Free Honey

So here is a fun thing that I came home to last week.

We had a bee infestation in some of the siding and I guess guys hired to take care of it decided it would be better to catch the queen and put her in this box.  Once she was in the box the bees went back to life as normal and we had a bee colony on our porch.  The upside to this experience was that I ate honeycomb and it was awesome.  The guys came back and picked up the box so there won't be anymore free honeycomb, but the slight inconvenience of thousands of bees was worth it for a couple days.

So the weather here is kind of perfect.

In the mornings I wake up and am a little chilly, it is actually cold enough to warrant gloves, sweater, and jacket for my 5 minute moto ride to school.  By the time afternoon hits I find myself comfortable in basically anything from a t-shirt to a hoody.  This wonderful weather forces me outside and the last few days have seen a lot of time spent under the sun.  Every Friday there is a "intramural" soccer game that teachers and staff are invited to play in with the students, and with the great weather there was no way I could say no.  Saturday again was beautiful and I found myself out running on the country roads that surround the side of town I live on.  Sunday is ultimate frisbee and I made my debut there this weekend which was a lot of fun and a good chance to meet people outside of our Doulos community.  Leading up to yesterday we had been trying to get a group of our guys to climb a local mountain with us, but there ended up being a lot of confusion and in the end my friend Brad (math teacher) and I were the only ones that made the journey.  Today will be the finale of activity outdoors, at YL tonight we are playing kickball!  As long as the weather stays this awesome you will find me outdoors every chance I get, even tomorrow when you can find me in my hammock reading a book.  Hopefully when I return to the states next time I will at least look a little bit like I live in the Caribbean.

Traditions.

Before Christmas there was a chili cook off at the house of some friends.  The reason I mention this is that on that evening I decided to make some chili by adding the spiciest things I could find and as many veggies as I could as well.  This chili never made it to the cook off, but it did become multiple days of lunch.  When we returned after the break we had a veggie kabob night in celebration of a friend's bday, and again this ended up being lunch for 4 people on Monday and Tuesday.  This weekend I invited some friends over to make a stir fry of potatoes and whatever veggies they might want to bring.  Between the three of us we had 10 potatoes, 5 peppers, 4 onions, 2 bulbs of garlic, a few dozen baby okra, 3 giant carrots, and 3 eggplants to cut up and eat.  Before we got the piles of veggies cut up we managed to create a bunch of guacamole with 2 and a half giant avocados.  The downside of the guacamole was that by the time we finished up the veggie stir fry was that we weren't hungry for the dinner, but now we have lunch for the week.  This is now a tradition that I hope to make part of my weekly life.  The time spent with food, friends, and board games is something that I really appreciate here in the DR.
This is the last week of the first semester and I am excited for the change that the new one will bring us.  When I update this next week my day at school will be about 50% different which should be fun.

Back to School

After nearly 3 great weeks in KC it was time to head back to the DR.  Originally I was a little disheartened by the fact that we had to be back on a Friday but I quickly learned how much of a blessing it really was.  Being back this weekend and preparing for another long stretch of school by doing a whole lot of nothing was really nice.  I set up my new slackline which was gift from Jordan Carey and went for a run with one of my fellow teachers here, but that was about as energetic as it got.

Today the pace changed and we entered back into the world of school.  Although we don't actually enter into our second semester until the 22nd of January things have already started to feel like they are changing a bit.  We have lost one exchange student and picked up 2 new ones with another returning after a semester in the states.  Some new faces have joined us at Doulos and it looks like the beginning of another good long stretch.