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06 January 2006

Maine Lobster?

images

R said her skin resembles this now.

Of course, she did travel to the Caribbean without sunblock. Duh.

Today she is on a day long catamaran cruise with the school. Hopefully she has found some sunblock in the meantime!

Everyone has been emailing asking how she is liking it so far, so I thought I'd do a general post here.

She loves it.

The island is so beautiful, the people she's met are really friendly, and she thinks that she'll like her job quite a bit. She lives in a really beautiful area called Frigate Bay where all the resorts are. Classes start on Monday, so she will be busy preparing this weekend. In a recent email, she said, "The sun is glorious and I saw lots of awesome birds today and yesterday. The ecologist's heart is frolicking."

At the grocery store, she found canned octopus, which she apparently loves, and she bought 10 cans. I hope they sell other things to eat there because I will not eat octopus, canned or not!

Ramen is expensive there - twice as much as in Maine! It's $.25 for a single pack! She said food in general is twice as much or three times as much what we pay for here. She said it's like buying all organic, except it isn't organic. She hasn't found anything organic there yet.

Driving on the other side of the road has been uneventful, which is a good thing, but she is having difficulty finding the turn signal, as it is located where the windshield wipers would be on an American car, and vice versa. She says that every time she makes a turn, she cleans the windows, too. The school procured her a rental car for the first few days, but she'll need to buy a car of her own ASAP. Apparently, they are all beaters and exorbitantly expensive ($3k - $7k for a dilapidated, rusted-out, fender-bended, run-down, ripped-seats with the stuffing showing, stained-interior, junkyard-looking vehicle from the early 90s). Of course, it is cheaper to buy a used car than to pay the VAT tax on an imported new car, so we'll make do. I just told her to make sure she finds a car that run, has working seatbelts, a steering wheel, and 4 tires. Everything after that is considered a luxury, apparently. She wants something with 4-wheel drive, too, because evidently there are Alaska-style dirt roads on the islands that one needs to be able to navigate if one wants to ever get off the beaten path and do some hiking, which we most definitely do.

The weather today is 84 and clear, as it is most every day, I hear.

For those of you anxious to Skype her, you'll have to wait a bit longer. She won't have an Internet connection for the next two weeks. She does have a cell phone now, but the calling rates to the island are higher for the cell phone than they are for a land line for some reason, and she'll get the land line with the cell phone. Two weeks is fast, from what I gather. Another couple had to wait four months. The calling rates are absurd. It costs about $.49 to call her cell, so we aren't doing much talking as you can imagine. She emails from school, but Skype is not allowed on campus (something to do with bandwidth, I believe).

In a few weeks, she should be settled and ready for visitors. Who will be the first to go? Flights are $350 from Boston right now!

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