Getting Acclimatized

By now I haven't mentioned one of the biggest parts about living on the island. What contributes to roughly 90% of my efforts and energy is sweat. I either am sweating, or I am dabbing my forehead to remove sweat (by the way, this is a lost cause). My dryer half doesn't seem to sweat nearly as much. I suspect she uses antiperspirant a great many places she shouldn't. I just checked the forecast on the weather network. Apparently it will be 29°C every day and it will feel like 41°C. At night it is hard to sleep. Often we wake up stuck to one another so we turn on the AC. We set it to a cool 25°C. Less than that and we already feel it's too chilly.

I have heard a lot of, what I think are conflicting, opinions on the seasons. Apparently this is the hottest time of year and it cools down to something reasonable by January or so. But also, it is apparently the wet season where it might rain for 3 days straight. It has only rained for a maximum of 5 minutes at a time so far. Some people say this is the worst of it, others say the worst is yet to come. If either the wetness or the hotness increases I may stay stationary until things dry out.

Now, I do not have pictures yet, so I cannot really prove this, but I do in fact have a tan. This is mostly incredible because I packed and have been using 60SPF sunblock every day. My tan is farmer by nature. I have considered going out naked, but then there are just so many more parts to put sunscreen on and so many parts I would much rather not burn. And the real issue is that some parts are already more tanned than others—I would need to wear complimentary clothing to the pattern I currently have. I can only assume this is how the invention of butt-less chaps came to be.

The sun sets at about 6:30 / 7 pm every day. It feels a bit strange coming from Vancouver when dusk is about 9:30pm. Here, your evenings seem to slip away into darkness much quicker than you’d expect. The benefit to this is even during winter this will be the case. The sun likes to get up at 5:30 / 6am and demand to pour into our windows. I tend to wake about 3 hours before our alarm because my eyelids are being seared.

I may not have mentioned it, but we have been to a couple different beaches so far. There is one not 5 minutes away from us. This is our quick dip beach. If you are hot, you can just bolt down, jump in, jump out, and be back for tea (right now I can't imagine having a cup of tea, mind you). The other beach, the beach you have likely seen photos of, the beach that is in the top ten list of the Caribbean, is Grand Anse. My sweat-less beauty and myself went with her classmates just the other day. The water is surreal and the surf stretches on and on. We managed to time it right for the 6:30 time slot. For this, I wish I had had my camera. It was probably one of the most beautiful sunsets I have seen. I think the best part is that the sunsets here are likely to be equally as amazing every single evening. The only thing that could make it better was a milkshake. We went back to try it out last night. It was sublime.

Dealing with the sun and the heat has been fairly straightforward. Just the other day we moved into our new apartment. By the way, I have never had so much trouble scrounging together all the money necessary for our deposit and rent. I had to do it installments. This seems like it must be a common thing because they were completely okay with it. I guess RBC, Scotia Bank, and CIBC all own or are affiliated with the banks down here. But, I quickly discovered they really have very little to do with their affiliates when it comes to getting your money. I was pretty stressed out when I could not access my funds, but I was forgetting that Grenada runs on much slower time than we are used to. It does not seem uncommon for a person or business to tell you that they will be somewhere at a very specific time and then show up an hour later, or perhaps not at all.

Sometimes you get unexpected visitors though. Today we had someone come and look at all our trees. I think they wanted to buy the water nuts (something like or related to coconuts). They taste a bit like water and an itty-bitty amount of coconut. The dry one told me that I should stop thinking of it as coconut; she's right, once I did I was able to realize just how watery the water nuts tasted. But, back on the topic of guests, we had a few others. I guess they are common. They are still pretty gross, and they do fly, and possibly land on you. We have only seen the two so far but we have asked that the landlord kindly have the place sprayed. She had it all organized for today; the only hitch was Grenada time. No one showed up except the guy who wanted our water nuts. He seemed pretty confused when I asked if he was going to spray.