^^It's not obvious in this picture, but there are Christmas decorations on top of the grocery store. I think it's some sort of light-up nativity scene? I know a saw a couple of wisemen up there last time I went after dark.
Thursday was awesome. Jared's teachers accidentally forgot to schedule his labs for the day, so he had an afternoon free (the first one in months)! Jared's brain has been fried from his 5 continuous months of rigorous med school, so instead of studying we went and ran lots of errands together.
We started by filming the final scene for a video we're making for one of Jared's family's best traditions--the extended family Thanksgiving Film Festival. We're not going to be there, but we weren't about to let that stop us from submitting a video. It's musical and embarrassing and everything a family video should be. The last scene we needed to do was at a beach. It almost didn't happen because Grenada's been having micro-rainstorms several times a day lately, but it cleared up long enough for us to shoot our 10-second clip.
After filming, we ran to the Spiceland Mall to withdraw some money from the ATM and hit up IGA. About twice a month we have to withdraw $1200 ECD to pay for all our living expenses (minus rent). You can use a card at the grocery store and most restaurants, but we've heard one too many scary stories about students having their credit card information stolen here, so it's best to stick with cash. We're running out of loan money for the term and don't want to dip into our savings, so we've been stretching our money real thin for the past few weeks. We're just about ready to ditch ramen, baked potatoes, and peanut butter sandwiches and fly home to Washington for some home-cooked meals. I have gotten really creative with our food storage though--last night we had tuna over brown rice with some soy sauce mixed in. Gourmet stuff is happening over here, people.
Before going home we had to stop by the Rubis gas station to replace our cooking gas. Once every two or three months I'll have dinner in the oven, but when the timer goes off I'll pull out a semi-cooked meal from a cooled-down oven. This means that our tank of cooking gas has run out and it's time to get a new one. Our landlord had an awesome system going where there was a spare tank downstairs so you could just grab that one when yours ran out, and then you could refill yours when it was convenient. Unfortunately, our downstairs neighbors abused the spare tank system and never refilled it last time they used it, so now we just have to drop everything and go get a refill when our tank runs out.
Speaking of dropping everything, I've got to dash. There's a significant others' end-of-term social happening right now at the university pool, and I'm sure it's every bit as magical as it sounds. Peace!