Hit the ground running...


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Published: May 21st 2006
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Me and the Mama to beMe and the Mama to beMe and the Mama to be

so it's a pretty awful photo of me, but clearly I'm not the important thing in the picture.
It's been a whirlwind couple of days since I've gotten to Trinidad, but isn't that always how the first couple of days seem?

So first things first...Where in the world am I and why?
I'm in Trinidad and Tobago (whip out those globes...or look at the little map on the bottom, it's an island off the coast of Venezuela) for the next 7 weeks doing an independent study of sorts studying the marriage and wedding traditions of the area.
Translation: I'm crashing Hindu, Muslim, and various types of Christian weddings for the summer.
Everytime someone asks what I'm doing here I get less and less sure why I'm here, but every person has enthusiastically told me I'm in the right place for weddings, so here's hoping.

I thought coming to an English speaking country would be easy, but I'm struggling to do anything more than the good ole smile and nod. The accent and dialect make it so hard to follow conversations, so unless I'm being spoken directly to, they might as well be speaking Russian. Other than that and some minor self inflicted credit card panic attacks, all has gone fairly well.

So what have I been
She's a biggunShe's a biggunShe's a biggun

Although I wouldn't have guessed over 400 pounds. The shell is slimming.
up to since I got here Thursday?

Well Friday I headed off to the university, University of the West Indies (conveniently said, You-We) to try and make some connections there for the "study" part of my travel/study. Lucky for me the woman I am currently staying with and her daughter work there, so combined I think they know just about everyone. Besides finding some good resources, I got introduced to the woman who works with all the international students. She not only has arranged for the students to go to a Hindu wedding next week end that I can tag along to, but also had arranged a trip turtle watching for Friday night for a group studying abroad from Kalamazoo and invited me along.
I was pretty excited but still hadn't really eaten since I'd been in the country. I'm ashamed to say, that my first meal here was Subway. If it is any consolation, my only other choices were KFC and Blimpies. I tried to make up for it by eating lots of the rice, okra, roasted chicken and pig tails that my host Sharon made for me before I went to see the sea turtles.

I felt like that weird homeschooled kid who gets to go on field trips when I got on the bus full of the other students. But turns out there are just five guys from Kalamazoo studying, so it was also like I was crashing an all boys slumber party. But I went with it and we started to the journey to the beach. The last 45 minutes or so was straight from a horror movie, just a small dirt path in the rainforest; if we'd turned off our the headlights to our van (or maxi taxi as they're called) we wouldn't have been able to see anything. Luckily we made it, and set out on a walk through the woods so we wouldn't step on any turtle nests.

Trinidad has the first or second largest population of nesting Leatherback Sea Turtles, although I think they are more proud of the fact that they have the best selling KFC in the world (Colonel Sanders is a national idol). Right about now all the female turtles come ashore at night about every 10 days to lay eggs and make the nest. So we waited until one came ashore and then got to be right there for the process. It was pretty incredible to watch her dig the nest and then meticulously pack the sand back down to try and protect the eggs. The odds of the baby turtles surviving are so small that she has to camouflage it perfectly. She worked for a couple of hours but then apparently got confused because a light flashed and started digging a new nest. Hoping we weren't the cause for this, we decided to leave before she made it back to the ocean.

So all in all it was a pretty incredible first night in Trinidad to get to stand on a beach with leatherback turtles under all the stars.


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