First, I would like to eliminate any confusion as to where in the world I currently reside.
Dominica is one of the little islands in the Lesser Antilles. It's sandwiched between Guadeloupe and St. Lucia. Yes, that teeny tiny little island. That's where I am.
I am NOT in the Dominican Republic, which you can find to the right of Cuba on the map. Before I left, when I told people I was moving to Dominica, a fair few said "Oh, you mean the Dominican Republic?" Uh, no. Like I was applying for a visa and moving thousands of miles away to a country I didn't even know the proper name of.
To be fair, I had never heard of Dominica before Chris decided to apply to Ross. Still, it's always annoying when your intelligence is questioned. Anyway, I wanted to clear this up in the early days of the blog, in case any of my readers were getting the wrong idea.
Now, here is Dominica. On the northeast coast, you can see Marigot. This is where the main airport is. If you come to visit me, that's where you will land.
Then on the northwest side, you have Portsmouth, which is the second largest city in Dominica. This is where the market is held super early every Saturday morning, which is the best place to get fresh fruits, veggies, and fish. Portsmouth is pronounced "Ports Mouth" here, not "Ports Muth" like I originally thought.
Directly south of Portsmouth is Glanvillia. That's where I live!
Directly south of Glanvillia (and not on the map) is Picard, which is where Ross University is located. Most students live in Picard, and that's where the shops and restaurants are. It takes me about 20 minutes to walk from Glanvillia to Picard, which I end up doing at least once a day. In Michigan, a 20 minute walk was nothing to me, but here in the heat, it's just awful. We're going to move after this semester.
On the southwest side of the island is Roseau, which is the capital city. Roseau is pronounced either "ROSE-oh" or "rose-OH" depending on who you're talking to. That's where I went on Monday, which was the original content of this post, before I thought maybe I should do the geography lesson.
Here's what Roseau looks like from the coast. No, I did not take this picture from a parachute. None of the photos in this post were taken by me. I thought the quality of pictures taken from the window of a van while driving on a bumpy road wouldn't be worth my time and energy. Plus, the batteries in my camera were about to die and I didn't want to waste them on iffy shots.
I went to Roseau with the spouses organization, henceforth referred to as RSO. About five months ago, an IGA grocery store opened in Picard, which along with a few other local shops and the market, allows you to find all the food and supplies you need. Before the IGA, grocery shopping involved searching all over town and hoping you could find what you needed, while also lugging around your previous purchases. How much do I love the fact that the IGA here opened the semester before I got here? Anyway, it used to be a big deal to go on the Roseau trip with the RSO, because they hired drivers for the day who would take you around to several stores, and then drop you off at your doorstep. Now, it's more of a luxury.
Here's what a street in Roseau looks like, though we were in a more commercial area.
Our driver took us to Save-A-Lot (groceries), Astaphans (closest thing to a Walmart here and the best place to get home goods), the Coke factory (which isn't what it sounds like, it's a big barn where you can buy cases of Coke products), and the spice man (spice guy, spice shack, I don't even know if it had a technical name). The spice man was pretty cool, photography was not allowed there or I would have taken pictures. There were tons of tubs filled with more spices than I've ever heard of, with these cute little painted signs sticking out of each tub to identify the spice inside. I saw signs for a bar in the back too, which intrigued me, but which I didn't check out.
I didn't go crazy with cash in Roseau, because a) I only had so much cash to work with and needed to save some for a fan at Astaphans, which was our last stop, and b) Save-A-Lot ran out of shopping carts when they were overrun with students. That being said, I did get a fair amount of goodies that I had a hard time locating in Picard, such as pizza rolls and individual flavored oatmeal packets. Plus a case of Coke Zero, which greatly reduces the number of two liters I have to stuff in my backpack and carry home, if I can even find two liters of Coke here, which I often can't.
There was a farmers market right across the street from Save-A-Lot, which I checked out while waiting for the others to get back to the van.
I have a hard time buying food when I go to the market. Everything looks tempting, but I don't want to buy fresh fruits and veggies unless I have a recipe in mind, or I know they'll just rot away in the fridge. But I did pick up some eggplant and pineapple.
Here is a picture of the pineapple I bought. It is the most classically pineapple-looking pineapple I've seen in real life, and I don't even care that this sentence makes no sense or that I am going back on my word and posting a picture I took myself.
Looking at this picture made me hungry, so I just got up and ate a slice of this pineapple. Still delicious! Dominican pineapples are the best ever. They are so good, you can eat the core.
Now, responsibility calls. My cat barfed on my shoes this morning sometime between when Chris left for school and I got out of bed. As if that wasn't bad enough, a ton of ants swarmed around the cat barf. I was too grossed out to resolve the problem immediately, so I sprayed the entire area with Raid. Now I have to clean cat barf AND Raid off my shoes, plus get rid of the pile of dead ants on the floor. Also, my dirty apartment isn't going to sweep itself, nor are the dishes going to scrub themselves, nor are my clothes going to become clean of their own accord. Nothing like super hot summer weather with no air conditioning to make you procrastinate on housework and sit in front of a fan blogging.
