Getting Lost in Barbados

After a quick realization that I am here to go to school, not to just lay on the beach all day, I thought it would be a good idea to finally get around to paying my fees for my housing. The problem in this country is that everyone is too carefree, no one is ever on time for anything, there are no real deadlines for anything, and information isn't really passed around from one place to another. A good example of this happened when I tried to pay my dorm fees. Paying fees should be easy enough as walking to the cashier, giving him/her a credit card, and that's it... but not in Barbados. I got to the window and told the cashier I had to pay for my dorms and my visa, she asks me how much I am going to pay to which I ask how much I owe. She doesn't know so she sends me next door where I have to find out how much to pay, which takes forever, then go back to the cashier and she has to call someone else to find out about my down payment that I already had, and all this other confusing stuff... so eventually it worked out, but it took way too long to....

Ummm... I went to a reggae show the other night, which was pretty cool. There is a 3 day music festival coming up for only $50 American that sounds amazing and I am stoked for. I went to the island specialty fast food restaurant, Chefette, for the first time which was not too shabby. They specialize in chicken, rotis, pizza, and some other random stuff... I find it funny that there are no other fast food restaurants on the island except the Chefette and tons of KFCs everywhere.

So on this past Thursday-Friday-Saturday, most of the group went to get scuba certified, but I didn't really want to pay the $275 or dedicate 3 mornings to it yet... but I still might go do it later while I am here, we'll see. On the first day my friend Kiki and I decided we just wanted to get on a bus and go wherever it takes us. It's a pretty small island, so we couldn't get too lost, right? With a general idea to go north we got on a bus til it ended, and where it ended seemed to be the middle of nowhere. There were big cliffs at the ocean and only one house in sight. We walked down the coast on the cliffs for a bit, all the while noticing that there were huge storm clouds that seemed to be following us. After coming to a river that blocked us from going any further we turned around to go back the other way. It was right about this time that we walked right into the storm that we named Hurricane Pete (coming in on the left side of this picture). Pete was not a kind storm, he was very windy and dropped plenty of rain on us. We had walked about 45 minutes down the coast so on the way back we had to deal with another 45 minutes or so of downpouring with no other choice but to take it.

When we did get back to where the bus dropped us off, we knocked on the door of the only house that was around hoping it was a restaurant or something, but it turned out to be a family living there who pretty much just laughed at us for being so wet and told us that we missed the bus by about ten minutes. Knowing that the next bus wouldn't come for an hour we started heading towards the nearby town to find some food. Instead of finding food though, a very nice woman saw us walking by her house and invited us over to take cover from the storm. After chatting with her and her son they noticed that we were pretty cold. So how do you warm up in Barbados? Rum of course, haha... the son brought us out a little mini-sized bottle of rum and guarana (some sort of energy drink) told us to drink it to warm up. Right about this time the bus came back around and we hopped in slightly warmer than before.

We took this bus back down south til we passed through a town that looked like they would have food. We found a little restaurant called Surf-something or other, I forget exactly what, but we immeatly could tell that it was very American-based because all the customers were white, something that you don't see too often in this country, haha. At this point we knew where we were in relation to the University so we decided to go to the coast and walk towards school for a while. We ended up walking about 4 or 5 miles down the coast through numerous beautiful beaches. There are no private beaches in Barbados, so we were albe to walk through resorts and check out a bunch of really nice hotels on the way at which we pretened to be guests and layed out on plenty of beach chairs.

After watching the sunset we came to the realization that we probably weren't going to be able to walk all the way home so we got on the nearest bus and headed home for the night. I woke up the next morning with a broken camera, not sure how it happened but now it only takes one picture right when the camera gets turned on and no more after, so it's quite frustrating and I might not have many pictures for a while until my new camera comes here in the mail. Which could take years to happen...

Longest Day Ever

Monday morning was the start of what can easily be one of the longest day(s) of my entire life. It started off when I woke at about 11 and like most normal days here, went to the beach. Breakfast/lunch consisted of a hot dog and pizza from the gas station shop. Spent most of the day down there, and came back knowing that "grubbing" was starting this night. It's going to be a bit hard to explain, but I will do my best...

Here at UWI, grubbing is a sort of week long hazing process that is meant to bring the people living on hall closer to each other or something... but overall it was kind of a strange thing. It started at 8:00 with a blindfold initiation where they made us walk through stuff and do dances and then they gave us nicknames which were all strangely sexual.... a bit awkward to have happen at a university. For example, my nickname is Bumble Bee - "beacuse his small stinger causes great damage." Another part of grubbing is "the line," this is where everyone goes out to the parking lot, stands in lines, and for long, extended periods of time we are yelled at and told to do stuff by the seniors. It wasn't terrible and mean or anything, just kinda blah...

After grubbing for the night ended, they told us that it was going to happen again at 4AM... and for every other night this week at 8 and 4. So being the smart kids that we are, a few of us just decided to stay up instead of sleeping for a little bit and being woken up. After hanging out in the common room til 4, we went back out to "the line," where they did the same stuff for an hour and a half then took us on a 5:30am tour of the campus, as the sun rose and at this point we were so incredibly tired at this point and had to wake up at 9 for a meeting. When the tour ended at 6:15, my friend Michelle and I decided that less than 3 hours of sleep would have a more negative toll than none at all, so instead of going to sleep, we went down to the beach from about 6:30 til 8ish.

Turns out that the 9:00 meeting was not only incredibly boring, but somewhat useless for us international students. I spent most of it slightly falling asleep, but not being able to actually get more than like 30 seconds of rest. After the meeting, which took waaaaay too long, we went to our EAP office to register for classes. It was confusing, hectic, and somewhat unorganized, but thanks to our liason it ended up working out well for us international students. The classes I am enrolled in are:

Carribean Pop Culture
Intro to Sociology II
Sociology of Tourism
Sociology of Development

The next plan on our list was to go into town to shop a little. I ended up getting sandals, and we also had to find a passport photo place to take pictures for our student visa's. I ended up finding this skedtchy little place where you basically had to walk through a maze of stairs and twists and turns just to find a tiny little studio where they powdered my face and fixed my hair for the photo. It was overall a very strange experience and I was glad to leave the building. After getting some food we headed back to our dorms, thinking we might get some sleep finally, but no... the group decided we would be going out to The Gap to a bar/club called McBrides. Most people stayed til like 6, but Michelle and I were so dead tired at this point that we got a taxi back to the dorm. Somehow we found the most insane driver, and on the way home he ran almost every red light and I don't think there was any way he was staying under the speed limit. We did make it safe though, and after 41 hours of keeping myself awake I was able to get some rest.

Living From Beach to Beach

Ever since we arrived in Barbdos, and a bit beforehand, the big name beach that kept getting mentioned was Crane Beach, so as a collective we pretty much all knew we wanted to go check out Crane. It seemed like it would be a quick trip where we transfer busses once, but it ended up being quite the trek. After taking the bus into Bridgetown we got off and started to search for the bus terminal using bits & pieces of directions. We ended up wandering the city for a bit, seeing things like Parliment, and the major areas of Bridgetown. We eventually ended up finding the stop, waiting quite a while for our bus to arrive, then took quite a while to get there. It ended up being a 2 hour ride that took half an hour to get back when we took a taxi instead of bus.

But we did eventually arrive at Crane, and it was not too shabby. I guess at one point it was on The Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous as one of the Top 10 beaches in the world, but it wasn't that amazing... There were some sweet stepping stones to get over from the road, a very cool cliff that you could venture out to and jump off, the sand was a very pretty shade of pink due to the amount of coral in the sand. I went up to the top of a large flight of stairs to find a resort hotel (MOM: http://www.thecrane.com) where I got an amazing cheeseburger. On the way out of the beach, some locals got us coconuts and popped them open, gave us straws, and cut them open to eat at the end. Good stuff...

A random fire alarm got set off later in the night, and it was amazingly loud, even more annoying than in the States, but eventually got fixed. Right afterwards I got a Skype message from everyone back in Huntington which was really awesome, very cool to be able to see everyone and them to see me.... almost like I was there with them. The rest of the night consisted of going down to the St. Laurence Gap to a club called McBrides which was hosting an 80s night, tons of fun, a bit of pool, and then we ventured down to a little pub called The Lighthouse where a duo of Barbadians were playing acousic American rock songs by Linkin Park, Coldplay, etc.... it was pretty chill. We got back to the dorms that night at about 5:15am and fell to a dead sleep

UWI, Cave Hill (pronounced "u-wii chill")

If there are too major things about my dorm that have gotten to me so far it is the weather and the water. First off the weather is crazy, it's so hot that even my friends from Belize think it's sweltering here. At night I can't even put a blanket over me and there is no way my shirt stays on throughout the night. Today was the hottest day yet and we also had the biggest storms and most cloudy weather yet... Not much of it makes sense, but I'm getting used to it. Despite the heat I can sleep the night through with only waking a few times for water. Luckily the water here is amazing, there is some sort of phenomenon here where the ocean water goes through the island and seeps up through the limestone which purifies the water, this means the tap water tastes amazing and having a sink in my room is amazing due to the heat. The first night I had to stick my head under the faucet, but since then I have realized that using a cup makes much more sense.

I woke Friday morning at 8:00 for the 9:00 school orientation. The orientation didn't start til about an hour after schedule and it ended an hour and a half late, island time is crazy, no one rushes anything or has any schedules except us Americans, haha. After orientation we went on a guided tour of the campus which was informative, but I pretty much forget where everything is already, but I do know that the school is quite beautiful. From one of the buildings there was a nice overlook where I learned that in Barbados buildings are not allowed to rise above the trees as to keep the beauty in tact. The only exeptions are The Grand Barbados and Marriot hotels, which I found a bit funny, but it is a very tourist driven society so not too surprising. We then went fora quick shopping trip at a local mall, which was an intersting experience all together.

Last night (Friday) was Fish Fry night down in Oistens and our liason said she would meet us down there and buy us food which was awesome. So the 10 Californians, 1 New Yorker, and 4 Canadians took taxi / busses about half an hour away to where the night life is crazy and there are tons of little restaurants frying and cooking up all kinds of fish, chicken, steak, and other animals. After dinner we went over to the stage where there were huge speakers piked on top of each other blasting reggae, dancehall, and all the other popular island music and we danced for the rest of the night. I'm glad I am not an American girl because the Barbadian men are all attracted to and make lude comments at them all the time, we've learned that it's a cultural sign of kindness and respect as opposed to how disrespectful it would be in the states, but it still seems a bit creepy at this point.

We got back to the University around 12:30 and went down to the beach and layed in the ocean for the next two hours as the rain poured down and we watched lightning in the distance.

First Day in the Dorms

I think that my internal clock was still a little messed up after the first night in Barbados, because instead of sleeping in like I had hoped for, I woke up at 1:00 after only three hours of sleep. After about an hour of lying in bed hoping to fall asleep, I got up played Peggle for a half hour or so then went back to sleep only to wake up at 8ish to get picked up and taken to our EAP orientation. The 6 of us woke to find that in the middle of the night someone else got dropped off from New York and he was completely lost. Being the kind Californian's we were we picked him up and brought him along for the ride... little did we know that there were also two other EAP students staying there that we didn't know about. Our driver then drove us to the Walmer Lodge where we soon found out the rest of the UC students were staying, and we all met each other for the first time.

The EAP orientation was pretty generic, alot of the usual stuff with some small exceptions. There are 3 rules that we have as EAP students, and 3 rules only...

1. Don't get pregnant or get anyone pregnant
2. Don't get arrested
3. Don't die

haha.... those are our only rules for the next 4 months. After orientation we got our first taste of the unpredictable Barbadian weather. As we stood in the blistering hot sun waiting for our taxi to come get us it started pouring in a few seconds time, straight out of an episode of LOST, and after about 5 minutes it stopped suddenly and was hot again. This has become a very common occurance and I'm getting quite used to it

After orientation we got our stuff and moved into the dorms. These dorms are very different than the ones I had at UCI. For one there are only single rooms and the rooms are very tiny. The bathroom does not come stocked with toilet paper, handsoap, or anything. and most of all there is no A/C... which tends to be a burden when the temp is a constant 88 during the day and 80ish at night all year long. After moving in, alot of us headed to a beach up the coast a bit where they had trampolines in the water, jet ski's, and plenty of other touristy things but decided to sav our money for a while and just swim for the day, but come back later to do the activities. Later on in the night after getting some food and hanging out at the dorms for a while, a good sized group of us went down to the local corner store, got some beer and hung out on the beach all night with frogs and crabs.

Hello Barbados

As anyone knows who has traveled outside the US, customs pretty much sucks, but when entering Barbados we had to go through the motions. I spent about an hour waiting in line just to have the officer barely glance at my passport and stamp it. Me and the five other EAP students that I had found along the way grabbed our stuff and headed outside to search for the person supposed to pick us up. We were greeted with a jolly woman named Avril holding a EAP Sutdents sign and gave each one of us a huge hug. She then right away took us to a taxi-van where she left us with the driver to send us off to our lodging. To our knowledge we were going to a place called Walmer Lodge for 4 nights, so when we arrived at Coral Lane we were slightly confused and learned that we were moving into the dorms a day later. The driver had other places to be, so we unpacked our stuff and went to the front door of the hotel to check in.

We were greeted with a huge sign that says "DO NOT KNOCK" and no one was anywhere. Being the Americans that we are we decided to ignore the sign and knock anyway... no answer. After ten minutes of waiting we called our liason and asked what was going on. It turns out they hadn't planned for anyone to meet us there and let us in, so after another 20 of so minutes the hotel manager showed up and gave us our room keys. This was the first instance we encountered dealing with "island time" and quickly learned that no one sticks to any time schedule at all on this island. Luckily the place was pretty nice and we all got our own rooms.

Hungry and tired, we decided to go down the street to a little corner restaurant called The Roti Den and ordered up some chicken & potatoes rotis (chicken, potatoes, curry, and other stuff wrapped like a burrito pretty much). Finally getting some food in my stomache was great, and we spent the rest of the night watching the Olympics in our room which was a very strange experience in itself. They showed the NBC broadcast, but when it would cut to commercial or to a featurette of an American athelete, the tv station immediately cut to highlights of local athletes like Usain Bolt running their races. The strange broadcast coupled with a few random commercials that were just plain weird made for a very interesting Olympic night. About an hour or so into the broadcast they cut in with a panel talking about cricket which signified to me that it was time to get some sleep around 10:00.

Goodbye USA

Tuesday the 19th at 8:00 pm was my final goodbye before my semester abroad. Jenae was kind enough to drive me out to LAX to drop me at the airport. Flight 1 left LAX at 10:45 and flew to Miami right through the hurricane which led to about a half hour of solid turbulence, ended up being the first time I ever got sick on a plane ride. To ease my upset stomache I walked around for a while and drank some water. Needless to say this led to little to no sleep, and at the end of the 5 hour plane flight we arrived at Miami at 7 AM and I wasn't any more awake than when I took off. But at least I got to watch the sunrise from above. At this point my body knew it was 4Am but the time change told my eyes it was morning and time for breakfast, so I got some food before the 2nd flight. Flight 2 was three hours and thankfully i got to sleep for most of the flight. We arrived at Sir Grantley Adams airport in Barbados around noon and had to move onto customs even though we were all very tired.