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.