ice cream, you scream!

Today we kayaked across ferry reach to the double dip ice cream shop. Ice cream is wonderful for brightening a day gloomed by frustrating slides and not so bright fluorescent autotrophs. Oh! Also, eric got stung by a jellyfish today! He is fine but we’ll all be more wary in the water now, I’m sure.

delayed posts to catch up to speed

I love the fact that I can tell how many days I’ve been here based on the fact that we arrived Sept 1st. Day 12.

------------------------


Interesting weekend. We took the bus to a private member only tennis club where we met the assistant manager who was very accommodating. The whole trip again reminded me of the similarities between Bermuda and Cuba. As I’ve talked about before, in Cuba there are two currencies that distinctly separate tourists from locals because they are meant to pay for things in tourist dollars and national money respectively. It used to be illegal for Cuban nationals to have the tourist convertible dollars or to have foreign currency, but those laws have since been retired. There is only one currency here. Well, the US dollar and Bermudian currency are exchanged equally, so technically two, but in theory only one value. In Cuba I found that even though it was perfectly legal for Cubans to have foreign currency, they most frequently can’t afford things in the convertible tourist dollar price. I have previously blogged about the duality this creates in Cuba between the locals and the tourists.
It certainly is not the same here. First of all, while there is stratification in Cuba, it is nothing like the socioeconomic conditions here in Bermuda. The difference between people who own actually cars (and boats!) to those who drive scooters, to those that take the public bus is great. Those who are rich here, are, well, REALLY rich. I found out that minimum wage is something close to 17 dollars an hour to provide for the high cost of living. Bermuda is a place where mayor Bloomberg comes on the weekends to eat out and recoup after stressful weeks… really. What I’ve realized (mostly by the lack of seeing people my age and especially girls) is that it is likely that the extremely expensive cost of dining out, drinking, and even just the smart dress code required (nice looking for girls, nice slacks, nice shoes, nice shirt for guys) probably keeps half the people from going out on the town too regularly. Of course, any and all are welcome to go into Hamilton to the nice restaurants, but it is very pricey and I think it ends up being mostly the well-off and tourists. Another reason we don’t see people our age is likely because they are all studying at colleges and universities in the US, or if they can’t afford that, then they are working on the island. Sometimes its hard to remember that most of the world is in school session right now.
This rather ‘stream of conciousness’ post aims to illuminate the fact that there are different spheres of existence here just like there are in Cuba and I find both these islands’ spheres to have sharper lines than those in the United States.

9/10/10

I have just begun my algae samples. They look… small and not extraordinary.

Picking up with the blog after the hurricane

This post jumps back several weeks to when i had just returned from my first extended boat trip.

9/8/10

Home again after four more days at sea. The world is rocking and it amazes me how many ants and other living creatures are crawling around. Did not sleep very well, I was trying to protect myself from the insect life that thrives in my room, but ended up being stifled by the heat.

Extreme Makeover: Hurricane Edition

Before, During, During, After




And a view from the front porch

Before, During, During



Before and After the at the Lime Kiln


Pathways to and from



A boat washed up into the shrub

Hurricane has passed

The skys are blue, the air smells green like spring, but the internet is for all intensive purposes out. Safe and sound!

is there still an eye?

Evidently we're in the center of things now but the internet is still up and really, very little damage has been done besides a few branches and plant debris AT the BIOS station. It feels like a very very windy day at the beach. The excitement has died down prematurely to the winds and now people are sitting around watching movies and trying to stay busy until the winds really end.

News sources online say that there has been significant damage to the Southern end of Bermuda and I know that even while we have a back up generator, a great number of Bermudians are currently out of power.