The Bahamas are gorgeous. You can see right through the sparkling blue water down to the sandy bottom 30 feet down. It's absolutely amazing... especially because it kept me from fainting in that vicious
sun! The beach was gorgeous of course, and got pretty crowded by noon. We drank Bahama Mamas out of coconuts and I showed the girls how to use my medium format camera.

The girls I'm rooming with are super nice and we get along great... big relief... mostly everyone I've met so
far is really cool and laid back. We are all hanging out in hotels until they let us board the ship.

The Bahamas isn't part of the trip, it's just the departure point, so many of us came down early to enjoy the islands since we had to come anyway. A lot of people made it a family vacation.

The food here is pretty good too. Lots of conch, fresh and deep fried.  Lots of fishy fish and a liquor store on every corner, duty free. We went to the "fish fry" which is a strip where the locals go to eat.  The hospitality in the Bahamas is impressive. A man, who I assume was the owner, showed us all the conch which he kept alive until cooking time by keeping them inside the ocean behind the restaurant.

He explained that when the fishers bring in the conch, he makes holes in their shells and ties them together so they don't walk away. When someone places an order, they go to the deck in the back and pull out
a live conch from the ocean. He proceeded to show us how to get one out of its shell. With a hammer and knife in hand, he cracked a bit of the tip of the shell so he could slide the knife in to cut the connection between the conch and the shell. Then he stuck his hand in the opening and pulled him out. It looked like one big black sabertooth, a mass of flesh and an umbilical cord. The big tooth is his leg which he uses to drag himself around with, his delicate flesh included a "face" with two eyes and a mouth between them and a "doggy", the locals' word for penis. The umbilical cord-looking thing was his connection to the shell. He skillfully removed all these body parts, throwing them in the ocean where a school of fish quickly showed up to eat them. He said, "It's ready to eat, you don't have to cook it, this is some of the healthiest food in the world." He said he thought it was probably still alive, which kind of bothered me. It's for the same reason I don't eat lobster, they are cooked alive. So I asked him where the brain was and he said he hadn't quite figured that out yet. I figured since all the slimier, gushy stuff was gone, he was probably brainless and dead. It's always disturbing to watch an animal get killed, but I'm always fascinated by it as well. I could never be a vegetarian, but I always buy free range eggs and milk and meat from places that state they treat their animals well.

I think eating meat is natural, but they should be raised and cared for with love and respect. Touchy subject for a lot of people, especially those who realize how meat is mass produced in the states, but we could argue it forever.

We've been spending most of our time on the beaches, socializing, relaxing, and burning. We've used a lot more sunscreen than we expected. We did stroll through the Atlantis, which is the biggest, fanciest hotel in the Bahamas. We wanted to go to the aquarium until we discovered it was $30… we're still debating whether to go or not.

Today we are going to stroll around some more, sending some postcards, and probably socializing at the beach some more. The Semester at Sea students are all around, all like 750 of us. There are more people in
the program than I thought originally. Tonight we'll probably have a few drinks, share pictures, and pack up to board the ship tomorrow.

We're all super anxious to get going. As awesome as the Bahamas is, I'm defiantly ready to go to sea and explore places that are less accustomed to Americans. Let the culture shock begin!