St. Nicholas Abbey

On Tuesday Nora and I went to St. Nicholas Abbey, which is a restored 17th century plantation house that now produces an exquisite rum and gives visitors a window into what life was like in early colonial Barbados.  Equally informing were our cab drives to and from the Abbey; our driver Orville was also an excellent tour guide.  He taught me and Nora all about sugar cane, termites, housing developments in Barbados, as well as some of the island's political history.  From now on, whenever I need a cab I am going to call Orville!  Anyway, here are some photos of the Abbey:

The first two photos are of the stately dining room and the "Gentleman's Chair" in the living room.  The chair was considered the apex of sitting technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  As you can see it has all sorts of attachments and hidden features that make reclining, reading, drinking/eating, etc more comfortable.  It was basically the Lay-Z-Boy of the times.

The next two photos are of the giant 350 year old tree in the back courtyard.  It's absolutely massive and upon closer inspection one realizes why it has survived for so long: it has GIANT spikey things for defense against curious animals and treehuggers alike.

Also in the back courtyard was the loo/privy/bathroom/place where people did their business.  There can be no doubt that this is one area where modern technology has considerably improved quality of life! Just imagine having to use this facility in the heat of the Caribbean.  No wonder the planter class was constantly getting drunk off rum.

Connected to the back courtyard was the building where vistitors can get their complimentary rum punch and rum tasting.  The rum punch was the first good rum punch I've had in Barbados - not too sweet, plenty of rum, and very cold.  Even better was the straight up rum, which is so smooth it's really more like a brandy or cognac.  According to the son of the owner, their rum is "smooth enough for the ladies but strong enough for the men."  I was smitten enough to buy a bottle, hoping that it will make the rest of the semester go by a little more smoothly.  Also, next time a hurricane hits Barbados I know that I'll have a clean drinking source available in case the water goes off.

Overall the Abbey was quite beautiful.  The old stone buildings blended in nicely with the surrounding foliage .

All in all it was a very fun day and I hope to revist the Abbey in order to take advantage of their half off refill policy before I leave Barbados.  Finally, I have to thank Nora for coming to visit me and providing the impetus for going to see the Abbey.  I probably would have delayed going for a long time otherwise.

A visitor's perspective: Nora's guest appearance

Hi, loyal readers.
Stephen has accepted my offer/request to guest-blog here at Bajan Solo during my stay in Barbados. I’ve been here for 3 days now and I have a lot to report. I know Stephen has already addressed some of this, so please forgive any redundancies.

I arrived on Sunday afternoon in the wake of Tropical Storm Tomas, which threatened to cancel my flight entirely and was responsible for the cancellations of several flights to the Caribbean that day. Thus, despite our 2-hour delay, I was understandably relieved to be making this trip at all. My spirits were dampened considerably when I stepped into the humid, disorganized mess outside the Barbados airport, only to discover that I was on my own to get to Stephen’s apartment. I abandoned my fears of looking like a clueless tourist (inevitable) and went about desperately asking informed-looking people how the hell I could get a taxi. One man asked where I was going and then barely gave me time to answer before throwing my suitcase in the back of a van and ordering me to get in. I asked the driver if he knew Crusher Site Road and he nodded and said yes, but as we drove through Prospect, it became clear that he wasn’t being completely honest. After a few conversations with pedestrians and a few phone calls with my host (who eventually had to come flag us down on the main road), I was finally dropped at my destination.

Stephen kept insisting that his place is actually very nice when everything works, and now that everything does work I am happy to report he’s right, but that first day I had no choice but to take his word for it. Fortunately, Monday night saw the return of electricity, gas, and real food.

Even with 21st century conveniences, life in Barbados is not what I expected—I was expecting more sidewalks and fewer chickens. Clearly, Stephen’s Barbados is not a tourist’s Barbados. Anyone who assumes he is spending a year drinking rum on a beach only to be rewarded with a master’s degree is sorely mistaken.

Speaking of rum, yesterday we toured St. Nicholas Abbey and saw the historic mansion and rum distillery located there. The grounds were beautiful, the rum was delicious, and the staff was great. In short, a highly recommended destination. Our cab driver, Orville, even took us up to the top of the very picturesque Cherry Tree Hill, a natural passageway connecting the east and west coasts of the island. The views were spectacular, if a little foggy, and Orville was an excellent guide (Stephen and I now boast an impressive knowledge of sugar cane!).

Today, since nearly everything is closed out of respect for the late Prime Minister’s funeral, we went to two nearby beaches. The first was too rocky and the tide was too high to sit on the sand, so we strolled through a swanky hotel lobby and used their beach.  Don’t worry—there are no private beaches here, so what we did was kosher.  Anyway, the water was perfect and we swam and bobbed around for a while until some stormy-looking clouds moved in.

We’re taking it easy tonight, partly because getting anywhere is always such an ordeal. Tomorrow we plan to check out Speightstown, one of the island’s larger towns with a few attractions, including an old house/museum and an art gallery. Speightstown’s tourism website also claims it’s common to spot turtles there, but I’m skeptical.

That’s all for now. Thanks for patiently indulging me, readers. This blog will now return to its regularly scheduled Stephen.

--Nora

Swimming Pictures

As promised, here are some photos from my swimming expedition on last Sunday.  The beach we went to was right near my apartment and is called Batt's Rock or Paradise Beach.  Either name works apparently.  Anyway, its a really long, deep beach that is hidden from the main road.  You have to walk along a somewhat sketchy path to get there, but its worth it.  Lots of families go to this beach on Sundays for a picnic and swim, which is why there are benches all over the place.  The Four Seasons was building a massive resort along the beach but construction stopped a year ago due to the financial crisis.  Rumor has it that construction will start again around December/January, so I am going to try fitting in a couple more visits before the beach gets ruined by the construction noise and dirt.  Here are some photos of the beach:

The first half of the beach is lined with trees, which makes for some really nice shady picnic spots.  Only problem is that the trees produce a poisonous fruit that is deadly when eaten and burns the skin when its juice (or rainwater coming into contact with its juice) touches your skin.  Still, on a nice dry, sunny day it makes for a very nice shady stretch of beach.

The second half of the beach doesn not have trees, so it is wide open to the sun.  Cruise ships and tankers dock off into the distance near the Bridgetown port.

Since we went late in the day we were there for a really nice sunset.  Nothing beats a nice beach + sunset!

Here's some photos of the friends I went with.  The first photo is of Elvis, my friend from Jamaica who is studying Internatinal Trade Policy and is seen here playing with the poisonous fruit (he's a real joker).  The second photo is of Brooke, who is from upstate NY (near Lake Placid) and is studying sustainable tourism.  She wants to grow her and her boyfriend's B&B business, so she is down here to learn some tricks of the trade.  She is the one who guided us to the beach.

Finally, here are some photos of the Four Seasons construction.  As you can see from the above photos the site runs down the entire length of the beach.  It is truly massive.  While I can understand why they wanted to place a resort on such a nice beach I am worried that doing so will ruin the family-friendly nature of the site.

So that was my swimming experience last Sunday.  Today Nora and I ventured out to St. Nicholas Abbey where we toured the beautiful grounds and sampled some of their amazing rum.  I took a bunch of photos which I will post soon, so stay tuned!

Tomorrow is the state funeral of the recently deceased Prime Minister David Thompson, so everything is being shut down.  As such there isn't a whole lot for Nora and me to do.  Right now the plan is to spend a day at the beach.  Despite the beauty of Batt's Rock, I think we are going to go try another beach nearby called Fitts.  A former Fulbrighter has recommended the beach to me many times so its about time I go try it out!

The past 96 Hours

The past four days have been some of the craziest for me in a long time.  Basically a category 1 hurricane hit Barbados, no one was prepared for it, and I lost power for close to 63 hours and water for about 6 hours.  Here's the story in detail:

It started as a typical Friday afternoon.  I woke up late and immediately headed out to the supermarket to do my weekly grocery shopping.  I bought my stuff and while in line even convinced the store shuttle to wait for me before leaving.  On the ride home (this is around 5pm) the driver was listening to the radio which interrupted a song to announce that tropical storm Tomas was headed toward Barbados and would begin hitting the island in the next hour or so.  Of course this was the first I had heard of the storm but I figured that since 1) I had just purchased food I should be OK to stay indoors for a day or so and 2) that since it was just a tropical storm it wouldn't cause that many problems, so there was nothing to worry about.  It turns out few people (including the meteorological service, police, etc) knew the storm was coming more than a couple hours before it hit.  Talk about poor planning!

At first the storm didn't seem that bad.  It was mostly just raid and some light to moderate wind.  Furthermore, I was able to leave my windows open without water coming in, which is the best test of a storm's strength that I have devised here.  Over time though the storm worsened.  Starting around 9pm I began loosing internet service every 30 minutes or so.  Then around midnight the power went out for the first time.  I ran around lighting candles but the period of darkness was cut short after 15 minutes when the power returned.  It stayed on until a bit after 3am when it went off again for what turned out to be the next 63 hours.  By this time the wind was really howling and the rain was coming down in sheets.  I could hear the sheetmetal fencing and roofing of my neighbors' homes getting pulled willy-nilly in the wind.  I was worried that the wind would rip them loose and fling them around, potentially crashing into my building, but thankfully that did not happen.  Oddly enough, water was still not pouring in through the windows, so I left them open.  This quickly changed however.

Once again I started running around lighting candles.  I had squirreled away a small stockpile of 32 tealight candles which were really cheap but because of their small size only last around 4 hours.  This was OK for this first night since the power went out at such a late time but would eventually prove to be a problem on Saturday and Sunday.  After sorting some things out I decided I should just go to bed.  By this time it was 7am, so I shut the door to my bedroom and tried to ignore the raging fury outside.  Since no water had been pouring in through the windows, I stupidly LEFT THEM OPEN.  Thus, when I closed the door to my bedroom, the wind started shaking it around really loudly.  Eventually I decided I couldn't sleep with that noise so I got up to open the door.  The sight that greeted me was unpleasant, to say the least.  In that short span I had tried to fall asleep, the wind had brought water into my apartment in mass quantities, spreading it all over my dining room table (including on my laptops, books, papers, etc) and all over the floor.  By this point the only dry towel I had left was a small hand towel, which was woefully inadequate for the job of cleaning up this mess.  I quickly shut the windows and cleaned off the laptops for fear they would short circuit.  I then dried off the books and moved them into my bedroom.  After this I tried reusing towels that I had used to clean up flooding in my bedroom but they mostly just displaced the water rather than absorbed it.  Lacking any alternatives to this I decided to leave the problem until tomorrow and head back to sleep.  So finally around 8am I passed out in my bed.

I woke up at 4pm and after realizing I still had no power decided to make the most of the remaining daylight.  I started by trying to clean the apartment for Nora's arrival the following day.  This was a disaster since with no way to do laundry I couldn't put fresh sheets on the bed or get fresh towels.  I also couldn't clean the kitchen since things were getting displaced due to the fact that the fridge was off.  I was also limited by the fact that the natural light was extremely limited to begin with since the storm was still raging and the sky was overcast.  Thus I couldn't see well enough to really clean the bathroom/shower.  Basically the apartment was a mess.

I decided to give up and embrace the chaos and coming darkness.  I lit the remaining candles I had, lay down on the couch, and alternated between reading by my giant maglight and playing my nintendo DS.  For dinner I had barbecue potato chips and a variety of wonderful cereal bars.  In between my reading/video game sessions I ran around the apartment scrapping the last bits of wax from burnt out candles and depositing them into still-burning ones. I was dangerously close to being out of candles and I needed to maximize the amount of fuel (in this case wax) that I could access.  I passed roughly 4 hours doing this then called it a night.  Since it was too dark to take a shower and I felt super gross I decided to just sleep on the couch rather than bring my filthy body into my relatively clean bed.  With the storm still raging outside I eventually passed out on the living room couch.

I woke up at 8am to the wonderful sound of a receding storm.  Tomas, which had been upgraded to a category 1 hurricane, was finally leaving Barbados!  However, I also woke up to the realization that at some point during the night I lost water.  At that moment I found myself without power and water, in a disaster of an apartment, with my girlfriend due to arrive in roughly 7 hours.  To say I was a bit panicked and frustrated is an understatement.  I quickly ate breakfast (more cereal bars and potato chips) and then decided I needed access to the internet to get local news, contact my parents, and figure out what to do with Nora.  I left the apartment and walked over to the graduate school campus.  During the walk over I came across a bunch of fallen power lines, uprooted trees, and lots of debris scattered everywhere.  The graduate school campus was in good condition but it was locked when I got there (it is supposed to be open 24/7).  With my anger/frustration reaching a boiling point I immediately started yelling "SON OF A BITCH" over and over.  The security guard must have heard me because he came over, asked me if I was a grad student, and let me in.  I thanked him profusely and immediately headed down to the computer station to begin sorting things out.

Browsing the news told me that many Barbadians had not only lost power and water because of the storm but had also lost their roofs (sheet metal roofing is extremely common here) and many of their possessions.  This quickly put my situation in perspective as I realized how lucky I was to have an intact home.  Still, with Nora arriving and me not having an power/water, my parents suggested that I think about a hotel for the week.  This sounded like a great idea, but the problem was that most of the hotels in the area either didn't have power or were all booked up because of the scheduling nightmare that the storm had caused on their arrival/departures.  With no hope of securing a hotel I decided around 11:45am to go catch a bus to the airport so as to pick up Nora.  I got to the bus stop around 11:50 and proceeded to wait for 30 minutes during which time not a single bus (no government buses, no rasta buses, no white buses) came.  Normally you don't have to wait more than 5 minutes before some kind of bus comes.  Obviously the bus service wasn't working (a fact later confirmed via radio and newspaper) so I decided to walk to the local supermarket to collect some supplies for another night of now power and now, no water.  I felt bad about not being able to pick up Nora at the airport, as the Barbadian terminal isn't the most organized experience (just like the entire country), but I had told her the night before via text message that I might not be able to make it, so she knew to hop in a cab if she didn't find me waiting for her.  On the walk to the supermarket I came across even more destruction.  I saw a utility pole ripped in half, lots of uprooted trees (many lying on top of utility lines), and many fallen power lines.  The general chaos led me to believe that it was going to take a long time for the power company to get power back to my neighborhood.  I was determined to prepare for a week without power.

At the supermarket I loaded up on candles, matches, and non-perishable foods like pasta and more potato chips.  Since my stove is gas and not electric my plan was to light it with a match and cook the perishable items in the freezer that night so as to use them before they went bad (this was my Dad's suggestion).  I tried doing this immediately after Nora arrived at my place (well actually I had to flag down the lost cab driver on the main road then lead him to my place, but same difference) so as to take advantage of the remaining natural light and it started out well.  However the gas quickly sputtered out.  I figured the gas tank must be out so I went outside to switch over the line to the second tank (the idea being that when one tank runs out you start using the second tank and have the first tank replaced, then rinse and repeat).  This tank was out of gas as well, and I got REALLY PISSED.  Clearly the person who was living here before me had failed to replace the first tank when it ran out, so now I was stuck without any gas.  (Thankfully water service had been resorted earlier that afternoon, so I was just without power and gas, rather than power, water, and gas). The person who lived in this apartment before me generally sucked - she was apparently overweight which caused her to rip off the toilet seat from the toilet many times.  So many times in fact that the landlady stopped replacing them so I am stuck using a loosely attached seat.  Ugh, there are so many examples of crap like this being left over from this previous person.  I want to find her and destroy whatever place she is living in now as revenge.

Anyway, without any gas to cook with I had to throw out all the food that was in my freezer, as it wasn't going to last another day without power.  There's nothing like throwing out $50 worth of food to cap off an otherwise wonderful day.  Instead of cooking a nice meal, I had to settle for, and Nora got to experience, a dinner of cereal bars and potato chips!  Welcome to paradise Nora!  Luckily my netbook still had close to full power so we were able to watch a couple of episodes of the Simpsons off my portable hard drive to pass the time.  We were both exhausted so we called it an early night and were in bed by 9pm. 

One of the drawbacks of storms in the tropics is that they tend to make the weather more hot and muggy.  This was the case with Tomas, so trying to sleep in my non air-conditioned bedroom was fitful.  Eventually we gave up trying to go back to sleep around 9am, had a breakfast of potato chips and muffins, and headed off to the grocery store to buy even more candles and see if the local hotels had received power yet.  The hotels still didn't have power, so we started planning for another night in my dark apartment.  To compensate, we stopped at a local restaurant (Just Grillin') for a fresh, warm meal.  I had the grilled flying fish while Nora had the barbecue chicken sandwich.  Both were very good and hit the spot that potato chips, cereal bars, and packaged muffins hadn't been able to fill over the past couple days.  After this we dropped the candles and other groceries off at my apartment and walked over to the grad center to take advantage of its working internet to try finding an available hotel and to let the landlady know that the apartment was out of gas.  After 3+ hours of looking and placing phone calls I finally found a place that wasn't outrageously expensive, had power/water/internet, and was nearby.  Since the hotel couldn't take us until tomorrow I decided it made sense to grab dinner, bring it back to the apartment, and see if anything had changed since we had last been there at 1pm.

We went to a local joint and picked up some food to bring back to the apartment (an absolute ton of food for a grand total of $16).  On our walk back to my place the landlady's husband drove past us in his car and stopped to tell us that not only did he just put in new gas tanks but that electrical power was going to be back on for the entire neighborhood within in an hour.  The Barbados Light & Power guy sitting in the front passenger seat confirmed this (no idea why he was in the car but was too happy to care) and pointed to the work truck down the road that was fixing some fallen power lines.

Nora and I then proceeded to eat our dinners while watching some episodes of the Simpsons on my netbook, which had a full battery from being charged at the grad school earlier today.  An hour later the power came on and the entire neighborhood started cheering.  It was like when the Yankees win the world series and you can hear all the drunks going nuts in Manhattan.

We're both really happy that power is back and that we don't have to stay at the hotel.  We've spent the rest of the night cleaning up, doing laundry, and making plans for tomorrow.  Our plan is to go to St. Nicholas Abbey (http://www.stnicholasabbey.com/) in the morning for a nice tour and some delicious rum and then stop at the Supercentre on the way back to pick up new frozen foods/vegetables to use for dinner.  I'll try to remember to bring my camera for photos of the abbey.  It is supposed to be a beautiful building situated on really nice grounds.


So thats the story of my last 96 hours.  It's been pretty crazy but thankfully everything is back to normal.  It definitely put some things into perspective for me regarding dependency, privilege, and planing. Sorry for the long-winded story but I wanted to write it all down while it was still relatively fresh in my head!


I hope my next couple of posts are more positive!

Working and Waiting

The past week has been pretty benign.  I spent the weekend working on my peer review for some classmates' presentation and writing my NAFTA essay, which I am about half way done with as of right now.  On Sunday I went for a swim with some friends at a nearby beach, which was really nice.  I took some photos of the beach and I promise I will get around to posting them soon!  I realize it's been a while since I've posted any pictures - I must be boring you all to death with my constant barrage of text!

Tomorrow I am going to hand in my Globalization & Global Governance essays, so I need to double-check them for errors tonight.  Even though I finished these essays weeks ago it will be nice to officially be done with them.  Since I finished them there has been this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me I could always rework them to be better.  This gets quite annoying after a while!

The other thing dominating my week is the fact that Nora is coming to visit on Sunday.  I'm excited she is flying down but before she can get here I have to do all sorts of shopping/cleaning/activity planning.  I suppose this is a good thing since it forces me to give the apartment a thorough scrubbing and stock up on all sorts of items I'd forgotten about.  Also, I am looking forward to getting to do some of the things I've had on my hit list since I got down here.  Once place I know we are going to visit is St. Nicholas Abbey, which produces the best rum I have ever tasted.  I also would like to take a catamaran trip around the island since I hear those are fun and a good deal ($80 U.S. for 5 hours of sailing, snorkeling, food, and all you can drink alcohol).  Luckily, I had some good news terms of fitting all these activities into my schedule: my classes on Tuesday and Wednesday are canceled.  Yes, this means that starting tomorrow night I have a 6 day weekend.  Feel free to hate me.  I know I would if I were working for a living and some punk studying in a Caribbean island told me he had a 6 day weekend coming up.

Thats pretty much it for now.  Stay tuned for those photos!  I swear they're coming soon!

Week in Review

I know its been almost a week since I last posted, but there are good reasons for my drop in blog productivity.  It has been a really crazy week.

It all started on Monday night when I had a little medical issue that has since then required a lot of my time and energy to deal with.  Thankfully everything is OK, but it has been eating up my time, which is annoying.  Then on Tuesday I had to give a 45 minute presentation in my Caribbean Governance class on whether proposals for federating the West Indies were the product of a regional independence movement or motivated by British colonial expediency.  It took me roughly two weeks to do all the readings for this topic and put together a good presentation.  But my hard work paid off: I completely dominated the topic and "am a tough act to follow" according to my peers.  It felt good to give a public presentation confidently and see the audience follow the story I was laying out.

Since Tuesday I have been slowly but surely chipping away at a 12-16 page paper I have to write on the United States and NAFTA.  The paper is to be written from a comparative perspective, so I am supposed to explain how the U.S. political process, political culture, and institutions affect regional integration prospects in North America, using NAFTA as an example.  This is another hard assignment to complete because the amount of background material I need to absorb before I can really start writing is massive.  Not only do I have to learn the history and fine points of NAFTA, but I have to cover the key theories of regional integration and various concepts from comparative politics.  It's an exhausting task and one that is made harder by the fact that 90% of the reading I have to do for the paper is based on my computer, so I spend hours up hours upon hours staring at my laptop screen.  My eyes hate me.  Anyway, my goal is to be finished with this paper by the time Nora gets here next Sunday because I really don't want this monkey on my back while she is here.

Unfortunately work on my NAFTA paper is getting delayed by another minor assignment in Caribbean Governance.  Whenever a student presents on a topic (which is every week now), another student (or two) has to "peer review" him, meaning coming up with a two page list of things you think the student should cover in his presentation.  This week is my turn to peer review.  Writing wise this assignment isn't a big deal.  The problem is having to do allllllll the reading that is required for the presentation, which is always a buttload.  There is a tiny bit of overlap in terms of things I had to read for my presentation and pieces that are required for this presentation.  However, the majority are new and not accessible online.  Looks like I have another wonderful visit to the Library in my future!

The other big news from Barbados is that the Prime Minister died today from pancreatic cancer at the age of 48.  Everyone knew it was coming, but it is still obviously a huge deal.  This type of transition has never happened before in Barbados, so there is a lot of questions about how legitimate and capable the new PM will be.   In fact just earlier this week there was a coup within the opposition party, whereby the former PM replaced as leader of the opposition the very person he handpicked to succeed him when he lost the national election in 2008!  Most people are disgusted by the blatantly opportunistic nature of this maneuver (the former PM believes new elections could be called soon and that he might stand a chance of returning to power).  Needless to say, it is an interesting time to be in Barbados!

Alright, back to work I go!  Enjoy your weekend everybody.

What a Night!

Last night was one of the craziest, oddest nights I've had in a long time, so apologies in advance if this post is a bit incoherent.  It started simply enough.  I got picked up at the Esso station (Esso is what Exxon is called down here fyi) across from the graduate school campus at 10:45pm by my Jamaican friend Elvis and one of his friends Richard.  From there we drove to the national cricket stadium, Kensington Oval, because that was where the party was.  But, once were got there we realized that there was almost no one there yet, so we decided it would be better to go someplace else rather than pay $30 bds each to get in to a crappy party.  So we drove into Bridgetown and went to a place called The Boatyard, which was $40 bds to get in with all you could drink bottom shelf liquor, so you really had to drink to get your money's worth!  I stuck to plain old Mount Gay on the rocks because all the mixed drinks are just too sweet.

Anyway, we're there just hanging out for about half an hour when we decide it's time to check out the dance floor.  What we found was an odd sight indeed.  There were 15-20 white guys and girls dancing and everyone else just kind of standing back and watching.  Curious, we decided to watch as well.  We quickly realized why no one else was on the dance floor: the white folks were crazy drunk British sailors.  How did we figure this out?  Simple.  I got literally pulled into a conversation with one of the blokes.  It all started with one of them dragging me out to the dance floor to show them how I dance.  I decided to mimic one of the sailor's dancing styles out of jest (imagine an angry drunk chicken running around and you'll get the idea) and was rewarded with a simple question: "Where are you from?"  When I said New York City it clearly sparked something in this guy's head because he started going on and on about how American football is for pansies and how he could jump into any football game and be a successful quarterback.  This is in comparison to English Rugby, which is a real man's sport because you don't wear pads and the ball is pain to throw/carry.  I then asked him what is he doing in Barbados and he said "Royal Navy," which sparked another rant but this time about how the American Navy sucks.  According to this fella it goes like this: Royal Navy on top, followed by the Canadian Navy, and then the American navy waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down in a distant third.  "You guys feel like your god's gift to the world," "You think you're so fucking special," were his complaints.  Naturally I wanted to point out that 100 years ago the same thing could have been said of the Royal Navy and that he was just upset that we rule the waves now instead of Britain, but I decided against it because the last thing you want to do is piss off a drunk sailor!  So I let him rant for a bit more (he continued to go on about how he would fight everyone in this bar one on one and win - another good sign) but he was really getting on my nerves because he was grabbing the back of my head in order to pull me in close so he could YELL into my ear.  Finally I just said "Hey look at that girl over there, look at the way she is dancing," waited for him to look and say "Oye, she's nice, lets go have a closer look" and then proceeded to get away from there as fast as possible.

We stayed at the bar for another hour and a half or so and then decided to leave.  On the way home however, we decided to stop in at Kensington Oval again to see if it had gotten better (it is 2:45am at this point).  It was pretty crowded when we got there so we decided to go in for a bit.  This brings me to my proudest moment of the night: getting in for way less than it was supposed to cost us.  Originally the price was $30 per person.  Since the party ended at 4am I talked the guy at the door down to $20 for both me and Elvis.  Quite a steal if I must say so myself!  It was nice to put all the years of watching my grandfather haggle into practice and having it pay off.  Thanks grandpa for all those informal lessons over the years!

The party turned out to be inside the club room at the Oval, but it was still open to the air and you could see the fields, which was neat.  We stayed there for about 45 minutes and then decided we'd had enough loud music for the night.  But of course the adventure didn't end there.  On the drive home (don't worry, Richard was sober) we came across an accident that must have happened less than 2 minutes before we drove past it.  Elvis made Richard stop the car because he wanted to get a closer look.  So he and I hopped out and walked over to the scene.  Thankfully it wasn't that bad of an accident.  From what I could tell, one car was making a right turn off the freeway when the other car struck it head on.  The driver of the car making a turn clearly had a concussion and the driver and passenger in the other car were OK except for one bloody nose.  We stayed there until the police and ambulance showed up, which took over 20 minutes!  What if someone had been really hurt?  It was frustrating to say the least.

Thankfully that was the end of the night.  Richard kindly dropped me off outside my apartment where I proceed to take a quick shower and head to bed.  I had been planning to go snorkeling today, and it is a good day for it, but I bailed on the trip because I'm just so beat from last night!  I would probably drown if I went into the water right now!  So I'm just at home, following the pansy football games on ESPN.com and trying to stomach the idea of doing homework.  One side note before I go: it was really awesome to be at foreign parties where over half the music played was American pop/rap.  This is not because American pop/rap is particularly good.  Rather it was amazing to see so many non-American people singing along and getting excited at a Katy Perry song, for example.  It was just the most spectacular display of how important exporting your culture is in the battle for global influence.  Ok that's enough out of me for now.  Cya all later.