We’ve been spending a lot of time at the dive shop these days (which is located on the property of this hotel). As many of you know, early morning is not my favorite time of day, but in order to get all of our gear prepared and the boat out on the water on time, we usually get picked up around 8:30am.

So, I stumble around the grounds of the hotel on my way to the dive shop, and then in the afternoons, I’m usually pretty tired from a full day of diving, so I’m almost as bleary leaving the place as I was when I got there 7 hours before. The hotel property isn’t nearly as nice as some others on the island, but they have some terrific flowers.

Actually, many people here have gardens, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Oleander bush.

Look and see:

I keep reminding myself to notice how beautiful our temporary home is, because I don’t want to start to take it all for granted.

Thanks to Patti H. (who is a font of botanic information) for helping me identify these plants!

Our first order of business after the semester was over, (after all of the parties ended and everyone left for home) was to get scuba certified.

If you learn how to dive on a leisurely schedule like we did, it might take 4+ days of about 4 hours each. The first part of dive training is terribly boring. You have to take home and read a book of 250-ish pages and answer questions at the end of each chapter about what you read. Then, you have to bring your homework back to your instructor, and go over each question; stopping to discuss anything that you got wrong. THEN, you have to take a quiz on each chapter, and THEN a final exam on the entire book.

Bah!

You also spend about a day and a half doing exercises with the scuba gear in a pool, which was more fun and more challenging than I thought it would be. Even after you read the whole book, all of the skills and equipment still seem pretty abstract until you actually start doing hands-on training. I mean, look at all this junk you have to learn to use:

I was pretty sure I would never figure it all out.

But our instructor, Carston, was superb and patient with us, and we got through all of our pool training unscathed.

The day before we were supposed to do our first dive in the ocean, Breck made some comment to me like, “I was surprised that you would want to do this, knowing how freaked out you get about sharks.”

Crap. Somehow, in all the excitement, I’d forgotten that I am totally, irrationally, terrified of sharks. If I’m swimming in the ocean, as soon as I get to where I can’t touch the ground, I start to get nervous. And if ANYTHING brushes up against me, I’m done.

How in the world did I not think this through when I signed us up for this?!?

Needless to say, the morning of our first ocean dive at Flamingo Bay’s coral reef, I was very nervous. It was to be to the depth of 16 meters (52 feet). The moment I had to roll backwards off of the boat and into the water I really thought I was going to FREAK OUT. But as we landed in the water, Carston stayed right next to us, and had us descend very, very slowly, so that we could get used to everything for the first time.

It took me about 5 armpit-sweating, heart-pounding minutes to get acclimated to the water. And then, all of a sudden, my fear vanished. I could see everything around me and I just wasn’t worried anymore. All I wanted to do was hang out around the reef and check out all of the cool little plants and animals there.

Our whole first dive only lasted about 35 minutes, and Breck and I were hooked on it. We got used to using all of our gear and navigating ourselves to where we wanted to be very quickly. As a matter of fact, Carston had to continuously stop and wait for us, because Breck and I kept lagging behind to look under things, or to follow an interesting looking fish.

It was heaven, and the next few dives we had to do to get certified went much too quickly.

We’ve decided that our mad money this summer will mostly go to diving. We took the nitrox diving course last week, and next week we want to get started on our Advanced Diving course. It should be even more fun than the first one, because there’s almost no book work or tests to be done. It’s mostly diving.

We’ll even get to do a night dive!

Here are some of the fish that we’ve met so far (these are not my photos, of course):

Please click photos to enlarge

If I see a shark, I will let you know immediately.

For those of you who would like to travel to see us in Grenada, or really anywhere else in the Caribbean, June through August is the best time to do it. It seems counterintuitive, I know. Who wants to go someplace hot when you’re already dying at home?!? But it’s pretty much the same temperature here all year; mid-to-upper 80s with low humidity.

As an aside, the newspaper’s weekly weather report is hilarious. Monday–31 degrees Celsius with 30% chance of rain; Tuesday–31 degrees Celsius with 30% chance of rain; Wednesday–31 degrees Celsius with 30% chance of rain; Thursday–31 degrees Celsius with 30% chance of rain….

Anywhere you go, it’s going to be close to an ocean breeze. And, the best part about it is that the airfare and hotel prices in the Caribbean are going to be at their cheapest, and all of the tourists who would usually be there are not.

But I digress. You don’t need me to sell you a vacation, do you?

Now that Breck is out of school, most of our days are wonderful and lazy. We got scuba certified. We go to the beach. We drink coffee for hours and hang out on the internet. We read. We take naps. We had a lovely date at this restaurant on Friday night.

Needless to say, the cats are very, very happy about our summer vacation as well.

Since international travel can be an extremely expensive, time consuming, maddening project, we were pretty surprised when we realized that very few students stay here over the summer. There are a good number of them that really, really HATE it here. So they can’t wait to rush off the island at every chance they get. But even the other folks who like their temporary lives here don’t stay during the summer. Some of the other students I spoke to were pretty shocked when I told them that we were, indeed, staying for the summer.

One vet student I talked to told me, “It’s like a ghost town around here in the summertime.”

To which I responded, “Well, uh, GRENADIANS live on the island during the summer, right?”

She looked at me like I had 5 heads.

True, there aren’t too many students left on campus these days. And the University shuttle buses are pretty empty. The beach is quiet and the water seems calmer and bluer than ever; only a few tourists are around. Most of them seem to be people from elsewhere in the Caribbean on holiday, or sailors. Who knew? There really are tons of sailors in the world! Mostly wealthy European families that travel on their yachts around the world for a year or two.

The supermarket is blissfully quiet, void of American students whining about the food selection.

Our street is deliciously peaceful; car traffic decreased by at least 75% at the end of the semester, and the bar down the street isn’t blasting terrible (and frankly, OLD) club music until 4am every Friday night.

When we went out to eat Friday night, we practically had the whole place to ourselves. It was awesome.

Summer here is like a sweet dream.

We have been living in Grenada for almost exactly 4 months now, and FINALLY I am posting something on the website. I really can’t believe that even for someone as daunted by new software as me, that I have had nothing to show for my time here until now. But it’s been a long, hard road.

I have wrestled with 3 different software programs. I have poured over somewhat helpful and not-so-helpful websites about Building Your Website. I have spent hours sifting through confusing FAQ’s and horribly misspelled conversations in chatrooms. I have posed dozens of questions to customer support people via email. They don’t seem to like to talk on the phone that much–there is never a phone number provided that i can locate.

But perhaps that is part of the problem. Maybe all of this techinical junk is hard to explain to a newbie like me until I have some semblance of a clue. And I can’t get a semblance of a clue until I read a manual or other clearly-written, comprehensive how-to. And that manual doesn’t seem to exist for any of the software that I’ve chosen so far.

So, while I stumble blindly around, trying to acquire this new skill, it might take me a little while to get the site as full of information as it I would have hoped it would be at this point. So I appreciate your patience.

At least there should be no shortage of detail and stories to share at this point, right?

As some of you know, I am much busier in my day to day life here than I ever thought I would be. So those of you who are picturing me as a lazy beach bum who spends her days by the water’s edge on a lounge chair, sipping frozen drinks–I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t go to the beach as often as I should. In fact, I have to build time in my schedule to get to the beach with some folks that go every Tuesday afternoon.

For the most part, I spend my time doing what many housewives the world over do: making sure that my husband is fed and wearing clean clothes, that the bills are paid and the house is presentable. I can tell you more about that another time, since I just finished a load of laundry and really don’t feel like talking about it.

The photo above is one I took the other day from the backseat of a Reggae Bus, which is what people call the public buses on the island. There are hundreds of them running where we live, because we are almost at the center of the most densely populated part of the island–the city of St. George’s. To be honest, the population is really not very dense when you are coming from Brooklyn, but it is the biggest city in Grenada, so we are fortunate to be between a 10 and 20 minute bus ride to anything we need.

We can’t actually get absolutely EVERYTHING we need here, but after a while, things that you originally thought were needs become “non-essential wants”, and you either substitute other things for them, or try to forget about them. Like fresh mushrooms, and sage, and decent wine, and good non-instant coffee. And affordable liquid soap. And non-polyester sheets. And Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. And rye bread.

I suppose I should stop now, but you get the point.

We could really use some Korean food right about now, though.

I have come to see the Reggae Bus as a microcosmic analogy for life here in Grenada.

They are called this because all of them have music playing all of the time. The music will be of the driver’s choosing, and it is always a combination of reggae, calypso, soca, and contemporary American R&B. Some of the newer buses even have built-in screens on the visors at the front of the bus that show music videos. The volume is usually at a respectable level, which is nice since many of the passengers might not appreciate music blasting in their ears.

Some of them go short distances, and others do trips back and forth from St. George to the smaller towns and villages on the other parts of the island. They are all licensed and regulated by the Government, and have standard fares that they charge for each trip. Short trips–for example, anywhere between here and the bus depot in St. George’s (about 4-5 miles)–are $2.50 EC (the exchange rate is about $1 US to $2.67 EC), so it’s a super deal. Longer trips can be about $6-8 EC, but that will get you about 20 miles away, so I still think it’s really much more than a fair rate.

In each bus (they are actually passenger vans with sliding doors) there is always a driver and his partner/Wing Man. The Wing Man sits in the seat closest to the door, and is responsible for opening and closing the door, collecting money, letting the driver know when someone wants to get off, calling out the window to attract more potential customers when the bus is getting ready to stop, and standing on the sidewalk, hurrying more passengers into the bus. His job is very important, and most of the Wing Men seem to be young men in their early to mid twenties. The drivers are usually older men in their thirties or forties.

Bus stops are along a set route, usually about 1/8 to 1/4 mile between each one. Most of them are marked in one way or another, and I’m still learning where some of them are. A marker might be an actual red sign saying “Bus Stop”, a wooden bus shelter, a large painted curb cut, or other places that are commonly understood to be where one should get the bus. When you are on the bus, and are getting near to where you want to get off, it’s good to know where the next bus stop is, because you have to knock on the ceiling of the bus to get the attention of the Wing Man. He, in turn, snaps his fingers a few times to get the attention of the driver, who will pull over at the next stop.

I’ve found that you can’t just knock and hope that there is a stop coming up, because there are a few places where bus stops are farther apart, and then the Wing Man will think that you are trying to get them to pull over illegally and let you out. This annoys them, and they will tell you about it.

The police levy costly fines for buses that stop and pick passengers up in unauthorized locations, and most drivers seem to really take the law pretty seriously. I actually found out today that the cost of a ticket for a bus that lets passengers enter or exit illegally is about the equivalent of $115US, so I can understand why they don’t like to do it. But, if a bus is low on passengers, they’ll either rush you onto the bus on the fly, or kindly wait for you at the next stop.

There’s no set bus schedule, but from about 7am to 8pm one comes along around every 2 minutes. In order to make sure that they maximize each trip, it’s in the driver’s interest to make sure the bus is always as full as possible, so even if you’re just walking along the route, you can expect buses to always toot at you, ready to stop and give you a ride.

Buses usually have about 13-17 seats, including those for the driver and his partner. But all buses have flip-up seats built into them which come down into the aisle in order to pack in as many people as possible. This way, you can fit about 22 people total into a bus.

Anyone can decide to drive a bus, as long as you can afford to buy or rent a van, and can get licensed as a commercial driver. Although a driver’s day is probably long and tiring, it is a very social activity, as most jobs in Grenada are. Because many of the routes are short and towns have nice, manageable populations, lots of people know or get to know each other very quickly. Also, each bus route has its own drivers’ association, so most of the bus drivers know each other and wave, honk, flash their lights, shout to each other, or a combination of these things when they pass other buses or people they know on the street.

Especially on the short routes, like ours from True Blue to St. George, drivers will see the same people over and over both as passengers on the buses, and just going about their daily business on the streets. Because of this, sometimes drivers will alter their routes slightly to pick up a friend at their house, or just to stop and chat for a minute with someone they know. But in Grenada, there’s not really any such thing as “late”, so someone like me has tried to learn to stop looking at her watch when the bus driver unexpectedly takes the long way to town, or backs up down a side-street to pick up a package for his aunt.

There’s no point in asking “WHERE are we GOING?!?” You will always, eventually, get there.

I like the buses a great deal, especially because the scenery you pass is fantastic, everyone on the bus will help you figure out where you’re going if you’re not quite sure, and you are never trapped with a passenger who is yelling into their cellphone. Grenadians are extremely polite about those types of things.