre. It will usually end up taking two hours or more to accomplish the task as we hop from store to store asking questions and comparing goods that may or may not actually do the job.

Our outings are usually followed by a stop at the grocery store, the pharmacy, the liquor store, and the bank to replenish our empty wallets. By the time we get home, our feet are tired and we might sit down to check email and our social sites, and also time to start making dinner. This is often the time of day when we hear one of us say “It's five o'clock somewhere”, but ...we really don't have happy hour everyday ...no… not everyday....nope.

Sometimes when someone asks us “What do you do on the island?”, we reply “We just live here – we do whatever we feel like doing. We’re retired.”

So, bottom line, we have replaced our office attire with shorts and bathing suits, our chapped skin lotion with sunscreen, our watches with suntanned arms, our cars with flip-flops, and our winter boots with bug spray. And that’s about it – that's the essence of what we're doing here.