Midterms

Since this week was midterm week for the students, my friends and I decided that we should try to stay out and about as much as possible so we weren't around to be distracting.

On Wednesday night we went to bingo at Prickly Bay Marina.  It's always an adventure at bingo night and this week was no exception, their big prizes were a bunny, 3 sheep, and a cow.  I don't have a clue what I would have done with Margaret the Moo Cow, but I really wanted to go home and tell Evan that I won a cow.  I didn't win anything this time, but it was still a good night.  There was a lot of entertaining dancing.  A 71 year old Grenadian woman won a bingo and her dancing was awesome.  I wish I had a video of it, but sadly I don't.  I did however manage to get a video of another lady getting her groove on.  There's a lot of alcohol consumed at bingo...enjoy.

Bingo at Prickly Bay Marina

Margaret the Moo Cow

Thursday was our big adventure of the week.  The guys were studying for their last midterm and we took a trip around the whole island.  We wanted to go to the chocolate factory which is on the opposite side of the island from SGU so we went up one side and came back the other.  It was a pretty awesome trip.  First stop was Belmont Estates (the chocolate factory).  We took a tour there where we learned about the process of making chocolate and how the estate harvests and dries out their cocoa beans.  It's a really cool process that takes a lot of work and a lot of time.  After our tour we looked around at some of the other things at the estate.  They have some land turtles, some cool birds, and a talking parrot.  The parrot didn't say much to us, but he did say "Polly want a cracker?"

Our tour started out with a quiz of local fruits.  All of these grow
on the estate.

Cocoa tree

The inside of a cocoa pod.  We had to pull a bean out
and suck the white stuff off of it.  It was a really
nasty texture, but it didn't taste too bad.

Cocoa beans fermenting under banana leaves and burlap

Cocoa beans drying out in a green house type of building

These drawers come out from under the green house
building for the beans to dry out in the sun.  They shuffle
their feet to stir the beans.

After Belmont Estates we continued our drive.  The side of the island that we live on is all the Caribbean Sea, but the other side is the Atlantic Ocean and we were excited to see some beaches over there.  I've decided that the beaches on the Atlantic side are definitely scenic and beautiful, but I like sea side more for swimming.  After stopping to look at a couple beaches we were back on the road.  The last part of our drive back was along the coastline and it reminded me of driving along the Oregon coast.  It was bittersweet because it was a beautiful drive, but it definitely made me miss home too.  Thankfully I had an awesome weekend to look forward to.

One of the Atlantic beaches

Evan's finals are not comprehensive, so that meant that after midterms were over he had nothing to study for over the weekend and it was fantastic!  On Friday night we went to Magazine Beach to go snorkeling with some friends.  It was Evan's first time snorkeling here and I was really excited to go with him.  We stayed until sunset and then went to see a movie.

Sunset at Magazine Beach

The clouds were really cool after sunset at the beach

On Saturday Evan and I went to our favorite beach and then into downtown St. George's.  Evan had never been downtown before so we just walked around and looked at some of the shops there.  At the spice market we found calabash that had faces carved into them, since carving pumpkins for halloween isn't an option we bought two of them to use as our jack-o-lanterns this year.  It's funny because I see pumpkin all the time here, but it's all cut into 1 or 2 pound pieces to cook with and it's green on the outside.

Our calabash jack-o-lanterns

We ended our adventure in town with a nice walk along the waterfront looking at the boats.  We even saw an octopus in the water and it inked!  It was super cool.  Our bus ride into downtown was pretty tame, but our bus ride home was true Grenada style.  The driver pulled over randomly because he needed to relieve his bladder...which he did on the side of the road next to the bus.   I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Evan thought it would be fun to make me a sand mermaid tail

In downtown on the water front

Evan at the old telephone booths we found downtown

Cool telephone booths on the waterfront

Even though this week was full of stress and anxiety, it was one of my favorite weeks on the island so far.  Evan did amazing on his midterms and we got to spend a wonderful weekend together before it was back to 24/7 studying.