The Bahamas!

As some of you know, Ryan and recently spent a weekend in the Bahamas, courtesy of Ross University. We didn't pay for a thing except the groceries we took back to the island! Ross even gave us cash for dinner out. The story is that Ross has two campuses. There is the main campus in Dominica, and then they're developing a secondary campus in the Bahamas, on the island of Grand Bahama, which is only about fifty miles from Florida. Ross flew a bunch of students to the island in an attempt to get a whole bunch of us to sign up to transfer to this other campus for third and fourth semester.

I do have to admit the campus and island are nice. The island is much more developed than Dominica. There were four lane roads and traffic lights! There were fast food restaurants, strip malls, and real, full sized grocery stores. There were shopping centers with nice clothing and the roads were in decent repair and there were these huge, sprawling parking lots... we don't really have enough flat space for parking lots in Dominica.

The campus seemed pretty decent. It was actually in two wings of a converted strip mall- but once you were inside you couldn't tell it was a strip mall. They're working on building an actual campus, but it won't be set for a few years. The apartments we saw were certainly beautiful. The furniture was in great shape... and some had touches like a dishwasher and granite countertops! There wasn't that much difference in rent price, although everyone down there owns a scooter or a car since things are more spread out. I sort of felt like I was in a small city in Florida... lots of long, low buildings all sprawled out on very flat land. The flat land really sort of freaked me out. We're used to Dominica with its huge mountains.

In the end, however, we decided that we love Dominica and want to stay. Ryan doesn't see that he will get a large educational benefit from transferring, and so we don't think it will be worth the move. We do have several friends who are leaving for the Bahamas, which is sad- we will miss them very much!

We do, however, have some photos of our visit. The photo of Ryan and I has a very special background... that's one of Jack Sparrow's ships from Pirates of the Caribbean! There's also a photo from the beach party thrown on our first night on the island, and a few photos of our hotel... which was lovely! All in all it made for a great weekend away from home.