Random events

Hello!

It is Friday, and I've just completed my first week at University of Guyana actually teaching! I can't say I actually taught a full week as I started Tuesday with meetings and Thursday was a holiday. Apparently, Guyanese celebrate major holidays associated with Hindu, Muslim and Christian religions. This particular holiday on Thursday is called Eid-UI-Azha (Feast of Sacrifice). It is a Muslim holiday where they will sacrifice a lamb or cow (in my landlords' case they sacrificed a cow).

My landlords are awesome! They gave me a lot of beef from this holiday and a whole fish!. With my limited cooking appliances, I did stir-fry the beef with garlic, ginger, soy sauce and bok choy this evening!

On holiday (Thursday), I was invited over to a fellow PCRV's home. She lives in a part of Georgetown called Kitty. I've asked several people how the neighborhood names come about, but no one has yet been able to tell me. She is one of the last PCRV's to be placed in Georgetown proper. From her rooftop she has an amazing view! 

I was able to watch the sunset from her roof and saw these small birds dive bomb eagles. I guess the little birds do that to keep the birds of prey away from their eggs. I wasn't able to take a picture of those birds dive bombing others, but believe it it was pretty fun to watch! Here is a Guyana sunset though!

I'm not the best photographer, so I probably did not do that sunset justice. Around 5-6pm, the parrots come back to their nests too. Ramona (the PCRV that invited me over) said she's noticed 2 regular pair of parrots that hang out in the trees around her place. See if you can spot the parrots!

Because it was a holiday, pretty much everything is closed so we were not able to explore too much. She did take me to the Marriott hotel, and we can see how the wealthy people live. The Marriott here is pretty nice, they even had white sand shipped in for the beach! Here are a few pictures, I'm definitely not part of the wealthy here, barely even working class here. :)

Fancy bar when you walk into the lobby

White sand!

There are two fancy hotels here, the Marriott and the Pegasus which is in this above picture.

At the Marriott, I got to see THE famous fastest women's runner in Guyana. 

We also wandered around the very few markets stands that were open, they sell some pretty huge squash! I wouldn't know what to do with all that squash.

Anyway, Ramona had invited me over for dinner and she made us a pizza :) It consisted of actual pizza sauce (not ketchup, although Guyanese love their ketchup), onions, bell peppers, spam and cheese! She also makes her own crust. It was quite delicious.

Her kitchen is a lot more equipped than mine. She has an oven. It's one that needs manual lighting, but she has one! She also has a washing machine within her complex. It is a portable washing machine, so it's quite small. It also costs a lot to use, $1000 ($5) per load, and it doesn't hold much!

It would be better to hand wash clothes- which is something that I do now every Saturday morning. I get up about 5am daily, so I might as well do something productive with my time, plus my clothes would be dry before the day's end!

So, in my earlier post, I posted the picture of the supposed tallest free standing wooden structure in the world: St. George's Cathedral. Well, today I was able to go inside. The church is on it's 4th replica. It has influences of dutch style and gothic style.

I was also able to visit the museum today, unfortunately they do not allow photography, however I did find a picture of their Giant Sloth exhibit. So, about 10,000 years ago, there was this animal called the Giant Sloth. Guyana appears to like to be known for it's giant creatures, like the giant anacondas, giant otters, harpy eagles. But this is the Giant Sloth!

Anyways, I'm planning on visiting the zoo here. It's nothing like the zoos we have in the States. It's mainly comprised of rescued animals. From what I understand they have a bunch of leopards right now, manatee, tapir...so more to come with animals! Hopefully I can take pictures there.

Speaking of animals, I have a pet gecko and periodic frog. Frogs are everywhere, and it's so sad to see them flattened in the road, but of course I had to get a picture of one :)

 Flattened frog :(

This is my gecko friend. I leave him be, as he's good at eating bugs too. Luckily, I've not had many bites as my first day here. Helps with a mosquito net. The mosquitos are supposed to get bad during rainy seasons; but when speaking with one of the taxi drivers, it's not nearly been as rainy in the past few seasons as it normally is. Rainy season here is to start in December, so we'll see! Must get rain boots before then I suppose.

I did start teaching this week, as I mentioned earlier. I currently have 7 students who are taking an accelerated track in learning about Speech Language Pathology. The accelerated track means I teach a different class every 3 weeks with creating a final after each class. Definitely keeps me busy! I'm hoping to make some connections with some of the private and public schools in the area to let my students observe and screen some of their students for practice. There's apparently a lot of ideas on how to direct this program, and a lot of chains of command to cross to get things done- so we'll see what actually gets done.

That is all for now!