Island Adventures

I am in the middle of Week 2 of school, but somehow have ended up only having 2 classes so far. One on Monday night and one Wednesday morning. My other two classes are taught by the same professor who has decided that she isn't going to teach class for these first two weeks, but maybe will be back next week? The school system is quite screwy, and even though I have some class it's still hard to realize I'm at school. As for the two classes I have been in, one is a straight up lecture and the other is smaller and is pretty much a discussion section. Being visibly and audibly foreign and different from the rest of the class has been quite interesting, at my Monday class my professor kinda laughed at me when I asked a simple question about how to get the syllabus, and for the Wednesday class there are 4 of us, who quite often get singled out when talking about anything American. It's not a big deal, it's a bit fun in some ways, but it is a very new experience being such a minority in a whole different world.

Early last week a couple friends and I decided we were going to go on an island adventure up north, so we took a bus til it ended and walked to the beach. We went down a small alley with a bunch of street vendors, and along the way got a coconut to chew on for a while. We ended up coming to this little beach area with a small part of the beach that was deserted. After mistakenly walking through a construction zone we found our way to the hidden beach and spent most of the day in the ocean and on the beach. (I know, all my stories are starting to sound the same). When we were ready to go back home we were getting hungry and walked down the road a bit until we found food that wasn't chicken or macaroni pie. Strangely enough we ended up at a Chinese food place which was actually very good, and a nice change from what we have been getting alot here.

The next day was another beach day, of course, but before that we headed to a place called the Surfer's Bar where we would pick up tickets for the upcoming 10-day Reggae Festival that takes place all over the island. Outside the bar we found a nice little beach and did the usual blah blah blah that I have been writing about far too much.

When we first arrived here our EAP liason had told us about a free island tour that we would be participating in, once it got closer we learned that it was a semi-off road tour in a jeep. When the jeeps picked us up this past Saturday we didn't know what to expect. The tour started off driving across the island over through a little jungle to a statue of a lion with his hold over a big red globe. This statue was made to signify England's rule over the world (it was made a little while ago), which is very important to Barbados since they had just gotten their independene in 1966. The tour then continued through sugar farms, old bulidings, George Washington's house (Barbados is the only other country he ever visited), and other various things.

An intersting fact we learned... There are 365 churches on this island, which of course means you can go to a differnet one every day of the year if you would like. This roughly translates to 2 churches per square mile. The more interesting part though is that for every church, there are 3 times as many liquor stores. 6 per square mile.

The tour then took us to a cliff which overlooked the beaches of Bathsheba, and had just a stunning view of the coastline. After overlooking the beach from above, we went down to the beach and spent some time at the unique coast of Bathsheba, which is widely known for it's great surfing. We then journeyed through some more jungle over to another beach which I don't recall the name of anymore, but it was quite nice. The next-to-last stop on the tour was over at some cliffs on the coast that overlooked the ocean, pretty much just another pretty place with palm trees everywhere. The tour ended at some random hotel where they fed us a free buffet and allowed us to go swimming in their pool, towards the end it started raining quite hard and we headed home for the day. Later in the night the school held a huge party on campus, which was quite odd. We went for a while but the big group of us white kids kinda stuck out like a sore thumb, and no one was really dancing, and it wasn't really the place to meet people, so we ended our day/night early.