Caribbean Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving started off with tropical sunshine, beautiful boat rides, swimming in coral reefs, field work, and that was all before 10 in the morning. It was a great day, I hung out with some fishermen at the docks, where me and some friends bought a 6 pound cleaned grouper from them for 18 bucks. After that was stashed in the kitchen, I enjoyed a sunset on the cliff at the edge of the center while I called my family. At dinnertime, all the students and staff gathered in our dining area and took part in a very delicious thanksgiving feast. The menu is the second picture on the right, and I ate large portions of everything on it. Really, I ate so much that it physically hurt to move, I ended up crashing with a bunch of people watching the blue planet. Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday, where we celebrate by eating not just for sustenance, but feasting in excess. Our feast here felt more meaningful than all my thanksgivings spent in America, since here, especially at times when food shipments have failed to come in, I have found myself eating simply and just for sustenance. Also, there are haitian households on this island that live like that all the time, that never have the means to eat in excess in a way that we take for granted in America. Puts things in perspective, makes me thankful for being privileged with the lifestyle that I enjoy.

Next day, pumpkin pie for breakfast and leftovers for lunch. Most of the center went to a beach cookout, and some stayed to camp, but me and some other guys stayed behind and grilled our grouper that we bought the other day, while we watched the sunset. It ended up being very delicious, one of the locals gave us some seasoning when we were out buying charcoal, which went very well with our citrus marinade that we made. We topped it all with some pico de gallo and ended up with a very peaceful and tasty fish dinner. I wish we had done that more, its a great feeling to prepare your meal completely and know where everything originates. There was still dessert left over from the day before, so we raided the fridge and polished it off.

I've also dove both yesterday and today. Yesterday was our last research dive, shallow water and strong currents. Its a great test of scuba skills, and the site was enjoyable, I had four squid sitting in a line watching me for half of my transect. Today we dove The Grotto, which is my absolute favorite dive site. The architecture of a huge cluster of coral heads next to the drop off creates a convoluted series of valleys and overhangs that house a wide variety of large fishes. I was swimming over them this morning when two huge reef sharks came out at seperate points and both started swimming towards our dive group in a pincer movement. The larger one looked like he was coming straight towards me, and being out in open water, all you can really do in that situation is hover and wait for the shark to turn away. He did, cruising out over the wall and out of sight. We saw the same sharks on the way back to the mooring line, as well as a sea turtle. There was a field of garden eels, poking their heads out of a sandy patch on the sea floor. Right above them was a small mating aggregation of yellowtail snappers. They rapidly shoot up to the surface in pairs to do this, and dash back down to a comfortable depth. Right by the mooring line, there was a fish trap, with a huge lobster head inside as bait. It had caught four large queen triggerfish, as well as an assortment of groupers and snappers. It was a good start to my saturday. Less than two weeks left on this island.