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.