A New Frontier: The Caribbean

Airplanes are amazing. They are sports cars in the sky. At ground level the world looks nice enough, but from a bird’s eye view it’s so organized. Every city looks like a giant Lego land. Within 24 hours I went from Duluth to the island of Anguilla. I love taking pictures from an airplane. Here are views of Minneapolis, St. Louis and Puerto Rico.

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Puerto Rico has a lot of sports on TV. So I spent the night in the hotel watching arm wrestling in Las Vegas.  Veins and biceps were bulging…followed by Tarzan roars.  I was really hoping to watch a grown man cry.

And now…I live in Anguilla!!!!!! Anguilla comes from a French word meaning ‘eel’ since the island’s shape is that of an eel. To get to Anguilla I had to take a boat ride from the French island of St. Maarten. The driver was really cruising to get us over there before the tropical storm, Erika.  As we were hitting waves, our luggage was bouncing in the bow of the boat, and I couldn’t help but think if my $300 of over-baggage fees were going to end up in the ocean so close to the finish line.

Being here 1.5 days, here are some immediate differences I noticed. People go far out of their way to be friendly: as in, cut across traffic on a bike to say ‘Hi, I’m Ray!’  Everything flows, nothing is slow, it’s just relaxed because you’re in the middle of the ocean and things will get here when they get here. For a white girl from Minnesota, every activity feels like I’m doing hot yoga…everything makes me sweat: making coffee, building a bike, climbing 5 stairs, sitting and pondering, lifting a leg, saying ‘Hello’ ect ect ect…..While the storm blew over this morning, I built my bike to go apartment hunting tomorrow,and I sweat as if I ran 13 miles.

Thank you for reading this post. My goal is to write about what it’s like to live on a Caribbean island along with imparting bits of medical knowledge.  Please subscribe so you can receive emails when I create a new post.