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...
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