On a boat...

Living down here and having a birthday can be a lonely time, especially when you don't know everyone. My friend Maegan's birthday was on Friday and so I decided to bake her a cake. I couldn't find a cake pan, so I got two pie tins. I got the funfetti mix, food coloring and frosting and got ready to bake. The first problem presented was that my oven doesn't actually say how hot it is. Instead of numbers, it has more of a wedge that I assume means cooler on the skinny side and hotter on the fat side. Well how are you supposed to know how wide on the wedge to go for 350? I guessed.  I don't have a bowl bigger than a cereal bowl, so I had to mix in two bowls and then mix them together. Another problem was that I don't have a mixer! So I used a spoon and stirred the old fashioned way. I poured the batter into the pie tins and put them in the oven. They baked and came out beautifully. They were really cute because I made them tie-dye. When I tried to get ready to stack them so I could frost, I realized another problem was that pie tin sides aren't at right angles to their bottoms so when I stacked them they weren't exactly even. Oh well. They were still tasty. I wanted to pipe her name on it but didn't have any cake supplies, so I used a zip lock with the end cut off. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. The cake wound up being very yummy.

For her birthday we went to the fish fry on the northern part of the island. We got on a catamaran and it took us an hour ride to get there. After a long, hard, sweaty week of studying, being in the ocean breeze under billions of stars made everything seem so nice. The catamaran was nice, but it's still shocking to see the difference in safety standards outside of the US. There was a little hand rail around the sides of the bow, but none in the front or around the back of the boat. It would have been very easy to fall off if you weren't careful. We docked and had to walk through the "projects" of Grenada, so to speak. Houses the size of what we would think of as a living room were up on cinder blocks and people just sat on the side of the road drinking. There are a few stray dogs around where I live, but there were a ton of dogs in this area! All of them had mange and all of the females were pregnant. It's sad to see all of them in such poor conditions. We got to the fish fry and it was basically a hundred yards of alley with EZ ups and each of them had something different. There were fried fish balls, seafood lo mein, fish kabobs, fish pies, fish cakes, fish salad. We all got different things and tried each others. Everything was very good, that is, until Wes showed up with one of his purchases; fish ice cream! We all tried it. It was kind of like vanilla ice cream infused with fish. One of the other guys put it the best, "It's not bad, but it's not good. It just IS." And it really was.  All in all, the catamaran ride was better than the actual fish fry itself, but it was a really good experience.

Being a Lebanese girl I have been influenced to find the best bang for my buck. I rarely pay retail price if I can help it. When I'm at the grocery store, I really don't mind buying the generic salsa instead of name brand, or whatever the product is. Especially in Grenada, all of the name brand items are expensive because they have to be shipped from the mainland, so buying store brand can save a lot of money. However, I have discovered that there are a few things I can't tolerate and I must buy the name brand. Milk; if I'm lucky enough to find milk AND it has an expiration date that's not today, it can't be local. I get the milk from Florida. Cream cheese; local cream cheese just isn't quite right. Aluminum foil; cheap aluminum foil is exactly that. Cheap. It's like quarter ply aluminum.

Speaking of Lebanese, I just found out that my landlords are Lebanese. The whole building I live in is owned by an older man who is quiet, but from what I understand is the "hammer" around here and is not to be messed with. His children are the ones whom I have dealt with for my apartment and they have been nothing but nice. They both said they were born and raised in Grenada, but they don't have the Grenadian accent. Also, there are two types of people in the Caribbean; black-looking and Indian-looking. They are neither. I figured they had to be middle eastern of some sort. The other day I was paying rent and finally asked the son what ethnicity his family is. He replied, "My family is from a little country called Lebanon." I told him me too! He laughed and gave me a high five. I wanted to say YAHADADEEN! But I didn't want to be subsequently evicted. For those of you who are not Leb, that is not what you should be telling another Leb who doesn't know how white you really are and that you actually have no idea how to speak Arabic.

I just took my first exam and got an A! It was my anatomy lab practical. Now I have a long weekend and week of studying because I have midterms all next week. Probably nothing eventful will happen between now and so I will write again on the other side.