More apartment pics...

View of road looking north

looking south

Side porch

Stairs to water

Special Requests... no not singing.

The day is absolutely beautiful in Barbados. The waves have calmed a bit so instead of the loud crashing and pounding on the coral below, we have the nice "swoosh, swoosh" as the sea laps on the beach.

Upon sending the blog URL out to the Schuhmann's, Dad S. has requested we post pictures of our apartment. It just so happens that in our library of about 10,000 pictures , we have a few. The may be a bit smaller than the others on the site since I compressed them to save uploading time.

We love hearing from everyone, so please, if you have any requests (any requests at all), send them along and we will do our best to post a response.

We miss and love you very much.

Lara & Pete

Blogging & missing

So its been a week since we last wrote. Funny, we talk about blogging and funny posts to write, but sitting in front of the computer and writing is ... apparently much harder. Don't know how schubee does it. That's why he gets paid the big bucks.
Things here are good. Two words: hot and slow.

Happy birthday to Elena! We can't wait to see everyone this summer.

Speaking of "can't wait", living away from home has a lot of pluses. But three and half months in, the minuses are starting to appear. Not to be negative, but what follows are random thoughts about differences. We both like lists (me more than Lara - top 5's and top 10's ala High Fidelity) so here goes. Pete first.
I REALLY MISS (family, friends and pets are not included in this list. They are of course the t'ing we miss most) ...

Pizza. Easily my #1. Pizza here is a complete joke. There's a chain called "New York Pizza" or something. Everyone raves. Quality is on par with the cheapest (I'm talking $2) frozen over-sized hockey puck with fake cheese you can find in the Food Lion. And it's like $20. The sad thing ... we eat it. Lara's turn:

Car Radio... and I am talkin just the radio here. I mentioned in an earlier post we have our van (similar to a VW bus), Jerry. To expand on Jerry a brief moment: Jerry is a '96 Suzuki Carry (we don't have them at home). Both of his windows have trouble going up and down and are missing their crank. I could go on and I will later complete with photos, but not now. Getting back to topic, Jerry does not have a radio. He has GREAT speakers, you know, the big ones that blast the base... but nope, no radio. It makes our car trips, especially in the hills (usually 3 - 4 hours) very long. Not because we don't enjoy each other's company, but because the music is so happy and uplifting that you just sing and dance right in your seat. It really is fantastic! Right now we are listening to UB40 (who plays here on the 29th).

#2
Pete - Our couch. I guess its really a package. Couch and TV. We don't have a couch and we don't have a TV. Not having a TV was a decision. We knew it would be great to not be subject to 150 channels of hype, fear and media news-making, and it is. We can read what we want (and we've both read more books in the last 3 months than in the last 5 years - maybe we'll post about that later) so the disconnection factor isn't the point. It's the quality time with the couch. Flipping channels, watching a good show on Discovery, catching the end of the game, Sportscenter! We have to drive to watch TV, minimum 10 minutes, then wait another 15 minutes for them to find the right channel. Then its in Spanish. On a really small crappy TV that's far away. And of course there's no couch. For some reason its just not the same. When we get home, we're going to order pizza and lay on the couch for at least a week.

Lara - Unfortunately, I have to agree with this one. And I really do hate to agree with Pete 'cause I was the one that was so excited about not having the TV. The only thing I can add is, when we get home, we will also be buying a new couch - one that is fluffy and can fit the two of us better than the one we currently own.

#3, 4 ,5
Pete&Lara - Did I say pizza? Oh yeah. Well, we're not going to make it to individual top 5s much less 10 so we'll wrap this up, collectively.

#3: Yard. Ours here is water. Very nice. But walking in the grass is cool, as is the garden.

#4: Privacy. Neither of us has had a roommate for quite some time. Our "landlady" Barbara is not technically our roommate, but she does live upstairs and spends a good bit of time either on the steps that look into our kitchen or actually in the house or on the porch. Don't get us wrong, we do love Barbara, just not first thing in the morning. And she never leaves the house.

#5: Our house. Its a project, but its a project we enjoy and we've dedicated ourselves to. We've made so much progress on in the last few years its tough to be away from it, knowing its not going forward. The window in the sunroom is still leaking ( 2 years ) and it kills us. Our house also has different rooms. The main door to our apartment leads straight into our bedroom and also has the bathroom. The bedroom leads into a small sitting area with a door into the good-sized kitchen. The porch is large, but seating is not great. This layout is tricky when guests visit. The only time we can't hear each other is when one is in the kitchen and the other is in a running shower (of course except when the waves are crashing and then we can't hear each other two feet away).

Love from Barbados,

Pete & Lara

Can someone please send us a pizza?

pics

Fiesta
View from the water

View from Fiesta
Rough day

Barbara
70th Birthday Party
last night

April 12

Haven't posted in a few days- obviously. Things have been pretty hectic with the long Easter weekend, Pete's work and Barbara's (land lady) birthday yesterday. Over the long weekend, we had a chance to head down to the Oistin's Fish Festival where they have vendors (mostly plastic crap), food and drink. Typically, Oistin's is a local/tourist lime (hang out) on Friday and Saturday night with music, food, drink and dancing. Prior to Cricket World Cup, vendors had a basic shack style cooking area, decorated however they saw fit- colorful and lively. You would wander around all the shacks to choose what you would like to eat - variety of fish, macaroni pie (yum yum), salad, cole slaw, chips, breadfruit and plaintains - order from the stall where you found your food, and find a picnic table or area where one of the gals working would bring your food. Unfortunately, with the news of Cricket World Cup here in Barbados, they tore down all of the shacks and formalized the stalls - they all look the same. Blue roof, plastic siding, all the gals and cooks wear hair nets, gloves and aprons. Although the stalls are in the same area they were before, the country took away all of the local flavor and made it into a sterile environment. Anyway, it is still a good time and all of the dancing, singing, liming and whatever else still happens down at Oistin's. We took Mom & Dad L, a friend and economist Marty, and Babara the Friday before they left to go home and had a pretty good time I would say. We met up with Deidre & Tony (couple we bought Jerry, our van, from) Yvonne and Buddy and some other guy. We all had a few drinks and some food but no dancing went on .... at least not by us.

I got a little off topic, so the fish festival - one of the great things about this festival is they have a contest to see who can clean the most flying fish (the fish of B'dos). It really is amazing to see people, typically women, at the fishmarket cleaning these fish. The fish are pretty small and have quite a few bones. It is an art they have mastered and they are FAST. Unfortunatly we didn't go at the correct time to see this contest but we had a nice time wandering around the area and listening to the local street bands as they walked by.

Today has been pretty quiet around the house. Pete is off to work. He taught a class this morning that he has been prepping for the past couple days. I think he ended up with 91 PowerPoint slides (whew).

pete: Class was nice. 7 students! Quite a difference from my typical class at uncw where my smallest classes have around 40 students and my large ones have more than 200. It was a grad class in the marine resource management track, and my topic was the economics of biodiversity. since most of these students have natural science backgrounds I had to spend the first hour just covering basic econ. But it was great. Lots of questions and good discussion; a very bright group. Hopefully they found it useful and at least somewhat informative. Anyway, it was nice to be in the classroom for the first time since early December.

Next week we have a dive trip scheduled to photograph different reefs for my reef valuation project. We're going out in the department boat (yes, the department has a boat!), and will be taking along a student named David who does nice underwater photography work. Hopefully we'll be able to rent a high quality UW camera for Lara (so with our little one, we'll have 3 cameras in the water) and will be able to get all we need in one day, assuming the weather cooperates.

Well, we're off to run some errands.

Love from Barbados!
P&L

From Barbados...

Live from Barbados...
Hopefully you will see a daily blog from Pete and Lara. I can't guarantee anything but we will try. We have had so many wonderful experiences, funny stories, strange and outrageous things happen over the past three months, we had to figure out a way to record them.
We hope you all enjoy!
L&P

Working?

Is this working?

Is this working?

Trying to figure out if this actually works?
I will see...