Almost DONE! A first semester recap.

Boat trip for Ronan's birthday

Matt doing a back flip off the boat's Tarzan swing

Handsome Matt in beautiful Caribbean water

Snorkeling

On the boat

A track on St. Maarten! Running with my new training partner, Carlos. We do track workouts together on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

At Mullet Bay, the beach that is about a 3 minute walk from our apartment.

Matt's team for the school's basketball tournament

Playing well!

Nerds for Halloween, though Matt's face reminds me more of Popeye here.

The Mcglue's got us out on their paddle board. Harder than it looks.

Right before my relay race on St. Maarten's Day in November

The things you see driving around her. Just a man with a giant pig on a leash in a puddle on the street. Classic.

Running my leg of the St. Maarten's Day relay race.

An island birthday! 23 Candles.

Hanging out by the pool at our apartment. Spoiled.

Matt studying by the pool.

Matt's white coat ceremony

Our island car, Honda CRV.

On any given night, this is what we look like.

The view from our balcony. The ocean is out there somewhere!

7 Alive. Hilarious.

Karla, Ethan, Erik, Elijah

After a run, snapped a pic of one of the views from the school (above). Matt holding his new textbooks in front of the school, doesn't he look so excited? (below).

With one semester, anyway...

Can you believe Matt has almost completed his first semester of medical school?!?! He has one more test tomorrow morning, and then we are USA-bound early Tuesday.

It seems like a good time for some LewsNews, a little recap and reflection on our first few months of island living. What a roller coaster ride it has been!

I can remember the feeling when the airplane was coming in for landing. I distinctly felt that everything was going to be different. Things were about to change. I could feel the plane lowering more and more in the sky and knew these were the last few moments I had with an old life, an old me.

We sat next to a man who was from St. Maarten. He had the window seat, and I'm sure Matt and I made him uncomfortable with our awkward leaning over him in an obvious attempt to see out the window. He was kind enough to point out some of the other islands, and then to show us where the school was on our final descent. There they were. The unmistakable red roofs of The American University of the Caribbean. Matt's new home for the next 20 months. So, the pictures we'd been looking at the last few months weren't lying. It was possible, a med school in the Caribbean.

My first feelings about St. Maarten? There were two, actually: the reality of heat and humidity, and a true, gripping, make-me-shake-uncontrollably fear. Here's why: at the baggage claim, I helped some other arriving med students we met carry their bags out to the curb. I pulled one rolling bag for one student and on my shoulder carried a hockey bag bigger than myself, and certainly heavier,for another student. After dislocating my shoulder and sweating completely through my shirt, I turned to go back into the airport's bag claim area. It was behind a wall, a wall I now saw was clearly marked, "No Entry," complete with a guard standing watch.

I hadn't brought anything of my own out with me, but instead left everything by the bag claim with Matt. He was still waiting for a few more of our bags to come. That's why I'd offered to help the other students. I didn't think talking to the guard would help because I had no proof that I'd been on a flight, no ticket stub, no passport, no phone to let Matt know I was trapped outside. And even if I could let him know, there was no way he could transport all our luggage out by himself. We barely managed with both of us. He would have to leave some behind, and then we'd both be trapped out here with no way back in to get the rest of our stuff. Great.

The panic was setting in, but I summoned any essence of James Bond I had inside myself, waited for the guard to turn the other way, and slipped back in. I was sure I would hear his voice yelling after me any second. I imagined his footsteps echoing behind me. I pictured myself in a detention room being interrogated, possibly in a language I did not know. And Matt becoming more and more frantic about his missing wife.

None of that happened. At all.

I got back to Matt, shaking, breathing sharply, but it was clear no one was coming after me. And knowing the island a little better now, I bet the guard wouldn't have cared even if I walked right by him, waving. Welcome to St. Maarten.

My next clear memory is meeting Karla Daniel. She was our unofficial spouse-of-another-med-student-sponsor. She and her husband Stephen were and still are literally life savers for Matt and I and our transition to island living.

Anyway, I exited the airport for the second time, with my husband and bags in tow, and possibly more sweaty than before. There was Karla, ready to lighten some of our load, and give us a ride. This was our first taste of what an "island car" is. It is: No air conditioning, no seat belts, no shocks, no breaks, no power steering, and plenty of rust underneath. But you're almost guaranteed to get from point A to point B and that no one will jack your car before during or after that trip. The Daniels inherited the car from someone else for free. Not a bad deal, really.

An island car drives on island roads, and oh, what roads they are. Mainly one road, to be exact. It goes around the whole island. Yep, just the one. And don't worry about traffic lights or stop signs of any kind, all St. Maarten traffic is regulated by two things: round-a-bouts and speed bumps. A more appropriate name might be speed hills or mountains. Oh, and I guess pot holes slow things down too.

Our first speed bump on the island greeted Matt and I by sending our luggage sailing from their stacks in the back of the car and right into the back of our heads. Welcome to St. Maarten. After another smack or two, Matt and I wised up and held the luggage in place with our hands.

Much the rest of our first week and a half here are a blur, but there are a few clear feelings and pictures. Like, the fact that our apartment was not cleared of its previous tenants, so Matt and I were homeless. We stayed in another girl's apartment by the Daniel's (she's now one of our great friends, Jen, but she was gone on her break before the new semester began). I was not happy about continuing to live out of a suitcase, I mean suitcases.

We spent our time gearing up for the start of school. I did a lot of reading. Matt did a lot of flip flopping between stress and excitement. We both got a lot of mosquito bites.

We got pretty good at acting like adopted-Daniels. We ate their food and hung out at their house and I even used their shower. They taxied us around to various grocery stores and to church and generally continued their life-saving ways. We played with their three boys, Elijah, Ethan and Erik, and even saw our first giant iguana.

Oh, the creatures of the island. At any given moment spent outside, you will see one or any combination of stray dogs, stray cats, iguanas, lizards large and small, mosquitoes (of course), centipedes (avoid-they're poisonous), snails ( I accidentally step on them all the time), fireflies (only at night...obviously), and cockroaches.

It was also during this time first spent on the island that I began my month-long dependence on the school's treadmills. I'm talking about running two times a day, 60 - 65 miles a week solely on a treadmill. This was not good for training. Mentally, I was surprisingly okay. Normally a treadmill feels like a death sentence, but the air conditioned, hill-less and safe gym sounded pretty good compared with the alternative. I didn't know where to run outside, or how to run in the heat, or why I'd choose to run on the surrounding hills, or if I'd make it back from a run alive. My sense of danger on the island was overly heightened. Not that there isn't some here, there is! But, I feel much more comfortable with how and when to run now. It's pretty much taken all semester to get to this point however. Let's just say I lost some really good fitness dinking around on the treadmill.

In any case, Matt and I did eventually move into our actual apartment. That was a good day for me. We finally had a home, and a home is exactly what you need most when you uproot and move to an island across the continent and in another country.

There are other big moments, learning to run outside, attending the LDS branch here on the island (my first experiences being called to the Primary), Matt taking tests and endlessly studying, spending time with my awesome neighbor and other best friend (in addition to Karla) Cheyenne and somehow convincing her to run with me at an unholy morning hour two times a week, finding out I like yoga, finding out I like cooking, buying our own "island car," getting internet set up, losing it, and setting it up again, running an island race that somehow made me seem much faster and cooler than I am, getting a new air conditioning unit after our old one kicked the bucket, joining up with a training group every Tuesday and Thursday at an actual track, beach excursions, tutoring the Mcglue boys Ronan and Dillon, torrential down pours of rain and driving through floods, losing power, and of course, more mosquito bites.

Welcome to St. Maarten. We (mostly) love it here.