Tuesday January 18, 2011

We left Dominica yesterday after 2 fantastic warm days. On Sunday we woke up early and caught a cab which took us around to a couple of the most popular sites. Our first stop was Titou Gorge where we were able to swim up a narrow waterway in between 2 rock walls. I will post pictures of the inside of it once I get to Brazil but it was absolutely incredible. Plus the freshwater was a nice change up because I hate saltwater so much. When we arrived at the Gorge, another large group of Semester at Sea kids were arriving at the same time. It was packed full of about 70 kids in that small cave all of which were screaming when they got in the cold water. After we left there, we headed over to Trafalgar falls. It was a little bit of a hike to get up to them bus so worth it after the fact. Again, I need to post the pictures to really do it justice but they were so tall and set back in a beautiful green location. It was perfect.

That night everybody had pretty much the same plan. Go to the ship and eat dinner, then the nearest bar to start their drinking. Without going into too much detail, it was quite a show seeing a boat full of college kids having their first 10 drinks after being cooped up for a week. I saw some pretty wild things including the ships sign language interpreter spinning upside down on the stripper pole. She was not half bad at it either, and this was about 15 minutes into the night. The night proceeded as you would imagine.

The next morning I woke up at about 7am again to get an early start on the day. Unfortunately when you are trying to organize a group of college kids, you don’t always get the start you intend. We ended up getting off the ship at about 10 and headed to the beach for the day….Oh and one more thing about Monday night; it was raining all night and some dumb broad was sprinting on the wooden dock back to the ship and completely bit it. She started crying. I boarded and went to sleep… But anyways this beach we went to was ridiculous. I have always heard of them, but seeing a black sand beach for the first time is so weird. I have been to so many Caribbean beaches and never seen anything like it. I could not get over how soft the sand was and how much it was just like a regular sand beach, but completely black from the volcanic lava. Crazy. After getting some pollo con arroz y habichuelas we headed back to port where I bought the Dominican flag. The second flag in my collection. Just before getting on the boat a few of my friends and I went swimming off of the pier next to the ship. I dove down and picked up a sea urchin and brought it back to the dock for everyone to hold. I then saw one of the big black ones with the long spines. Never attempt to pick one of those up. I watched a black shot of venom shoot up my finger the moment I touched it. My finger still kills. Mental note that white sea urchins are good, the black ones are bad.

Now that we are back at sea again classes started back up. It is by far the rockiest day we have had so far and countless kids have puked. It is really funny to see everyone attempt to walk around the halls. For the first time ever, I had a class which was cut short due to “big waves.” You can’t do justice trying to explain what it feels like through this blog, but this is by far the rockiest I have ever felt a cruise ship. It is easy to take a serious spill and I’m sure it will happen at least a few times before the end of the trip. Although we have 6 days at sea ahead of us(which means 6 days of classes), in just 3 days we will enter the Amazon River. I can imagine it will be soooooooooo cool to be in class and look out the window at the dense Amazon rain forest on either side of us. Updates to come.