Home sweet home

Here are pics of the new digs. This is a view from the front. From this moment on I will no longer refer to it as a dorm. It is actually an apartment. An efficient apartment. I think there are six units in the building - three on the first floor and three on the second floor. Ours is on the bottom left. I've also included a picture of the front door.






Here are some shots from the inside. The kitchen is the first thing you see when you open the door. Turn to the right and you're in the main room with two desks a bed a table and two closets. The bathroom is behind the kitchen.









Fancy huh? Here are some shots of our view out our two windows. We're on a hill overlooking campus. On the right is the bay and on the left are the mountains. That huge building by the bay is a dorm - called a super dorm actually.

Things I like about our apartment:
- lots of closet space
-nice view, better than most people's
-bed is comfortable
-two desks, as I've already mentioned
- very close to everything on campus; very convenient

Things I don't like:
- when C.J. wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to check his e-mail it wakes me up too (discovered this last night when he couldn't sleep)
- water sometimes doesn't come out of the faucet right - sputters and squirts out erratically
- kitchen counter is tiny for preparing food
- bathroom is really hot, for some reason air doesn't work in there
- no storage space in the bathroom

Things I heard before I got here that are not true:
- you can't get some things here; from what I've seen you can get just about anything here and the stores are nice; it may be expensive but so was shipping all that crap not to mention the service at Amerijet

Things that are true:
- Your alarm clock may not keep time when it is plugged in; that happened to us Wednesday night and we were almost late for our tour because the clock fell a few hours behind

Casual observations:
- the sun sets earlier here - between 7 and 7:30
- there are students here from a lot of different places but mostly the U.S.; so far we've met people from Georgia, New Jersey, New York, California, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Michigan and two folks from Canada
- this wasn't anybody's first choice; everyone is here cause they couldn't get in somewhere else unless they are actually from the Caribbean which there are many Caribbean students here; instead of asking people why they chose SGU C.J. has started to joke "so you decided not to go to Harvard too? yeah, I didn't like the cold climate"
- the sun is hot and it is really humid; probably warmer than I expected
- the EC (Eastern Caribbean dollar) is like monopoly money; it is really easy to spend; but everywhere also takes U.S. dollars which was nice when we first got here and didn't have any EC; the exchange rate by the way is $1 U.S. to $2.60 EC so when you see an EC price divide by three roughly; when I saw a box of crackers at the IGA was $15 I almost had a heart attack but that is EC not U.S. so it was actually about $5..or something like that, see what I mean? monopoly!
- they do not recycle here; this gives me huge anxiety; I've asked several locals about it and they confirm, no recycling..where is all the glass, paper and cardboard trash going? in a landfill?? ahh!!!

Later I will post pictures of our island tours yesterday. It was awesome. We went up into the rain forest and picked fresh bananas out of the trees and ate them. There are fruit trees everywhere. There are avocado trees with huge green avocados, not black like at home. More on that later.

Now I'm going to the IGA for dinner and some laundry detergent. Later there is some social event for first termers at a bar called the Aquarium. They had some class on substance abuse today that C.J. had to attend and then tonight they are taking us out for all the free drinks we can handle. Tomorrow morning there is a booze cruise. The irony.