So last night our new Greek friend invited us to come have a drink with her and a German couple down at Umbrellas, one of our favorite beach-side bars. Tyler’s love of Germany encouraged her to invite us along to meet them and it continued our trend of befriending the foreigners here in Grenada as opposed to the other med students.

But as the night turned out, we ended up a huge group of mostly med students who were finishing clinicals by working at the hospital in St. George’s (just about to graduate), Tyler and I, our Greek friend who is also doing rotations at the hospital, and one other student who is also in my term. He remembered quite vividly an incident where I apparently “shushed” him during an exam and he now holds it against me. I will likely never live it down now. But anyways, we had quite a blast. It was great for me to talk to so many people working in the hospital, but more than that we just love meeting people. Especially people who are not from America.

Today we travelled to Belmont Estate, where the grow the cocoa beans. Since it is one of my favorite places I wanted to be sure the Greek student got to see and experience all it had to offer.

Me, Tyler, and Anthia

It was great! We of course enjoyed the delicious local food (and ate way too much) and ate lots and lots of cocoa samples. I think I eat more than the 5EC cost of my tour in sample chocolate every time! This was my third time at Belmont and my third time taking the tour so I am practically qualified to give it. The tour guide had me try and name all the fruits and spices they had out – I didn’t do half-bad. I just always forget the few that are really really weird. But even though I have been on the tour a lot, each guide always adds some more extra. Tyler and my favorite part is eating the raw cocoa fruit out of the pod. The fruit is so tasty and after you eat it, you can totally catch the subtle fruit flavors in the cocoa you eat. Changes how you view chocolate. We joke that if we could only buy the cocoa pods, we would crack one open and suck on it for a snack in the afternoon.

This time we asked the tour guide about one of Belmont’s little secrets, the monkeys. He took us up to see some of the animals, including the monkeys! I was so excited. We were also supposed to go see the goats and get to bottle feed the little babies, but unfortunately we had to leave since Tyler had a conference call to make it back for in the evening.

All in all it made for a great day! So excited for the next time when we journey up there again! I guess if we befriend some Northumbria GSP students or anyone else new to the island. The guy that led our tour was also super nice and spent quite a bit of time talking to us about Grenada and gave me some recipes for making provisions and saltfish and told us about the awesome foodstands. We told him we wished we could live in his village, sounded so awesome. It was a great day!