First Year Anniversary Take 2

So the ACTUAL day of our Anniversary was the week before the Anatomy exam so as our previous post stated, we decided to lay low until the next weekend.


We were in luck!  The Wellness Group was going Zip Lining (one of our new favorite things after Thailand) so we decided to go there in the morning and go out to dinner later on.

  All geared up and ready to hit the zip lines!

  This was the HARDEST part for me!  My arms were killing me afterward.

Kelsey making his way through the course!  It isn't as easy as it looks :)

This was the last zip of the trip - it was awesome we went back and forth over the river!

Starting dinner off right with some wine and a Heineken.

  Beautiful deck right over looking the ocean

Sunset!

Happy couple 1 year after.......

So we finally got to have our anniversary dinner and drinks and went home and made peanutbutter popcorn and watched a movie - couldn't have asked for a better night......

Do You Know What Today is........................................It's our Anniversary (made for you and me)

Thanks to Tony, Toni, Tone' I always hear "Anniversary" play in my head each and every time I even say the word!  And Sunday was no exception as it was our very first WEDDING ANNIVERSARY!!!! It completely baffles me how a year has gone by and we have already done so much and grown leaps and bounds in our relationship.

 1 YEAR TOGETHER AND STILL SMILING!!!!!

Since last June we have moved FOUR times.  Kelsey moved in with me at his sisters apartment - Philly, we moved to our fabulous little studio in August in Rittenhouse Square - still Philly, we moved into Budd Manor in January - Moorestown, and into our first studio/1 bedroom Dominican style - Picard, Dominica and will move again this August into our final apartment (hopefully) here in Dominica.

Since last June Kelsey and I have been to FOUR countries.  Kelsey and I went to part 1 of our honeymoon in St. Kitts in the Caribbean, in November Kelsey went to Mozambique while I drove cross country to Louisiana, in December Kelsey and I traveled all over Thailand for part 2 of our honeymoon and then this past April we moved to Dominica for the next 16 months while Kelsey is attending medical school.

At times, I have felt like our relationship and most definitely our first year of marriage, has been like one of those chose your own adventure novels I used to read as a child.  Each chapter would end with me changing the direction of the adventure based on my "choice for the characters". On this miraculous adventure called "marriage" I have wanted to "chose" (at times) the direction of our adventure, thinking I would know how it was going to go.  However, each "decision" has brought me to a completely different destination than I thought.  But along the way we it has brought us closer (although sometimes through precarious circumstances and stressful situations).  But none the less we are closer now then we ever have been before.  And I pray that this statement rings truer and truer as the years begin to pass.

As I continue to reflect upon the past year I have realized that God has and is continuing to use my beloved husband to make and mold me into the woman HE has always created me to be.  My thoughts of "me" have become "we" and doing things for Kelsey fill my heart with joy more than a gift to myself ever could (ok maybe a choloe purse may come close).  This is not to say that I don't have my moments of selfishness, where thoughts of "what about me" and "why does he (Kelsey) always get his way" (totally not true, but from the viewpoint of my fleshy soul it is alas the lens that I first look through). 

But most of all I now know, more than ever that I have found the love of my life!  He is the only one I want to wake up to each and every sweaty, hot morning here in Dominica - actually he is the ONLY one I would move to Dominica for.  And he is the one that I know always has my best interest at heart - even if I can't see it at the time.  He loves me like no other person in my life, for my family will love me because we're family - but Kelsey has chosen to love me for the rest of my life and I him.......it's the best gift I have ever received (aside from Jesus ;) ).

SOOOOOOO I know you are all wondering - "How did you celebrate?"  Well since Kelsey had an Anatomy Practical on Tuesday we decided to play it low key - so we started with sleeping in late (which Kelsey does with ease - but I struggle with) and then had a french toast breakfast with bacon (Kelsey's favorite!)  Next we went to church and then had the daunting task of where to eat!  We didn't want to do a fancy dinner, since we were thinking about doing that the following Sunday to celebrate, and we didn't want to do chinese, so that didn't really leave us many options, so we ended up at.........................................

Yes  - we did KFC!

We were starting to run out of options and neither of us was really feeling one place or another, so we ended up at the KFC which was on our way home.  

Then we came home and I finally watched the Count of Monte Cristo with Kelsey and it was great!  However our celebrating doesn't stop there - this Sunday we will be ziplining and going to a fabulous dinner.....look out for future posts.

Until next time - Remember to always take time each day to be thankful......for something!

First Mini

This Monday Kelsey took his first mini.  For those of you not in med school - the mini is one of 3 that students take each semester that will test them on all 5 subjects they are studying (histology, anatomy, physiology, dps (doctor/patient/something else) and biochemistry. 

Kelsey all ready to go with his #2 pencils 

(that was all they could take into the testing room with them)

After the mini we went to "Beach Bash" which is thrown by the student government each semester for mini 1.  It was a beautiful day and we got some free food and t-shirts out of it.

They made it through mini 1!

BEACH BASH

After the beach bash we headed to the CAC for the Ross Christian Fellowship Mini 1 Party - it was awesome! We had a blast playing Taboo and having hotdogs wrapped in bacon (well Kelsey did at least).

After mini 1 Kelsey still has a Histology exam this morning and an Anatomy Lab on Tuesday so even when you think you might get a break for a moment you don't!

Hopefully we will get to celebrate our 1st Anniversary this Sunday with at least a little dinner - we are hoping to go away for the day next weekend to go snorkeling and a nice dinner.

Until next time.......study hard (or at least try to learn something LOL)

Cook, Pray, Eat

We are  finished with week 4 of living in Dominica and I haven't said a word about the food, restaurants, etc here.  Because it's a university town (and I use that term liberally) just like in the good ole US of A the restaurants are expensive so I have been cooking most of our meals....


COOK


To cook in Dominica (as with everything else here) is a little bit of an adventure.  First we will start off with the cooking appliances.  Oven/Stove - seemed simple enough - I had a gas stove back home and I actually prefer cooking and baking with it :) Oh what's this - a propane tank?!?!?!? Yep here we cook with propane - think of your outdoor BBQ there sitting on your back porch and that little bitty tank that you hook up to it - got the picture in  your head?  Now remove the barbecue and replace it with an oven/stove and you have our kitchen.  So here I am trying to figure out how to light the oven and stove as I wanted to bake fish (yes we get local fish right from the beach another adventure I watched the fisherman take a machete and chop off my portion of fish - awesome, gross (flies were all over the fish) cheap (only $8 ec  or $3 us per pound) and tasty).  Luckily our landlord was walking by and she showed me how to light the stove (no pilot light) and the oven).  Oh did I mention that she raised a glass covering that was over the stove to light the stove top?  Ok well she did but not all the way.....

So Kelsey and I are making one of our first meals together on the island and we did fish and rice for our friends.....we lit the stove, put down the class top and cook our meal...I think cooking over glass is a little odd, but it's Dominica so maybe they do things different.  We go on to cook several more meals on our lovely stove top and this particular night I begin my first attempt at chicken/veggie fried rice.  I have all of the burners going, I'm making chicken, I'm frying rice, I even added an egg, then I left the room to get some bug spray you get eaten ALIVE down here without it...and then it happens.............

CRASH, BOOM, BANG!!!!!!!  I run back to the kitchen and there is glass everywhere! 


PRAY

I now move into prayer mode.  What do I do?  How do I explain this to the landlord that we broke the glass?  Was the glass faulty?  Kelsey tries to phone the landlord and he can't get her.  However he runs into our neighbor - tells him what happens to which the neighbor replies "You COOOKED on the GLASS ?!?!?!" Funny thing....turns out the glass was just a cover for the burners, but our racks for the burners are about a forth of an inch higher than the burner itself and there were grease stains on the glass - leading both Kelsey and I to think you cook on top.  In our defense (sorry it's the lawyer in me) there was no way of knowing this information, we never had a formal walk though of our apartment, literally we moved in and have been figuring out how things work little by little (did I mention we have a switch that turns on electricity to heat the water for the shower?  That was a fun one to figure out lol.)

After cleaning up all of the glass, we try several more times to call our landlord with no luck - I had to get out of the house and they were showing a movie on campus (the only cinema here) and I couldn't look at or remind myself of how dumb I had just been.  In hindsight lifting the glass could make sense, but only in hindsight.  As we begin to walk back to campus (keep in mind Kelsey has been completely calm this whole time - I am married to the most patient man out there)  we see that our landlord is home, so we walk up to her apartment and say "Yeah we were cooking and the glass that was on top of the stove shattered...." to which her husband replies "Did you slam down the cover?" (now I'm thinking - these people are going to think we are sooooo stupid Americans now).  But instead we she was so full of grace and mercy and asked if we were ok and then her husband said they should just be able to reorder the glass for the top and that was it...we were on our way!


EAT


So we finally were able to finish the fried rice when we got home (amazingly no glass got in any of the dishes)....and it was DELICIOUS!  Since then I have cooked/baked many more things, including banana bread (adventure:  try to figure out how long it will take to cook when you have no way to know the temperature and you just have a "high" and "a little less than high" setting for your oven), rice crispy treats (cocoa crispies were all I could find and it was generic and uber expensive but oh so worth it), mashed green bananas with garlic, cherry juice (turned out to be pretty gross - NOT AT ALL the same as when the locals make it), rice - lots of rice, turkey burgers, home fries, egg sandwhiches, and am hoping to make some more local dishes while I am here.

All in all the cuisine isn't that bad.  We've had the local BBQ (which they do every Friday night) and we've tried hot tuna sandwiches.  I recently found out that the KFC (believe it or not I've actually eaten there) and Rituals (which tries to be like starbucks, but also serves really good food and muffins) have only been here since February of this year, so I feel very lucky to have come at a time when more things are available to eat. 

Grocery shopping is a little different as well.  There are about 3 different stores here were you can get some items (I say some, because the joke here is that you can make a lot of the dishes you had back home, but you won't be able to find all of the items at one store - you will have to go to 2 or sometimes all 3 stores!)  Roseau, which is the capital of Dominica and about an hour drive away, does have grocery (I use the term loosely) stores with bigger selections and more items from back home.  Don't get all excited though, they still have more of a Big Lots/Dollar Store feel to them, and you have to check the expiration dates on everything!  And just because the pasta/rice/flour/sugar etc. came from one of these stores does not mean it lessens the chance of having bugs in your food. :)  So you always take everything home, go through it and then if bugs could get into it, it goes in the refrigerator - which unfortunately with mini fridges - leaves very little room for the items that should be in the refrigerator.

However, we are hearing rumors that an IGA (grocery store that we normally can only go to in Roseau) will be finished in September or November of this year right next to campus (varying information from various sources).  Now for those who have never been to the Caribbean or West Indies, IGA is the closest thing you are going to have to a US grocery store.  In fact they often carry a lot of the items that we would get back home.  So if that actually does happen it will drastically change our lives here.  On a sad note, there are several mom and pop type grocery stores here that would be hit hard because of it.   SO I'm a little torn, but with me going to work in the fall, it would be nice not to have to get up super early on Saturdays to take a trip down to Roseau an hour each way (on winding roads that go up and down and round and round - Dramamine is highly recommended!)

Well blog family and friends, that is all for me now - until next time,  COOK for those you love, PRAY for those in your life and the world around you, and EAT things you shouldn't every once in a while because they taste good! ;)

Welcome to the Dominican Zoo also known as OUR APARTMENT!

Hello Family and Friends:

Well here is another installment of our wacky and crazy life here on the beautiful island of Dominica.  Today I wanted to talk about the creatures that I have found in our local zoo - otherwise known as my apartment.  It all began last week, when I walked in the front door to find the largest cockroach I have ever seen (and I lived in NYC!) I screamed so loud poor Kelsey thought that I had found a centipede (oh did I mention they are the ONLY thing that's poisonous on the island....centipedes not the cockroaches)  However, with one quick swoop I grabbed my large can of BOP (sorry Mickiala if you read this I just had to do it) and I sprayed the roach, the kitchen floor, the screen and EVERY inch of the kitchen.

Once I felt confident that any friend who would have attempted to rescue this nasty roach I went to sleep.  The next morning I arose and went to the kitchen.  On the floor there were 10 or so little flies that had also fallen victim to the BOP.....but nothing compared to the massive suicide of fruit flies that were lying on the outside of our kitchen windowsill.  As I gathered myself and pushed through the whirl of emotions I cleaned up these poor innocent casualties and moved on with my day.  After all it's a dog eat dog or in this can bug kill bug world out there......

Fast forward a night and Kelsey and I are again coming home after dark.  After our encounter with the roach we made an executive decision that Kelsey should now walk into the house first.  Kelsey unlocks the door with the skeleton key (think Pirates of the Caribbean type key for a treasure chest)...and flips on the light to expose the lizard with weird webbed feet (after writing this I realized I should be more politically correct, but really what lizards are reading my blog???? okay maybe no one's reading? if you ARE reading out there leave a comment, I'm beginning to believe only my mom reads this...and she only does because she gave birth to me and has to!)

So believe it or not - I'm was actually okay with the weird webbed footed friend in our apartment.  Chalk it up to fast assimilation to my environment, but it occured to me (almost instantly I might add) that although gross, this little creature would EAT the even grosser (is that even a word) little creatures we found the previous nights before.  So no BOP was needed (I don't think it would kill the lizard, but you never know)...and we went to bed.

Now let's jump ahead just a few more nights to when we discovered and fell in like with Charlie....(for those on Facebook - we finally gave it a name).

Meet Charlie!!!! Our first question was do we make him our Dominican pet or have him for dinner?







Yep that's a crab (his or her body is about 6 inches wide)!  We were walking up to our apartment and there sitting on the bench right next to our front door was Charlie.  And keep in mind we are not near the ocean...we're about 4 or 5 blocks up from the road that goes along the ocean......no body of water to be found.

Unfortunately not all crabs are as lucky as Charlie....some have met a more dire fate.........................

Don't fear this photo was taken up on campus so I don't think it's Charlie. 

On another note, I wish I had a picture to show you one of the many cows that sometimes resides on the back side of our apartment.  I'm not really sure how this works, but from time to time at all hours of the day and night I will see a cow tied up to a tree out behind our apartment.  Sometimes there are cows that just roam the sides of the road eating grass, climbing the hills and pooping on the side of the road (that picture is just toooooo gross for this blog). And at times a goat or two or ten will run across the street.  This isn't however counting all of the numerous chickens, roosters, and stray dogs you will see on a regular basis.

Well I hope you have enjoyed a little glimpse into our zoo here in Dominica!

Until next time - take time to stop and notice the beauty around  you and be thankful :)

White Coats!!!!

Hello All,

Well it's OFFICIAL!  Kelsey received his "White Coat" in the wait for it, wait for it......... at the "WHITE COAT CEREMONY" (I know clever name huh?).  Anyways, Kelsey and his other 1st Semester classmates all received their white coats in a 2hr ceremony yesterday (oddly enough this was longer than my graduation from grad school!)  And family and friends were all able to watch via a live stream on the internet (how cool is technology?!?!?!)

Don't they "look" like doctors?








The best part of this whole ceremony (for me anyways) was the free food after - at 4 something in the afternoon this meant I didn't have to make dinner!  And the spread wasn't too bad!  Nice job Ross.

So now my husband looks all official and with their first "mini" (one of three exams they take each semester covering ALL the classes they are taking) only three weeks away - this may be one of the last events we go to for a while.

Until next time.....love - do it unconditionally and with all your heart.

Laundry - Dominican Style

Laundry it is one of my favorite house chores to do (compared to the bathroom - which I abhor).  There is nothing better than having fresh clean clothes, wrinkle free and ready to wear.  Or better yet, warm hot towels as you get out of the shower.......

Thanks to Dominica things have changed....introducing......our new washing machine.................

ME!  Yes sink washing has been our solution to having any type of clean clothes since we have arrived.  There are people that do your laundry but we are still searching for the right person (plus am I the only one who is a little creeped out that someone else would be touching my undies?????)  Any who apparently the service here is across the board - from crappy places that will leave bleach spots and maybe lose your clothes to those who have both a machine for washing and drying and you have clothes without wrinkles!!! Prices vary as well, but really where in the US can you get your laundry done for about $10 US a week?  (Sadly Kelsey and I have been walking around in wrinkled clothes for most of our time here since we thought peanut butter was a more worthy element then an  iron and therefor higher in the pecking order that was our packing list).

I do have a couple of leads on a few places (thank you Chelsea!) and hopefully I will decide soon, as the towels are not going to make it much longer without leaving us smelling worse than we did BEFORE we got in the shower.

Ahhhhhhhh whirlpool/kenmoore/ect. how I miss you dear sweet friend.....

Until next time......peace - bring it with you where ever you go!