Surfing Grenada!!

Today started off with a little (3hr) meet the faculty and staff. All the department heads got up and spoke giving us words of wisdom for the first term. It was again very encouraging as each speaker appeared to have a real interest in teaching. How much can you really tell though from a five minute talk? We are about to see. Classes start tomorrow and I will have to say that I am getting pretty nervous. The running census so far has been that we are fixing to get an information atom bomb dropped on us. The good news is that there seems to be a lot of academic help via open door policy, DES, small groups, etc. Anyways, after the meeting I fixed a quick sandwich, grabbed my snorkeling gear(works great Samuel), and met up with some guys on my hall to try a bit of surfing. We went to a place called prickly cove and it was rightly named as one girl in our group stepped on a nasty sea urchin. It got about 8 spikes in her foot and toes causing her quite a bit of pain and swelling/discoloration in her foot. She and my roommate caught the bus back and I think they went to the clinic to get them pulled out. I haven't found out how she is doing. Back at the cove I snorkeled around for about 30mins and didn't see much besides lots of coral(more sea urchins). I haven't seen too many fish for some reason so snorkeling thus far has been kind of boring. I then donned one of the surf boards and headed out to try my hand at riding waves. Little did I know that the board I was on was
not a very good board. It took a lot of my energy just to get out to where the waves were breaking. They aren't huge waves but big enough. I was able to catch a few and just ride them laying down. I feel pretty confident that if I try it again, on a decent board, I will able to get up. Nonetheless, it was a lot of fun being out there(3.5hr) and I got a decent amount of sun. When we finally got back I hit the shower and then I headed down to the soccer field for our orientation Bazaar. Basically, this is when a few of the locals can come out and set up booths. Most just had food and fruit. I ate some chicken wings and bought some mango and bananas. All the different clubs were there as well and I signed up for the pediatric club, and the orphanage beach club(take kids to the beach on Saturday mornings). We will see how those go for now!

Hopefully by the end of the week I will have a camera and then I can post some pictures of everything I am talking about! There is a chance that I might not have time for blogging starting tomorrow but we will see. Hope everyone is doing good!