Hi folks,

first of all, because I always forget this, thank you, thank you very much all Rotarians for giving me the opportunity to live here in the Bahamas. It is like paradise you always see in magazines and tourist information, sunny weather, crystal blue water and snow white sand.

 
I live 50 meters from Taino Beach at the canal. We have three boats, a pool and a real nice house with a green blue roof. One of the boats is 40 years old and Murry, Gregs cousin, works all the time to renovate it because most of the furniture was made out of wood and termits eat through all of it but it will be really fancy when it is finished.

Most of the time four people live here, Greg (my host father), his girlfriend Sanae, his cousin Murry and me. We also have a black dog called Piper. But the number of people always depends on which day it is or if one of Greg’s hundreds of friends comes over. Believe me if I say Greg has so much connections and he knows nearly everybody due to that he owns a brewery. No matter where we go or what we are doing there is always somebody who says: “hey what’s up Greg” or “How are you today” or “Haven’t seen you in a long time”. It is quite amazing what he can do with all these relationships. One time we went to a hotel to deliver some of his beer and we went to the bar and got drinks - free. That’s great, isn’t it.

His cousin Murry runs the brewery with him as his partner and he is loves to makes jokes which are funny (most of the time) and he comes like Greg from Canada. Sanae is a citizen from the Bahamas and works at the casino down at port Lucaya. Port Lucaya is an area full of bars, souvenir shops, stages for shows, restaurants and any other kind of shops tourists could need. But also the Bahamians go out there and it is nice although it is disegned for tourists. An other place to meet is the Bowling alley where you can play bowling what the name tells you but also any kind of arcade and fun games like air tennis. I haven't been there yet but I am planning to.Greg, my buddy Stefan and me went snorkling and lobster fishing out on the ocean.

The reefs are beautiful, we saw thousands of fishs and we visited a tiny island in the reefs which looked like the surface of the moon because all the lava stone was jagged and grey with head big craters. After that we went to Banana Bay for lunch and we had a typical Bahamina dish called conch fritters which are fried conch meat in batter. Conch is a shell fish and one of the National Bahamian Symbols. It was fun although we did not find any lobsters to shoot.

I joined GGYA (The Governor General's Youth Award) which comes from Britain and it is all about surviving skills like hiking, camping etc. and social service. Social service is needed here in the Bahamas for nearly every educationg stuff. You need it even for graduation and if you do GGYA you have a better chance to go to universtity than somebody who did not. So I helped last weekend at the Conch Man Triathlon with Enrico and some friends. We prepared food and filled watercups for the runners. I will send you some pictures about that.

On Sunday I went to the Guy Fawkes Festival and for the people who do not know what it is, I think it was a man who tried to blow up some government's buildings in Britain but he could be stopped. Anyways, they make a realy fancy bon fire and prepare dummies to burn them in this fire and all this was organised by the Rotary Club of Lucaya. I missed unfortunately the burning dummies because I was standing in a line to get some food and nobody said anything about starting. I am really upset about that, I really wanted to see that :-((. Life is unfair.

During mitterm it was quite exciting because I helped Greg bottling 5,000 bottles of beer during one of my free days and I had no school for 3 days because the storm Noel was supposed to go over Grand Bahama. So we went shopping for hurricane supplies and there was no bred left in the food store, I have never seen a big supermarket running out of bred. Apart from the Guy Fawkes disappointment it is very very great here, I found friends in my school and outside of it and I got to know some German people who live here.

OK till my next report which will come a little bit faster than this one.
 

Thank you all

Max

See Max' pictures HERE