I'm home! Getting home was a little bit more of an adventure than I expected since my flight from JFK to Reagan National Airport was canceled due to thick fog and impending rain. My fellow Bucknellian in Barbados, Whitney, and her family were kind enough to let me stay with them for the night until my parents could come pick me up in Pennsylvania in the morning, but before I knew where I was going to spend the night, I'll admit I was freaking out a little.

The final installment of the annual Barbados Reggae Festival, this almost day-long concert is an anticipated event. Hundreds of people flocked to Farley Hill Park to hear contemporary reggae artists such as Beenie Man, Buju Banton, Queen Ifrica, Morgan Heritage, Hotta Flames, and Ayana John. Not being a longtime reggae fan, I couldn't identify most of the performers, but the music was good, it was a beautiful day, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

So much has happened since I last posted, so I have some catching up to do.

Last Wednesday was Earth Day, so my friend Whitney and I decided to go back to the dive shop where we got our open water certification to participate in a clean-up of the Carlisle Bay area on the south coast of the island. Normally, the boat drops divers off near the shipwrecks, which boast some of the more impressive marine life, but our purpose was to pick up trash in the area outside the marine park. We didn't see too many fish, and the visibility was worse than during our certification course, but our group collected bags full of bottles, cans, bottle caps, and lengths of bent wire. One guy even found a rubber crab squeaky toy, which in some ways was oddly well-suited to its new environment, but small enough that it might be ingested by a fish or sea turtle, so we took it to the surface.

I can't believe that, with about five weeks left of my semester here, I'm already starting to ask myself what I will take away from my experience in Barbados and at UWI. Will I bring my newfound carefree, uber-chill Caribbean sensibility to Bucknell in the fall? Will I try to replicate the delectable Chefette roti with tortillas for lack of actual roti wraps? Will I keep taking cold showers, or, given the chance, will I revert to my erstwhile scalding ones? And let's face it, these beaches are spoiling me. I don't even think twice about the pristine water and tropical fish anymore. Will I ever enjoy the Jersey Shore after this?

Last Thursday, I didn't have any food in the refrigerator or money in my pocket for lunch, so I walked down the hill to the ATM machine so I could purchase one of the on-campus eLounge's exquisite croissants. Many of us here at UWI believe that this ATM machine is cursed because it often breaks down, and, to my dismay, Thursday was one such day. But it ended up being a great stroke of luck, because, bitterly disappointed about the croissant and disillusioned with the world from working on my three essays, I made a split-second decision to run for the bus to Bridgetown, which was just pulling away. In Bridgetown, I could definitely find an ATM machine, possibly replace my disintegrating flip-flops (which would actually fall apart while I was out two nights later), and -- most importantly -- wander around the city.

Barbados is divided into parishes, each of which, as I understand it, is named for an Anglican church in its boundaries, though these namesake churches are not the only ones; if I took a photo of every church I passed on foot or by bus in Barbados, I would have quite an album indeed. One Saturday, when I was walking from Frank Worrell Hall to the cricket field for a morning run, I noticed a crowd of people sitting on folding chairs in the veranda and standing around some tables weighed down with huge dishes of food. At first, I thought it was a reception of some sort, but as I started to run, they started singing and saying, "Hallelujah!" and "Praise God!" So I guess it was church.

Growing up in Maryland, watching the Preakness every May and generally keeping track of wins and losses in the annual Triple Crown series was a rite of spring. Pimlico Race Track in Baltimore is an image burned forever onto the television screen of my childhood. My father and I would watch on the living room couch as the horses were paraded in their face masks and bunting, their glistening flanks not yet encrusted with dirt and sweat. Face buried in the newspaper, he would rattle off the odds in between checking the progress of whatever was cooking on the grill as I, heedless, chose a favorite horse based solely on aesthetics and clever nomenclature.

When my friend, Whitney, told me that a horse race -- the Gold Cup, sponsored by the expansive, swanky Sandy Lanes resort, where Tiger Woods got married -- would be run this past Saturday at Garrison Savannah, I jumped at the chance to go.

Yes, termites. My room has a bed, a closet, a vanity area with a sink, a desk built into the corner of the room with windows overlooking the cricket field, and a chair, which, when I tip it from side to side, makes a sound as if it were filled with sand.

Normally, I would use this space to tell an interesting anecdote or to narrate an exciting excursion from the past weekend. But since I spent most of Saturday at Paradise Beach, right near UWI's campus, and Sunday on-campus doing schoolwork, I will use this post to discuss classes, which I have largely ignored so far in this blog, and to be unusually candid about what I have found to be the circumstances of daily life as an exchange student at UWI.

That's what our guide told me and some 50 other UWI students during our hike along the Atlantic coast Saturday, as we skidded down a steep gravel path from a town of colorful houses in the hills overlooking the choppy ocean. The Atlantic coast, on the east side of Barbados, is much different than the southwest corner of the island where I live, outside Bridgetown: more sparsely populated, covered with layers of lush vegetation and fringed with rocky beaches and powerful waves.

Two Bajan girls tried to sell me tickets to their school fundraiser on the bus en route to Speightstown Sunday. This, by the way, is what the bus looked like:

Barbados is beautiful!

In one of my courses last semester, we learned about the elusiveness of the "innocent eye" --how, even if one has never been to a given destination, his or her impression of the place is inflected with a set of preconceptions from the media, cultural presumptions and hearsay that may or may not match reality.

Hi, Study Abroad Blog readers! I'm Stephanie, and I'll be your guide to things Barbadian as I spend the spring semester studying at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). As my co-worker Bill at Barnes and Noble told me the other day, "It's going to be tough, someone has to do it." I keep reminding myself that I'll be spending the next four months on a tropical island -- not crossing Bucknell's academic quad swaddled in outerwear and struggling against the wind. While there are many things that I'll miss about Bucknell -- the people, band and orchestra rehearsals, poetry readings -- I'm eager for a change of scene and excited about the opportunity to record my adventures here.