Settling in...

Yesterday and today were good days. This place is slowly starting to feel more and more like home. Ryan and I both feel pretty comfortable here. We're figuring out where to get food and supplies and we're getting used to everything running at least ten minutes late due to island time. We're also working on our back-up supplies. Apparently we need to keep enough food, cash, and water on hand for a few days in case of emergency or rain or power outages. So we're working on building that up, and we're working on settling into our apartment.

Yesterday I had my own orientation while Ryan was going to his. Apparently most of his are a pretty big waste of time, and I really feel like my orientation was yesterday. There were very few spouses (spouses refers not only to actual spouses, but also to girlfriends, boyfriends, or fiances who are accompanying a student), and most of the attendees were parents. Yes, there are a LOT of parents down here... I actually want to write a whole posting on the parents who came down with their students, but I don't want to go into it here, since it'd take so long. But the whole orientation was taken up by stupid, repetitive questions, and I didn't feel I learned very much useful information at all. One good thing I did learn was that the centipedes (again, I'll cover island wild- or not so wild- life in another post) are not actually poisonous... it's just very very painful to be bitten.

Today I came to one of Ryan's orientation events- Food on Dominica. It was given by a nutritionist who grew up on the island and now works at Ross and the local hospital. She was very funny and very realistic about where and how to get safe food, especially safe fruits and vegetables. She really drove home the importance of eating well and keeping a good weight, and she had a lot of fruits and veggies with her so that she could show us different sources of different vitamins and supplements. She also had AMAZING suggestions about where to get protein, since there is limited meat, and no beef available on the island. Next Saturday I will be going with her to the Portsmouth market to buy fresh food right from the farmers and fishermen. She'll show me (and anyone else there) the best stands and introduce us to the farmers and tell them not to overcharge us. I think it'll be great to know where the best (and safest) stands are. She also told us how to safely wash fruits and vegetables.

Tonight Ryan and I decorated our apartment! We hung a bunch of photos that we brought with us, so this place is really starting to feel like home. It looks pretty nice, I'll have to set up another video tour so you can all see what our home looks like now. With the photos up it feels much more personal and home-like. It's our first place and we love it.

I experimented today and did some laundry in the sink. There are no Laundromats and the only way to do it is in the sink or to pay a lot of money to have someone else do it. So I'll be doing the lighter and smaller articles in the sink. I think that some of the pants and heavy shorts and blankets will be easier to pay someone else to do since the bucket I do laundry in is not that big. But the good news is I think that the clothes are clean and I didn't ruin anything and everything is sprawled out across our apartment drying. It takes forever to dry because the humidity is so high. 

We saw an enormous boat off of 'our' beach today, and we'll have to get photos up of it. But since we have some friends coming over to play cards soon, I don't think I'll have time to upload the photos now. But they'll be up tomorrow! I also want to put up photos of our new buddy, Jester. He's a perky little mixed breed dog (one of the dozens of strays) who likes to follow us around on the beach, and will follow us home when we leave. We keep telling him we already have a puppy and we can't let him in anyways, since we signed a contract with our landlord and all. It's kind of fun to have a beach buddy though, and he chases the crabs, which is really funny to watch. So tomorrow (or later tonight) I'll update this post with photos of the massive boat we saw, along with a photo of our beach buddy.