Living in Grand Cayman

Some of you asked for some additionnal pictures of the house, especially outdoors.  Today, after our trip to the beach, I took some picture, so here they are.

 As for the car, we are still actively looking for a CRV, but are now exploring other options.  My next post may be from L.A. I am flying there next saturday and come back the following friday. On the sunday, I already plan to go to Disney World 🙂

Aipa at the beach

A cricket match.  We watched a few minutes.

The house – Front

The side

The back yard

We did not get this one either! 🙁

Actually our bid price was over what it sold for.  What happened is that in the “auction instructions”, I wrote that I wanted them to make sure the car was a “Right hand drive”, had dual airbags & Air conditioning.

Well, I got a message that upon inspection, the car  did not have dual airbags as we requested, so they did not bid on it. We are actually quite pleased  ; technically they could have got it and I would have only seen this issue once the car got to Cayman … it would have been too late then. I guess they are really professionnal and seem to do a good job for their clients.

So back to square one!

 I am starting to like the Grey CRV’s. Its a bit darker than silver  So far we had only bid on white.  What do you think?

Still a Honda CRV.  Now its a 2004 instead of a 2003.  Its pretty much the same as the last one ; white and all equipped.  Funny thing it actually has a DVD & Navigation system. Kinda funny for such a small island.  haha

We should know if it works sometime tonight or tomorrow morning.  Stay tuned.

 Here is a picture of the actual car we bid on.

Note : Since there are quite a few pictures in our posts, I archived quite a few.  You can only see the last 5 posts now on this page.  To see previous posts, click on the different months on the menu to the right.

This week-end is our first where we can actually take it easy. On saturday, we went to 7-mile beach and did some snorkeling.  The rest of the day we went shopping and in the evening we went over to Rory (a coworker from the UK) & his wife Leslie’s ocean front condo for a great BBQ & drinks.

 Sunday we went to a very quiet beach at Beach Bay which is an 8 minute drive from our house.  There were only 2-3 people on the whole beach.  We took Aipa with us and she loved going in the water and getting a piece of wood that I would throw into the ocean. Since there were waves and some current, we put on here life vest ; quite cute!  See the pictures below.

 As for the Honda CRV (see the previous post for more details), we did not win the auction.  We will bid on some other CRV’s this week.  We were about 1000$ off the final price it sold for.  Its quite fun actually ; its like eBay but a lot more expensive!

 The beach at Beach Bay.  Notice the palms are propped up since they had been knocked down during the hurricane in 2004.

Today we made an bid on a 2003 Honda CRV. I say bid since we are participating in an online auction via the IBC Japan. 

Here is how it works.  To be able to bid, we needed to make a 1000$US deposit. To do that, we did a wire transfer to the company which is in Nagayo, Japan.  Once the deposit received, they gave us access to bid on the cars.  These cars come from individuals.  In Japan, environmental laws are very strict and its very expensive to maintain a car that is more than 4-5 years old, so people change cars very often.  Hence, a huge surplus of cars exists in Japan, so they auction them and boat the off all over the world.  Its important to note that IBC has a really good reputation and that I know quite a few people here that have purchased cars with them, so yes it a leap of faith, but I think we did our homework.

In the auction site, all I see is are two pictures of the car and there is an evaluation of its condition.  That evaluation is in …. Japanese, so I cant even read it.  The IBC (www.ibcjapan.co.jp) site has a “live chat support” where you can chat with a person who will translate the evaluation form and give you the cars details ; overall condition, dings, options, etc. Finally, everything is in Japanse yen.  So I we always have to divide all the amounts by 121 to get the value in US$.

 If we win the auction, it will take about 6 weeks for the car to get here.  If we dont, we will bid again on another CRV friday or this weekend.

 Say tuned.

 Here is the actual car we bid on

 Here is the evaluation sheet.  Thats it!  Of course, no test drive possible. With just this information in hand, would you have bid to spend thousands of dollars?