Elvis, ice shots and thunderstorms

I’ve had such a strange and wonderful weekend all at the same time.
Saturday night after studying all week, I went out with most of my classmates and Dr. Gilbert to let off some steam. We started at Club Havana in Falmouth Bay, and the first crazy thing was a giant block of ice (about 2x3 feet) with a groove cut in it. The idea is to stand with your mouth against it, and someone pours a shot of alcohol into the groove and you have to catch it in your mouth. Well, you guessed it, I couldn’t resist.
I don’t think I swallowed the whole shot, but my mouth and throat were burning just the same for ages.
The next place we went, The Mad Mongoose, was full of bored young male tourists and since our group was mostly girls, they seemed happy to see us. We sat around a round table with our professors and talked and laughed, and lo and behold, Elvis showed up.
He was wearing the whole white spangled suit with the poofy hair and he came and took pictures with some of the girls. Then he invited us to come to a party on his yacht which was moored in the harbor. I actually would have rather gone to bed, of course….. On the way to the yacht Dr. Gilbert gave us a stern lecture.
“Now, there may be some shady characters at this party- drugs and drinking and all that. I want you all to stick together and be very, very careful.”
The yacht was bigger than a hotel. A staff member greeted us as we walked up the fiberoptic-lit gangplank and let us up winding polished pine staircases, until we reached the fourth floor. There was an enormous hot tub shimmering under the stars, and a disco ball casting coloured lights through the huge room. A few people were behind a black and chrome bar and they served us drinks and turned up the music. Everyone started dancing and talking. I walked to the prow of the boat with Rachel (my classmate) and we could see the entire harbor from our vantage point, lit up with lights from the boats and the houses glowing on the hillsides. It was quite majestic. We had a great time on the yacht until we got kicked off about 40 minutes later…..

So that was Saturday….. Sunday morning I went with Burton and Kingsley to take Kingsley to the airport as he had to go back to the States for a couple of days. Kingsley is a wonderful guy, full of the Holy Spirit, although I sometimes have a hard time understanding his thick Nigerian accent. We prayed and sang all the way to the airport (about an hour’s drive) and said goodbye to him. Then Burton and I proceeded to drive around for about two hours, completely lost. When we finally made it back to the campus we packed up our things and went with some of the others to the beach. At the beach it rained on and off, but it was still glorious. I swam about a quarter of a mile out to a tall ship and watched the pelicans swooping and perching on the masts. When we came back later we studied for a bit and then went out to get some groceries, including a bucket of ice cream. I cooked dinner for my housemates and then we invited all the other students and sat and had ice cream in my room. (Rum and raisin, of course)

All night long it rained, and not just rained, it poured. Every few minutes a flash of lightening would light up my whole room. The sound on the tin roofs was deafening, but I was tired enough to sleep most of the night anyway. I got up super early this morning and looked worriedly out my windows. The water level was rising quite high around my house, and it wasn’t letting up. Well, there wasn’t much to do.

I decided to go for a rain dance. I went outside in my little nightgown and ran out onto the road. There was no one around and I danced and whirled and ran in the rain until I was soaked. The rain was cold and wonderful and I jumped through the puddles and felt it splash everywhere. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me.
“What are you doing in the rain?”
I turned around with a gasp and one of the security guards was standing there with a funny look on his face. I suddenly realized how crazy it must seem to him to see a girl dancing in the rain in the wee hours of the morning in her undergarments. I didn’t stop to talk, I just booked it as fast as I could back to my house. I ran up the long stairway and ran across the verandah but unfortunately the verandah was much slipperier than I’d remembered. I totally wiped out, and as I fell I grabbed at one of the metal chairs on the porch and it came crashing down after me. I hit my head against the railing and landed on my back on the porch in a huge puddle.
I jumped up and ran into my room, slamming the door. Good heavens. Hopefully I wouldn’t run into that security guard again.

Well, I just finished an exam and it is still raining. The thunder is so loud that it’s hard to hear myself think. Parts of the campus look like a lake. We’ve moved our things off the floor in preparation for a flood, but I am hoping it won’t come to that.
Adventure, I told one of my classmates yesterday, this is an adventure.
Whenever we open ourselves up to God to allow him to work in our lives, we can expect surprising things to happen. Sometimes they are mundane, sometimes they are tragic, sometimes they are wonderful.
Oh…. And by the way, I am still suffering from the 90 pushups I did the other night.