Monsoon, Websites, Shopping and Cats…

To pretend that Ambon does not have a serious wet season is difficult. Today is sunny, but for the previous 5 days it has rained pretty much constantly and continuously. We are lucky that the Aston is out of town, and therefore we do not getting flooding, rivers running down the streets or anything like that….just wet grey days…

It hasn’t been put to waste though, as we have had no excuses not to stay in and prepare pages and pages of information on Ambon, to send to agents and anyone one else who enquires…and we’ve been updating a lot on the website. It’s strange, but websites don’t magically write themselves, so there have been a lot of long nights, hair pulling and brain-storming.

When creating a website there is a new buzzword – ‘responsive’. Responsive doesn’t mean that the website talks back to you, what it means is quite subtle..it means that the website will respond to the size of your web browser automatically. You can try this. If you’re web browser isn’t running full screen, grab one of the edges and move it from side to side, making the area larger or smaller. You can see the page ‘responds’. You can go to any page and try this. It also means that if you view the website on your smart phone or tablet, the same thing happens and you have a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

 

The bit that I’m really pleased about is the responsive photos and photo galleries. It you click on the photo above, the thumbnails below or go to a page like Diving, scroll down until you get to the photo thumbnails and click on one you will see what I mean. You can resize your browser and the photos will resize automatically!

Anyway, why am I telling you all of this? Well, no reason really, except that it amazing how even websites and then internet keep evolving, keep improving your experience but in ways that you might never notice…another example of this is the photospheres I put in last weeks blog. I’ve put another two below here, one taken from inside the Dive Centre and one from outside. It’s truly incredible what your smart phone can do, as these amazing photos that you can pan around 360 degrees show…

Inside the Dive Centre:

Outside the Dive Centre: 

So though it’s been raining, the work goes on on the Dive Centre. We rushed down to get some sunny photos today. More walls have gone up, more wood forms built…it’s great to see a bit more structure up, giving us a better idea of the size of the camera room, the dry room, the main area etc etc. Let’s hope the good weather keeps up now for a while. The photos show all sides of the Dive Centre.

In other very exciting news…there has been one shopping centre in Ambon for the last few years called the ACC (Ambon City Centre). It’s not in the city centre, in fact it’s very close to us at the Aston. Well, they have recently completed another shopping centre, much closer to the centre of Ambon, called MCM (Maluku City Mall), an even bigger mall. We this week we heard that ACE Hardware was having their opening day. This is really exciting news! An ACE in Ambon!! (how sad are we that this is such exciting news…..?) So we drove over for this momentous occasion (hoping they would have cat litter for Neo) only to find that not only had most of Ambon also descended on MCM, but also that ACE had delayed it’s opening for a week. We did see the opening of Robinson’s Department Store…holey moley!!! The Lion’s rugby scrum would have had difficulties making there way through! We took a quick look, saw the high quality products and then decided that we wanted to live and not be battered by a thousand uncaring Ambonese elbows, no Polo Ralpl House shirt was worth it…….

And finally, for all you Neo fans, a couple of photos. Neo will be getting his own webpage soon, but to show how well Neo has been adapting to his new home in Ambon, here’s a few photos of my our Neo’s very comfortable new sofa being put to good use.

Please have a look around the updated website, let me know your impressions, if I got something wrong etc. Feedback is always welcome..