Past Three Weeks

I've lacked functioning internet for some time now. About 2-3 weeks ago the internet in my house stopped working so I had to rely on the school internet, then a week ago internet everywhere on campus went down and for whatever reason the problem has yet to be resolved. I am the only person with internet because Dereek was nice enough to help me get this little usb internet thing. It's super annoying because now it's another monthly cost that I wasn't supposed to be spending, but with grad school courses all being online, I need internet and obviously the school can't provide that like they said they would. There are things that I love about this school and things I hate. The longer I'm here the more I see some other sides to people and the school that I didn't in the beginning.

Now backtracking a couple of weeks. It was Halloween! The school had a large Halloween party here, they took over the library for about 2-3 weeks to make it into a haunted house. The haunted house was really cool when it was done, but I think the school has their priorities seriously in the wrong place. The PTA also decorates the school and they had a fake person hanging by the neck from the front. It scared the younger kids and personally I thought it was highly inappropriate to decorate the school this way. It was honestly shocking to see for the first time, but of course, like usual, the director can't ever seem to say no to the parents despite the number of times he tells us "he's not there to be their friend..." The party after school was cute. The kids trick-or-treated to our houses. I dressed up as Snow White (we got costumes made specifically for us, all the teachers were princesses) Here are some pictures.

Marcel and his family

Luis and his dinosaur pumpkin with Marian and Martina behind.

The teachers as princesses for the party at night.

Selma was also Snow White

The chaos that is pumpkin carving during the day

Some of the finished pumpkins

Another cool thing I got to do in the past few weeks was learn how to make paella from Dereek's dad. I got to learn how to clean all the seafood and Dereek and I had lunch with his family that Sunday. It was a nice day and I got lots of good food out of it. Here's some paella pictures.

Cutting the vegetables

Cleaning squid

Final paella product

I've done some other things but this is already taking a long time to write and upload stuff so I'm leaving it at this for now. Expect some cool upcoming posts. Tuesday is Thanksgiving dinner here where all the parents cook us what we would usually eat at Thanksgiving if we were at home. Then on Wednesday we leave to go to Angel Falls and we get back on Saturday. Finally, Dereek and I are going to go to Araya Penninsula in December. It's our Christmas present to each other and I get to spend part of my winter on the beach. =)

***Maybe I'll try and add more pictures when the internet works better... I'm really struggling with uploading anything right now...

Travels

Wow, I got really really bad at updating this...

So a few weeks ago we were in Trinidad and Tobago to do a visa run. Because we do not have working visas we need to leave the country every 3 months to renew our tourist visa. This semester the school sent us to Trinidad and Tobago. We were in Trinidad for about 5 nights and Tobago for two. The school paid for our time in Trinidad, Tobago was our choice though.

While we were in Trinidad we got to wander around Port of Spain and go see some pretty mansions, see the botanical gardens, go to a zoo and just in general enjoy being in civilization again. We also did some small excursions like taking a day to go to Maracas Beach and another day to go to the Caroni Bird Sanctuary to watch the scarlet ibis' all fly into this one tree to roost. It was awesome, the birds are bright pink and hundreds of them all fly to the same place at sunset. While we were in Trinidad we also tried lots of new Indian food like pholurie, doubbles and roti. We also tried the well known bake and shark while we were at the beach.

Yeah, I suck at updating. This post has now taken me weeks to write. It literally just sits here open on my computer, I might as well finish. The weekend after Trinidad and Tobago Dereek took me to Caracas so I could get a new camera. (Mine suffered an unfortunate death in Tobago, at least it's a nice place to die.) Caracas was cool, wish we had more time to spend there. Our hotel was interesting to say the least, we enjoyed it though. It was nice to get out of the two areas of Venezuela that I know though. I wish I knew the country better, I feel like I should since I live here. Here's some Caracas pictures that I took with my new camera. 

This past weekend we went to isla de plata. Hopefully I can put those up sometime soon. Maybe in a combo post with all the Halloween shenanigans that have been going on. The internet is always too iffy for me to post much at a time it seems. And I've been kind of lazy...