Let me start out by saying that we live one town over from the school. Our neighbors are local people, goats, dogs, and chickens. And bugs... ugh.
Here's a picture of the road we take to get to our apartment. We actually live a few houses down on a different road, but this one has a better view. Please note the juxtaposition of beautiful mountains with tiny little shacks and rusted corrugated metal. The name of this road is "Mountain Breeze," which is in quotation marks because there are no signs anywhere, it just goes by word of mouth. It's hard to give directions here.
Now, here's what our front porch looks like:
Our door is the one immediately on the left. Our next door neighbor is a fourth semester student. Another student lives upstairs, and the landlords live right above us. I intended to take a picture of the whole building from the street, but our landlord was on the porch and that would have been weird.
View from the porch:
Again, mountains. You can't go anywhere and not see mountains. Several other student/spouse pairs live in that pretty peach and white building, which I love.
Alternate view:
When I took this picture a few minutes ago, that rooster was almost sitting on my porch. He ran away when I opened the door. Never having lived on a farm before, I didn't know how loud roosters are. They. Are. LOUD! The sun rises before 6am in Dominica, and I am literally woken at the crack of dawn every morning by sunshine on my face and a cacophony of rooster crows. They get right up under our bedroom window and screech their little throats out. It's true that from far away, a rooster makes a noise that sounds surprisingly like "cock-a-doodle-doo." But from just a few feet away, it sounds more like AWK AR AR AH ARWKJRGHEKWAHGE. It's really disturbing.
Moving on.... view from the front door:
Note the two fans both blowing toward the desk. We only have air conditioning units in the bedrooms, but it's so expensive to run them that we are planning to only use them the night before Chris has exams. Also, this is the cleanest our apartment has been since we moved in. If you want a more realistic picture of what our place looks like, imagine all kinds of random items piled on the dinner table and desk.
Here's what the living room looks like from the view of a med student diligently hitting the books:
Actually, a more accurate description of that view is what it looks like if you're me and wasting time on Facebook.
As for tv here, it's a mixed bag. We get ABC, Fox, ESPN/ESPN2, HBO, Starz, Encore, TLC (my favorite), HGTV, TBS, etc. However, we are missing several favorite from the states such as Comedy Central, FX, and Food Network. In their place are really weird things like Al Jazeera, Chinese TV, and a bunch of local Caribbean channels. The channels we do get from the US seem to be from Florida. Our cable comes via satellite so on a really cloudy or rainy day we lose channels easily.
Kitchen:
The kitchen is almost twice as big as my kitchen in Rochester was, which amuses me. I have a love/hate relationship with this kitchen. It is spacious. But it is also an ant magnet. Then there are the appliance issues. Our microwave has two settings, defrost and high. It's ancient, and the door is really hard to open. But what I really hate is the stove. Let's have a closer look:
The first thing to notice is the fact that the glass door is broken. When I cook, heat from the oven escapes into the apartment, which is already about 90 degrees and humid. You can take a piece of rubber and push it back up, but it just promptly falls down again. However, that isn't even my main concern. The dial on the far right is the one for the oven. There are no temperature settings. There are no numbers at all. No dots, lines, or any kind of temperature indicators. The oven is either off or on, and that's it. Based on my successes/failures at making food thus far, I've come to the conclusion that the one temperature it operates at is between about 400 and 425 degrees. That means I can't make cookies, brownies, cakes, or anything else that needs to cook at a lower temp. Do you know how many recipes call for a 350 degree oven? All of the delicious ones! Grrrrr.
The stove operates off a propane tank:
One day I'm going to be right in the middle of making dinner and the propane will run out. I'm not looking forward to that day. My cat Zoey likes to sneak into the cabinets and hide between the propane tank and the wall, for some reason. I'm forever pulling her out.
Bathroom:
The shower has two temperature settings (sounds familiar...) which are "hot water off" and "hot water on." I believe the hot water is a combination of a solar panel and an electric heater in the showerhead. "Hot water off" feels like pool water temperature, and "hot water on" is warm for about 90 seconds, then reverts to lukewarm for the remainder of the shower. It's actually not bad though, because I'm perpetually too sweaty to want a hot shower.
Bathroom sink:
I knock at least one item on the floor every day because we have barely any storage space. It drives me nuts.
Looking down the hall from the bathroom toward the bedrooms:
Also an accidental picture of our cat Lola, who is currently on a diet. I'm also about 95% sure she has ear mites. My vet appointment (a house call!) is a few days out, but luckily Lola is the happiest cat on the planet and really doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that she's slightly itchy.
Main bedroom:
Other side of the main bedroom:
I miss real closets.
Spare bedroom:
Basically the same as the main bedroom, just a little smaller. This is where the litterbox lives. In Dominica there is no such thing as scented litter, to my dismay. Also no such thing as clumping litter. The cat in this picture is Zoey. Someone was making a lot of noise outside the window and she was feeling disturbed. Previously she had been hiding here:
Again, terrified from the noise. I promise she actually likes me.
And if you were wondering about that barrel... that's how we shipped most of our possessions to the island. Chris bought it from someone on Craigslist. It was filled with red dye that they use to color mulch chips, and it took forever to clean out. Well actually, my parents did most of the cleaning. Thanks mom and dad!
It's a really big barrel:
If you don't have enough money to buy a plane ticket here, just ship yourself in a barrel. Should only take 3 or 4 weeks! Bring snacks.
And there you have it! Our humble abode. We're planning to move in 3 months when the semester ends. Our place is okay, and it's certainly more spacious than the apartments I've seen near campus, but it's definitely not as nice/new either. It's a no-frills place to live, and Chris and I are both ready to pay a little more for a couple frills. Plus it takes 20 minutes to walk to campus, and with the heat index being over 100 degrees on an almost daily basis, it's just too far. What's the point of walking to the pool to beat the heat if I'm going to be crazy hot by the time I walk back home anyway?
On my agenda for the rest of the day is laundry, lamb from Shawarma King and a double feature of The Hangover 2 and Pirates 4 on campus. Tomorrow I'm going with some ladies from the RSO to a beach called Red Rock. I'm excited!
Also, starting tomorrow I believe I'm going to participate in a "10 days in Dominica" blogging challenge. Not sure if I will be able to keep up with posting every day for 10 straight days. Guess we'll see!
