Bahamas: Jan 09-13

The Bahamas were absolutely beautiful and populated by the most cheerful, happy people I think I’ve ever seen! Really made me want to just quit everything and move there for the rest of my life, but I’m on the ship now so I guess I just missed my chance with this one.
To sum up my time, it was a weird limbo waiting to set sail, and the hotel was literally taken over by Semester at Sea students, so I was meeting someone different everywhere: the elevator, the bathrooms, etc. It was wild. Surprisingly, I didn’t spend that much time sunbathing; I tended to miss the sunny parts of the day and it would get a little cloudy and chilly at times, plus I foresee a lot of sunbathing on the ship as the decks here are fantastic.
The first day (1/9), I laid out a bit cause the weather was amazing and warm, and after a while in the sun we decided to go to an open-air botanical garden/zoo. It was very cool because the set up was open so that many of the animals were very up close, and even better, some of them would wander around free in areas that people were walking such as the peacocks and flamingos. The flamingos actually had a little demonstration that they did where they actually listened to commands and marched around, very cool. There was also a bird cage that we could go into, and feed these adorable and gentile parrots fruit. They would land on our heads and our hands which was pretty neat. I’ll try to put a few pictures up in a few days, or maybe later today, who knows.
The next day (1/10), I woke up early to go scuba diving, which has to be in my top ten experiences in life, it was absolutely amazing to see the coral growth, and a school of fish followed us around which was really cool to experience. I’ll hopefully get certified once I get home to do that more often. We spent the rest of that day relaxing.
The last day (1/11), I went to the Pirates of Nassau Museum downtown and was actually very impressed with the way that the information was displayed and learned some very interesting stuff! Unfortunately, the mannequins did freak me out a little bit, but it wasn’t too bad since they weren’t the kind that move…then there would’ve been some problems! After that, we walked around the straw market a bit which was very cool. There were people actually weaving objects out of straw right at their stand, and carving wooden objects right there as well. Didn’t buy anything due to the obnoxious amount of stuff I had already packed for this voyage, but still interesting nonetheless.

I'll be talking about these past few days on the ship next so keep reading!