A change of plans...

I'm excited to tell you all some great news! Aaron and I will be leaving "the rock" early! We are tentatively thinking August 24th. We are very excited and sad at the same time. We of course are incredibly excited to be around family and friends and to be able to go to the grocery store and actually get what we want! But we are sad to leave Dominica's beauty behind. I will also miss the fresh fruit and juices and rainbows and the people. We really have had a very positive experience here and are hoping one day to come back and see all the changes and hopefully revisit some of the people.

While we are in Iowa Aaron will be studying for Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) and is planning on taking it at the end of October.  Then we will be waiting to get his score back and to see where to go for  his first rotation. 

We will be driving to a small town called Calgary in Canada the last week in August/first week of September for our friends Kelsey and Jordan's wedding!! We are very excited! It will be a fun little road trip! 

I just wanted to update you all on this exciting new news! I'll be seeing you SOON!!

Kelsey, Jordon and Aaron and I at fresh water lake

Mermaids and a hybrid

This semester Aaron and I have really made some great friends. People that we are hoping to continue to be friends with long after leaving the island and after graduating med school. There is a couple here, Kelsey and Jordan, that are in fifth semester like us, but we had never met until the beginning of the semester! How our paths hadn't crossed until now we can't figure out. However we just "click" with them. We have an unbelievable amount of fun with them. Hanging out with them is just so easy and we can actually be 100% ourselves around them. We are actually really sad because they are going to be leaving the island on August 10th! We are all hoping to meet up again in New York and live in the same building if possible.

We were supposed to go on a hike Tuesday with them and a few other people, but it ended up getting cancelled because of the torrential downpour that had been happening all night and all morning. We decided to make the best of the day anyway and rent a car and drive to Freshwater Lake, which is a little over an hour away. It turned out to be completely cloud covered and so we couldn't actually see the lake at all from the hike so we decided to turn around half way through and go back down to the lake. Jordan and Aaron got in, it was pretty cold out where we were anyway so Kelsey and I opted to stay in our sweatshirts and rain jackets. After that we drove to Roseau and I got a pendant that is the shape of the island and has Dominica written on it. Kelsey got some fun fabric to make some pillows out of when she's back in Canada. We also stopped at the Save a Lot and picked up a few things, steak, yogurt, crab meat. By the way that is my new favorite store on the island, they have actual meat and produce sections that have reasonably priced groceries. A really nice steak is $10 or $11 EC (eastern caribbean dollars. 2.67 is the exchange rate) You can't even get that great of a price in the states! Anyway then we headed home and cleaned up and ordered pizza and watched a movie. It ended up being one of my top 10 best days I've had on the island.

It was FREEZING! I have two zip up hoodies and a rain jacket on!

Kelsey may actually kill me if she ever sees this on here :) She was stylin with her purple shorts, green shirt, and red hoodie.

Isn't the lake beautiful......?

Trying to think of the words to the potty song!!

We decided that there are most definitely Mermaids  in this lake. I looks just like the one from Harry Potter

Takin a dip

The view of Roseau from Morne Bruce. That is the Carnival Victory, in case you were wondering.

On Monday night Aaron and I went up to De Champ to have a couple drinks and eat dinner and on our way home we saw a puppy who looked exactly like both of our girls combined. If Lily and Meeka morphed in to one, this pup would have been her. She was soooo lovey and sweet. She ended up following us all the way back home which was a long way from where we found her. We offered her some food and water. We still have the cat kennel that we used to put Meeka in when she was much smaller, so we set that out on the porch for her to have some shelter from the rain. We said that if she was still there in the morning we wanted to find her a home because she is just way way too sweet to be living on the streets of Dominica. She stayed the whole night on our porch so we fed her again and tied her up so that when we got back from the hike we could contact PAWS, bathe her and work on getting this sweet little girl a home. Unfortunately when we had gotten back some one had unhooked the collar and she was gone. However we have seen her a couple times since then, so she is safe which made me feel better. I am just hoping that someone will take her home and give her lots of loves because she deserves it. 

Isn't she sweet!

She made herself right at home

"Scratch my belly!!!!" Her ears look so much like Lily's!

She loved having her chin rubbed

I think she looks exactly like Lily here!

She's got Lily's color and ears and Meeka's face, Aaron called her the hybrid.

This morning I dropped my baby Meeka off to go get "fixed." Her and Koa Toa are both being taken to Roseau today and having their surgeries.  When Meeka realized Lily and I weren't going and it was just going to be her  she started to cry and it broke my heart and made me start to cry :( My poor baby! This vet will be keeping them overnight and will bring them back in the morning. I'm glad that Dr. Paul keeps them over night so she can get some rest, maybe I'll sleep better than I did when Lily got done too!

Me and my baby Meeka <3 I love my girls!

Well thats all I've got for now, I'll try to write sooner than I did last time! I'll leave you with this picture I had forgot about and just found on Aaron's camera...

We went to cook breakfast one morning and this happened! We had never seen a double yolk before.