*Note, I’m skipping the first travel day. Not much to report beyond heavy bags and a lot of time in a plane and a bus. I’ll try to edit out the boring stuff, but no promises.
What a day. Watched a couple of movies on the bus, one of which was ridiculously inappropriate, what with the endless profanity and gratuitous sex scene. The movies were pulled from the Re-Member list to learn more about Native American culture, but apparently were not previewed to determine their appropriateness for the audience.
But, the bus did not break down, and we managed to get to Re-Member without incident.
It’s worth noting the watch story. When we started this trip, I did not have a watch. I stopped wearing a watch a few years ago and have relied on my phone, but given that my phone will spend most of the time turned off, and given that there seems to be a fair bit of scheduling going on that I should keep track of, I opted to buy a watch. At the gift shop in Colorado, they only had one kind of watch. It was a Timex watch for kids, which had a button specifically to animate a dog running around. It just barely fit, and had a motion sensor so that any time the watch moved, it did an animation where the numbers sweep away and back again, taking about 7 seconds. You cannot skip it, so you have to wait for it to stop before you can check the time. You also have to hold perfectly still while checking the time or it starts all over again.
Less than one day and I was done with that watch.
So, on the way to Pine Ridge we stopped at a gas station where I finally find a decent watch. Between the two, I’ve spent about half of the money I’d budgeted for the trip, but at least I had a working watch.
Arrive a Re-Member, attend orientation. The first thing Ted says, “Here on the Reservation we do things a little bit differently. The perception of time is different, so you can take your watch, put it away, as you will not need it for this trip.”
As Jaime tells it, she turned to look at me and my head was on the table at this point. And the entire Burlington group cracked up.
For Dinner we had Buffalo stew, which was quite delicious.
Oh, and we saw Car-Henge on the way up. Fantastic!!
The Pow-Wow was a lot of fun. They started it by having all of us go out and dance for about 10 minutes. It was a simple round dance, but it was also about 10 minutes. It was pretty exhausting.
Next, I got to go up and say a few words about our group, why we’re here, and what we hope to do.
Some friends were made. The girls befriended some young girls named Cecilia and Morningstar. Apparently Cecilia “Brings the shizzle, up in here!”
All in all, a good time was had. And now: Too sleep!
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