Valentine's Day

It's Valentine's Day! One of the worst days I could be away from my fiance, but we traded little gifts and cards.  Some of the girls are going to a women's night concert tonight for Valentine's Day.  Carnival is in two weekends which seems much closer than it should be.  I am not sure if we will get to try on our costumes, or at least the full thing, until Carnival day.  We also have large flags we use in our dance that we are pretending to practice with right now; I hope we get those before we have to perform!

We are getting better at our Carnival dance at least.  Our moving one isn't that good, though, because we don't have a large enough space to practice and keep tweaking the dance.  Still, I figure we will know it well by Carnival.  I can see why we start so early!

Reading about the Sochi Olympics and problems they talk about the stray dogs...there are so many stray dogs here!  After a while you get used to the sound of barking and howling, as well as the fact that you can't pet them, no matter how much you want to.  They are everywhere; Aubrey and I walked across campus and saw them trying to have a threesome...wasn't working too well.  All the dogs are wild/semi-tame, so they aren't fixed.  That means lots and lots and LOTS of new puppies and dogs.

The cars drive on the wrong side of the road here (to me at least) but an odd thing is they walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk, too!  One is supposed to stay to the left, not the right.  This means that I'm constantly running into people wondering why they aren't moving.  I'm the one who should move!

Pedestrians are valued maybe less than the dogs here!  Being a white female there's a better chance cars will stop so I can cross the road, but a few of the other students have been brushed by cars coming too close.  Cross walks here are called zebra crossings and there's not many of them!

I think I mentioned this before but people honk here for everything: hello, goodbye, hey sexy, get out of the way, I'm going to honk just in case something might happen, I can play a song on my horn (the maxis do this!), I'm bored, the sky is blue......the list goes on.

I haven't been to the clubs here but the students say they are fancy dress.  People who go do their makeup fancy, do their hair, and wear really nice dresses.  It's very classy.

As for the normal clothes here most of the students do wear long pants to UWI because most of the rooms are air conditioned so much you'd think they were trying to make it snow!  However, lots of people wear spaghetti straps, tank tops, sleeveless dresses, etc.  They don't really wear short shorts; about knee length or a little shorter are acceptable.  Bikinis are only for wearing on the beach so one needs some kind of cover up or light clothes to go into town after or for food.  Having some kind of hiking sandals would be great; the only ones I can find here are expensive!  It is definitely good to have lots of long dresses, skirts, etc. for all the events we go to through the program. I do wish I had brought some more nice pairs of clothes like church clothes; I only have pair that nice.

The waterfall was amazing; swam in, climbed up, slid down, rolled around in, etc. the waterfalls! It sucked for anyone wearing hiking shoes though....we had to walk through the river a ways and there was no way the shoes were staying dry. Aquasocks would have been best but I forgot mine and wore flip flops; wasn't too bad off except in the mud! But it's an experience I won't forget!

This sunday we head to Panorama (steel pan) semifinals; I'll post again after that!