Oh, hell yeah.

Itinerary

• 19.May: Cranberry Township, PA. – Chicago, IL
• 20.May: Chicago, IL, – Omaha NE.
• 21.May: Omaha, NE, – Colorado Springs, CO
• 22.May-25.May: Chill in Colorado Springs
• 25.May: Colorado Springs, – Salt Lake City, UT
• 26.May: Salt Lake City, UT, – Reno, NV
• 27.May: Reno, NV, – Santa Clara, CA
• 28.May-1.June: Chill in Santa Clara
• 1.June: Santa Clara, CA – Long Beach, CA

4-1-1

• Distance: ~3,290 miles
• Participants: 3 of my best friends
• Duration: 12 Days

I smell something life-changing.

Not too much going on as of late. We finished up the teaching thing, did a few odd-jobs for the ministry. I obtained Harry Potter 7, which I’m reading now. Nothing new though.

With the end of this internship in view, a thought that I’ve had many times keeps coming to mind: I’m in a place that people dream of coming to, that people spend huge amounts of money to come to. People see places like this in their calendars and on their computer desktops, and they burn to go there and experience it, and here I am, and here I’ve been for two months. I am immensely fortunate and grateful.

Last night was pretty killer. After work, our driver Josh took us to Boca, his village inland of the eastern side of Grenada.  It was kind of funny, this was not a tourist destination, and everybody knew it from the beginning. Boca was throwing sort of a block-party: there was cricket in the streets, SoCa music, the local shop stayed open late, and then there was the Oildown. Oildown, as I’m sure you haven’t been able to guess, is Grenada’s national dish. It’s sort of a crazy stew, the base of which is coconut milk. Add in some chicken (sometimes the feet too), pork, breadfruit, dumplings, provisions (they’re a fruit that looks like a banana, tastes like a potato), sometimes calalloo leaves,  and cook it in an enormous pot over a wood-fire. It’s really… and I mean really tasty depending on where you get it. Boca’s party was the real deal, we have had some from caterers before, but nothing like this.

The other great thing about being in Boca that night were the dominoes games. Dominoes is huge here in Grenada, you can always here the loud bang of them hitting tables (part of the game is to slam them, to be intimidating). I played with a few locals, actually won a few games, talked a little trash, it was great. As the night went on, I just floated around to different groups of people chatting.

The ride home was also.. interesting. Half of it was spent yelling “I’m GOOD! You GOOD?!” to the other people in the back of the van. Got home at midnight and crashed. Pretty good stuff.

That’s all for today, kiddos.

Well, someone at some point said that it can’t be perfect all the time. I don’t know who they were but they were certainly right. Even here in the beautiful tropics, there’s stuff to worry about when it comes to your personal wellbeing. So, for your future trips here, I’d recommend looking out for these top five toxins found in my travels:

5: Mango

Risk of Exposure: 10 – The only time you don’t see mango in Grenada is when you’re blinking.
Pain: 0, unless you’re allergic or you try to eat the pit.
Psychological Detriment: 10 – it’ll ruin fruit for you for the rest of your life.

Now, mango isn’t a toxin. And to be truthful, I just needed to round out my list of four to a nice straight five. But they do have an effect on you. You’ll be spoiled when you come back to the US. Mangoes here are infinitely better than the pathetic excuses of fruit that they try to say are mangoes in the grocery store. You can pick them off anywhere, they get ripe, they taste amazing, they fill you up, and they’re very untouched by harsh chemicals and growth agents. So yeah, you’re going to get back form the Caribbean and just complain for awhile, I bet.

4: Mosquito/Sandfly Bites

Risk of Exposure: 10 – Everywhere… crawling on my skin…
Pain: 4 – Scratching enough can break them open, and trust me, you’ll do plenty of scratching.
Psychological Detriment: 5 – If you live in my room, it’s more like 7. When you start to feel bugs land on your skin, but look and see nothing, you’ve gone into the deep end. Also, if you look at one sucking your blood, and just sit there to let it fill up so you get a nice bloody splat in a second, you’re a sadist / easily amused / both.

I can’t escape them. As I type this, each of my limbs has about 20-40 bites on them. My room is the worst, I think, of all the interns, for mosquitoes. I call my bathroom “The Warzone” because showering is not only a battle to wash myself off, but a battle to slay any incoming insects with my bare hands. I’ve seen and felt enough bites, watched blood splatter from them as i squished them mid-bite, ugh it’s just gross. I hate to kill bugs, I really do, but it’s either them or me, and I’m sick of being lunchmeat for insects whose only natural purpose (as far as I can surmise) is to spread disease and make me die faster.

3: Grenadian Rum

Risk of Exposure: 10 – Everyone’s house has a roadside bar/massage parlor/internet cafe/tattoo parlor/tire factory. They all have rum.
Pain: Variable, depending on your threshold. Most normal people with common sense won’t go beyond smelling it though.
Psychological Detriment: Like all alcohol, the number is proportional to how much of it you have.

Plain and simple — the rum down here is ridiculous. If the movie Pirates of the Caribbean were accurate, and they were drinking real Caribbean rum, Johnny Depp’s face would have contorted horribly with every swig he took. And after Kiera Knightly used it all to start a fire, he wouldn’t be upset that it was gone. Jack Iron rum, extremely popular in Carriacou, is estimated at 160 proof, but is likely to fluctuate, meaning that certain batches are even higher. I won’t even bother going into a description of what this would do to your internals. It’s not for the weak of heart.

2: Manchineel Fruit

Risk of Exposure: 3 – They’re pretty scarce, I think people cut them down. Those that aren’t are marked with red Xs. However, if you’re an idiot, like me, your chances are quite high, since you’ll eat anything.
Pain: 7 - After one tiny, eensy little bite, I felt like I just chugged a bottle of pepper sauce, without the taste of pepper, but with the burn.
Psychological Detriment: 10 – That stuff’s scary, not knowing how badly you were poisoned.
Remember how when you were a little kid, everybody told you not to eat random things that you just find? Remember the cliche for camping-types that stresses the importance of knowing something before you eat it? Hm? Well I guess that makes one of us…

Walking along the beautiful beaches of Carriacou, Two associates and I stumbled upon a small, greenish fruit growing on a few trees near the beach. Seeing as how everything (read: EVERYTHING) on this island was edible (you can peel the bark from trees and eat it. A typical backyard has like at least 10 types of edible plants growing, etc.), we decided to take a little taste. To the fruit’s credit, it was delicious. It tasted like a cross between a mango and an apple. We had a little and moved on. About a hundred yards up the beach, I ask Jimmy, “Is your throat burning?”
“No” he replies. Minutes later though, I get a look and Jimmy says, “okay, my throat is definitely on fire.” Uh oh. We turn to Auggie, who looks at us strangely, but also confirms the burn. Panic. Turning back, it only gets worse, and when we ask a local boy, he doesn’t really get what we’re talking about. “Are you hot in the mouth?!” he finally said, and as we nodded, he yelled out “Go and wash out your mouth!” Naturally, we were a little anxious.

Turns out that we ate the Manchineel fruit. Locally it’s known as Mangini. It’s the fruit of the worlds most poisonous tree, famous for being used by natives to poison enemy water supplies. A typical method of torture was to leave a victim tied underneath of it’s branches, exposed to the elements. The poor soul would develop all sorts of blisters. If it rained, they’d die. Well, the fruit can also be fatal in certain cases, but thankfully it wasn’t us.

I think we’ve learned a lesson.

1: Tibili Old Grog

Risk of Exposure: 1 – Only if you’re dumb enough to try it.
Pain: 6 – It doesn’t hurt much else beyond your psyche.
Psychological Detriment: 10 – You’ll never forget the taste. or the horror.

Ah, Old Grog. Just the name sound appetizing enough. There are many brands of it, each, I’m sure, with it’s own unique blend of what makes Grog so special. See, Grog is, as far as we have been able to figure out, a pretty simple recipe. First, start off with a collection of old hospital bedding and equipment. The 1930s is a good decade to keep an eye out for. Then, mix it with pure rubbing alcohol, and a pinch of spices for “taste”. Viola! You’ve made old grog. Seriously though, this stuff got the top spot for a reason. It is by far, the worst thing you can consume in Grenada. It’s just fire and ground-up syringes / labotomy equipment. The “real” Under-the-Counter Old Grog is actually stored in an enormous jug at this place in Gouyave. At the bottom, it’s full of millipedes, centipedes, bugs of all sorts. The locals say that it’s good for you, in the same way that your older siblings might tell you that Windex and Blue Kool-aid are the same thing. Also, the bottles boast that it’s chock full of Bois Bandes (French: “bwah-ban-day”), a naturally occurring aphrodisiac. I’d rather eat a scoop of Mangini Sorbet.

So Carriacou was pretty cool, in all it’s 12-square mile glory. It’s definitely more laid back then Grenada, which I found hard to believe. People there somehow manage to take it easier than the people here in Grenada. The boat ride is really neat too — I’d never been on a catamaran before, and I got to see a bunch of small islands, an underwater volcano, etc.

The accommodations for us in Carriacou were, “Unique”. Not only because it was named “John’s Unique”, but also because our room had the unique smell and moisture that one normally associates with swamps or dungeons, not hotel rooms. It also was unique in the very progressive notion that light fixtures were merely for show, not function. In fact, there’s a lot of really new ideas going around that place that involve taking running water away at random intervals, just to keep the guests on their toes. But yeah, I kid. I don’t care where we stay, it’s beautiful here and I can’t complain at all about the place, since I only sleep in it. The other rooms, as it may be, were perfectly fine. The place was very cool still, it even had a turtle sanctuary in the front of it!

After waking up and getting out of the dungeon, we would head to the Sandy Isle Cafe, to eat eggs and cheese sandwiches on the patio. Every breakfast was excellent, and the scenery was beautiful. This, however, can sometimes be interrupted by little blackbirds, who puff up and chirp, sneak into the kitchen to steal food, and land nearby (in my case, on me) to stare at your bread menacingly.

Then came the classes, which were a little more difficult this week. Teaching teachers is a little different, especially since we’re younger than them. There was also this crazy split in skill levels — some students were really skilled in what we were teaching, the others were beginners. We had planned for a class of just beginners, but when half of the class got upset at the pace and material we chose, we had to switch it up, which pissed off the beginners. It was rough, and it’s hard to carry respect when you’re a complete foreigner with no real title. If I’m ever going to become a teacher, I’ll make sure to find a way to remedy this..

After work came, what else, the beach!! It was absolutely gorgeous there. Carriacou’s beaches are just like Grenadas, except they have a very pronounced reef. I took some goggles and got to swim around and see all sorts of exotic fish, urchins (scary), coral, etc. This beach was also special because there is a dog, whom we affectionately named “Semicolon” who would come and stay with us on the beach. She practically owned the place, climbing up onto high walls that overlooked the sea, barking at waves, and being enormously friendly to us.

On the way home from the beach, we might see Mr. Snagg in passing, and let him know that we’d stop by later to hang out in his establishment. Mr. Snagg is a guy who does a bit of boating, but runs a small bar on the side. It’s right on the beach, hand-made by Snagg himself, with very cute ambient lighting and just an atmosphere that I can’t easily describe. It’s the perfect place to spend a night on the beach. We all got to be good friends after we had stopped for some refreshments, only to see the multiple pots of food that he had cooked for a small group of vacationers. He offered us the leftovers, free of charge.

Snagg’s a cool guy. After that incident, he was talking to the people who came out to eat there (he sits down and eats and chats with you, how cool is that?) and they had mentioned that he seemed very happy to have fed “the hungry students”. He told me this later, and he was saying how good he felt about it and how he’s glad that he made some friends, and I couldn’t help but smile at one of the few people in the world who can have such a good soul. We went back once more for a game of cards (which Snagg of course played with us) and then we took our supervisor out for dinner there. We had also managed to bring a big crowd of Archeology students from the US, which Snagg was pleased to see his place so full. We saw him once more, right before leaving, and hopefully we might see him again if we travel back to Carriacou for the Regatta holiday.

So, Carriacou’s definitely different. After hanging out with Mr. Snagg, watching cooks half-heartedly shoo birds from the kitchen, and pet Semicolon after swimming through the reefs, I can honestly say that it seems like the perfect place to return to. I plan on seeing a lot of the world, and it seems silly to make such a fuss over such a small place, but I think I’d like to return, hopefully soon. Maybe I could even retire there someday..

So, what do you do on your weekends? I love it here. Still. In case you were wondering.

I’m going to say right now that this post is going to be braggy. It’s hard to explain things without coming off like I’m bragging.

Weekends here are pretty killer. Last week our driver stopped at this bar on our way home on Friday. We went exploring around the back and found the wildest stuff. In one guy’s backyard, we found plants that provided coconut, breadfruit, sugarapple, five-fingers (starfruit), guava, a type of provision (think a potatoey-tasting banana), limes (which i picked many of), bay leaves, cocoa, papaya, and west-indian cherries. That’s all I can remember but I bet I saw (and ate) more. There was also just tons of flowers and plants growing. I unsuccessfully tried to climb a coconut tree. It’s just amazing that this stuff exists in the backyard of some guy’s house/bar.

After that, we made a quick stop for some tasty roadside chicken, part of which we fed to the hungry stray dogs. Passed a beach called Bathway which was destroyed by the hurricane. Saw the Rivers rum distillery after hours. Then there was a trip to Lake Antoine, the remains of a giant volcanic crater. Around the perimeter of the island as it got dark, we made a quick stop in Gouyave for fish friday (expect a whole post about fish friday later), finally making it home and going to bed.

Saturday was spent underneath the waterfalls at mt. caramel, with some new local friends. This waterfall is pretty amazing, it’s like 80 feet tall and really hits you hard, but it’ll certainly cure what ails you . Rest of the weekend? The beach.

Now, for the coupe-de-grace of the trip so far: We moved. The university was awesome, we all loved it there and it was a really great place to be. However, when you move to the university club, the place they house guest professors, speakers, etc., you can see why the nicer-than-psu dorms pale in comparison.

I have my own villa, which has a beautiful view of the caribbean sea. It’s got a big bed, wireless internet (low strength but who cares), a porch, a bathroom, and it’s all to myself! Each intern got one. They even gave us cell phones. The food here is just as crazy — there’s a 5-star chef that’s here. We’ve got to dress up for dinner, and it’s some seriously fancy food. I haven’t had a meal that good from a restaurant in a loooong time.

But yeah — works been okay this week. Students really weren’t warmed up to things, but that’s life I guess. The class was smaller, so maybe the concentration of people who don’t care was just higher. Meh. We leave for Carriacou on Sunday, so I’ll be out of touch for a week. Here’s some stuff I found online about Carriacou, from a local:

…If you’re looking for a tiny island surrounded by wide, white sand beaches with clear, clean and warm water seas filled with fish and healthy coral, with PERFECT weather year-round, then you have come to the right place. HERE the island is the attraction and we have not attempted to improve much upon nature with any fancy tourism infrastructure. We have diving. We have hiking and nature trails. Most people either walk or take island buses or ride bicycles. Hours will pass and you’ll not see a transport and lastly, when we see three tourists standing on a corner we consider that a tourist invasion. We have no high-rise hotels. I think our largest is 18-rooms – most are 3-4 rooms. We have no casinos. We have no movie theatres.

Carriacou is also an island where:

• Your neighbor can purchase a new stereo system and can play it 24/7 at full volume
  aimed right into your own house’s window and you can’t complain.
• A Local man can make a Farm on a vacant lot right in the center of Hillsborough, the main town on Carriacou, and raise goats, sheep and even slaughter cows, pigs and sheep/goats and sell the meat. Don’t bother to complain about his roving animals eating your flowers and plants
  as they roam freely throughout the town.
• Dogs run wild in packs of 5-10 in the town streets, knocking over trash bins, relieving themselves on the buildings, chasing everything that moves with teeth showing and barking to keep everyone from sleeping at night.
• Those few people owning vehicles drive without speed limit, tossing a finished beer can out the window, and park on the sidewalks so we must walk in the street

Pretty excited for that, teaching there will be new, that’s for sure. But hey, I’ve got a whole weekend ahead of me. I wonder what kind of adventures I’m going to have before then…

So, for the past two weeks, we’ve been doing a lot of teaching. Teaching is what really sparked my interest in this trip. Originally, I thought we were going to be teaching teachers. I figured this was really cool, but now that I’m here and have taught a few students, I couldn’t be happier about it.

I’ve always had the thought of being a college professor. They get to travel, do research, live in an academic environment, and, best of all, teach. Teaching is the ultimate way of giving back — in almost any scope you put it. You can improve communities, individual lives, or even the world, if you’re a good teacher. Colleges are even better because your students are (usually) motivated to listen to you, and you can actually still be a part of the community through multiple involvements with tons of enthusiastic people (at least, PSU is like that).

So yeah, I’ve sort of always held the goal of being a professor. I’ve taught in the past, a few times actually. During Governor’s School, I spent time teaching iMovie to middle schoolers enrolled in a small camp. A year later, for my senior project, I taught a class on how to use Linux. Both experiences were extremely rewarding, for their own reasons. And now I’m here, and my idea of being a teacher is even more solidified.

The past two weeks of teaching has been great. We usually get a group of kids with no programming experience. One or two of them are hardcore IT-kids, and go faster than everyone else. Sometimes, you get students who just don’t get the material, but they keep trying. Other kids just finish their work and toy around with the programs. But the thing that makes the experience so special for me is that they’re all enthusiastic and they all care about it.

Sometimes you’ll work with one student for a good bit of time, and leave them to finish their assignment, and they ask you for some more help, but they seem to do better. Later on, in another assignment, it all clicks into place and the student is happy — really happy to have gotten their program working. They marvel at it like they’d never be able to do it, and always want to show their friends and the interns. There was this guy who when he got something right, he’d call us over to check out what he did, he’d have us run his program, just beaming. There was another guy who’d clap his hands and laugh when he got things going.

It’s seeing stuff like that, seeing these kids learning something entirely new, something that they can take further, and being really happy because of it, that’s why I want to teach classes. Seeing a student who got help from one of us on a certain topic taking that knowledge and helping the kids around them, it’s great. Sometimes we’d have to do very little work, and the programs they wrote, they’d all be different, in ways that our lessons never explained, and they’d work and they’d be unique to the proud programmer.

I dunno, I feel like I’m getting repetitive, so I’ll end it here. All I can say is that I’ve never felt so rewarded about anything I’ve ever done. It’s a good feeling — knowing that you’re making a difference in someone’s life like that.

PS I get the overwhelming feeling that this post seems pretentious and that I’m stratifying myself with other people, putting myself on a higher plane than them because I’m a teacher. I don’t really know how to properly address this other than saying that I feel lucky to have been given the chance to share a lot with these kids, and that it’s more than just teaching java. I’m learning plenty, too, and I think (hopefully) the students and we interns get together alright.

Okay, so I know I was a little slow in getting this thing going, but things have been awful crazy since I got home from PSU. I’m going to fly through the basic gist of things, just to let you know what I’ve done so far. I think later on, I’ll go into details about life here, but for now, here’s what’s been going on:

I flew, for the first time ever, out of Pittsburgh on June 3rd. After all the stuff that surrounds leaving goes on for a few weeks, you’re pretty ready to leave. The fear surrounding the flight didn’t though. All in all, I’d say it was pretty cool, and I liked flying (I had 2 window seats, one of which was us flying over the islands in the Caribbean), minus turbulence. Turbulence is probably the scariest thing I think I’ve ever experienced. I thought maybe it would just be a little bumpy, but nobody told me the plane freaking drops like it’s going to just drop out of the sky. So yeah, a little unnerving. I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

After we got there, we met our supervisor, Mr. Leo Cato. Mr. Cato’s a pretty great guy, and he arranged a tour for us around a few attractions of the island. We visited the Anandale falls, Lake Etang, and a few points of interest around St. George’s. After our first lunch of real Grenadian food (I got a Crabback and a soup made of the Calaloo leaf.), we visited the Ministry headquarters, and went home. One nice part of this trip was that we had three technology people who were our age accompanying us, so we got to find out a little bit about the culture of the people while we saw the sights.

Tuesday was more meetings with people from the Ministry. We found out more about what we’re going to be doing while here, and decided on a plan of action. In case you didn’t know, we’re going to be teaching students here how to program in Java, and how to do some system maintenance (both hardware and software types of things). We’re doing two weeks in three parts of the island and one part on a small island to the north called Carracou. We have some other plans too, involving wire less networking around the capital city, and when we can help with other stuff, we will.

Wednesday was spent setting up computers in the Gouyave location. They needed the software for coding Java, so we got that set up for teaching there. At night we went to a local nightclub, including a big dance hall and a bar on the beach.

Thursday was a national holiday, Corpus Christi. It marks the beginning of the wet season, and all the locals we talked to were telling us to expect lots of rain. It turns out that this happens just about every year on this day, it rains a lot. I was told that they hadn’t had rain like that since January. Traditionally, some people in Grenada spend Corpus Christi planting crops, even if it’s only in their own gardens, because the oncoming rain will be a welcome change an an excellent start for yielding a good crop.

Friday was spent as a free day for us, to do what we like. It was nice, we basically spent the day on the beach. Saturday wasn’t much different. Sunday was, though. We spent it making a textbook for our class. It started off to be around 30 pages (it’s nearing 50 now).

Since then, we’ve just been going to St. Mary’s school in Gouyave. Teaching is awesome, it’s been awhile since I’ve been able to do it — I did for Senior Project, and if you count some of the IST groupwork I’ve done, that might count too. I love it, and it just reinforces my will to go get a Ph.D. and become a professor of something.

Very quickly (I’ll touch up on this later) — I’ll say a few things in rapid succession, just to give you an idea of some of the crazier things here. Driving is insane, people are hospitable, there’s plenty of really good, healthy food to eat, and the little differences between Grenada and the US is immense.

I have a lot to say, about a lot of crap. I hope this will be the last “this is what I’ve been up to” post — I’d like the rest of them to contain that stuff, but have some more thoughtful posts about just how amazing this place is. People dream of places like this, they see them on television and it seems so far away, and they don’t even get the whole picture. I love it here so far, and I doubt that will change. So cheers, here’s to a summer that makes a difference.