First of all, update on Sky. You've all waited in anticipation for the answer: are we keeping Sky or are we not? Well, I can now give you that answer: we ARE keeping Sky! :D
I'm so excited to take her to all the Caribbean islands, and then to America. I reckon she's going to love them! :)

Well, summer's gradually coming to a close, and school's around the corner. I'll be starting revising for my GSCEs this school year, which is actually quite frightening in some ways, despite what people say about them being easy.
My cousin, Reece, has just got his results, and they turned out pretty good. Let's see how I do! 😂

Speaking of Reece, he's left Grenada now to he go back to England to start college. I hope it goes well for him.

In two months, it will be my fourteenth birthday, and my Grandad's coming for that event! I'm so looking forward to seeing him again. I've not seen him for two months, and that's been long enough.

Anyways, let's move onto recent updates. Carnival has come and gone, but I'll talk more about that at the end of the blog, since it will most likely be the longest bit.

Update on the kids' net: it's still going strong, and we now have three net controllers: me, a Spanish girl (who has lived in England for most of her life, but is fluent in Spanish as well as English) named Pola Evans (daughter of Natalia Evans, who runs the kids' get-together association at Secret Harbour and does a brilliant job), and a South African girl called Natasha Simpons (daughter of Denise Simpons, who runs the cruiser's net and has been a BIG help with the kids' net, so huge thanks to her). Pretty much every cruiser on the island seems to know me from it, so that's pretty cool.

I've started up a drama club at the kids' get-together group (called KOS, short for Kids' Organized Society), and we're doing a production for Alice in Wonderland. I'm working on the script at the moment, and it's actually quite a lot of fun. I'll tell you about the production when it comes. :)

Last Tuesday, we went on Cutty's island tour. Cutty is a taxi driver, and takes a taxi-full of people on a tour around the island. We went with the crew on Neptune II, Vega (whom we first met in Montserrat and again in Mustique and have been friends with ever since) and a few others I have never met but came along in the bus.
We first went to Annandale waterfall. There were these guys who walked to it with us, and we watched them climb up a natural wall, and jump from the top of it into the water. It must've been, like, thirty feet high with dangerous rocks beneath them. They just jumped off it as casually as jumping off a two-foot-high diving board. Sorry, they didn't jump - they pretty much walked off, casual as you please. We were all spellbound.
We jumped into the water from the pathway that was about five feet above the water. The water was freezing and sliced through you like a knife, but it was super refreshing. We gathered for a photo, then took a natural shower under the jet of the waterfall pelting down on us like hundreds of large hailstones. I never knew water could be so heavy. It was awesome. It was my favourite part of the tour.
Next we went to the top of the mountain Grand Etang, and saw an endangered species of monkey - the mona monkey. Cutty took a bunch of bananas, and we took it in turns to have him place the banana on our head and feel the monkey's little paws scramble up our shoulders, rummage through our hair, snatch the banana and scurry off to eat it. Then Cutty had someone place a hand on the shoulder of the person with the monkey, and he placed the banana on the head of that other person. The monkey left the first person's head, ran across the other person's arm like it was a bridge, snatched the banana and scampered away. It was really cute.
Lunch was a small buffet in a restaurant close to a rum distillery which we also visited, we ate local foods like macaroni pie, local veggies, and a kind of sauce, with tasteless melon for afters. We had some sort of fruit punch to drink, which was tasty enough, though I had no idea what was in it. Some Chinese film was playing behind the bar, but it was all in a foreign language.
We had already done the tour at Rivers' Rum Factory with my grandad in June. A man took us around the factory, showing us how the rum was made: they have stacks and stacks of sugar canes and sugar cane shavings. The workers use a large machine to crush the juice out of the sugar cane. The juice is carried off in a pipe that led to a furnace room, in which it is fermented into rum. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but that's kind of the basics. Once the rum is ready, it's taken to a testing room, where a machine tells you how much alcohol there is in the rum. Rivers' Rum Factory only stocks the highest quality of rum, which means they won't bottle any rum that has any less than 75% alcohol. Any of that stuff will go straight back into the furnace room. After the tour, the adults tasted the Rivers' Rum. This time, I did try a sip of the weaker passion fruit rum punch at the end, and it tasted like passion fruit rum punch (I'm not sure how to describe it in any other way), and it was quite nice. I also had a taste of the chocolate rum, but I didn't really like that.
Speaking of chocolate, we went to two chocolate factories after the rum factory. The first one was called the Grenadian Chocolate Company (very original name), and the tour was short, but the chocolate-tasting fantastic. We learned a trick about how to make dark chocolate taste like milk chocolate. Take a bite out of 100% cocoa chocolate (that's chocolate that has no milk, no sugar, nothing but cocoa) then taste the 70% cocoa chocolate. In comparison to 100% cocoa chocolate, 70% cocoa chocolate tastes very sweet. It's a cool trick to play on your brain.
We didn't buy any chocolate at the GCC, but we did at the Diamond Chocolate Factory. We had already been through the tour, so we decided there wasn't much point in doing it again. We just hung out in the shop sampling/munching the chocolate samples. Then we bought a few bars and headed back to Secret Harbour.
It was a great day all-round.

Okay, let's get on with the Carnival.
First of all, I'll explain what a Grenadian Carnival is and what it's all about.
There are three main festivals: the Jouvay, the Light Festival, and the Pretty Mass. Each festival symbolizes something about the Caribbean's past.
The Jouvay had people covered in oil, dragging chains around at four in the morning. The costumes represents the slavery, and the time of the festival represents the start of the slave rebellion.
The Light Festival had people marching down the streets covered in LED lighting. The lights were artificial symbols representing the rebelling slaves burning down the plantation on the streets.
The Pretty Mass had people dancing down the streets in costumes that represent how the lives of the locals turned from bad to good. People dressed up in rainbow costumes represented the colour coming out of the darkness; and people representing things like "Joy", "Harmony" and "Love". All that kind of stuff.
On Monday was the Jouvay. Jouvay means "early start to the day", so if course it began at about four in the morning. We dressed up in old clothes (for a reason I'll talk about in a moment) and went to the capital, St. George with Neptune II, where there were people literally covered head to toe in engine oil. And not just the people: the streets were slippery with oil, the gutters were running with oil, and the stench of oil was almost choking. At first, I wanted nothing to do with the party - why would I want to get covered in lank old oil that would never wash off properly? - but then we started getting covered in paint. It was tradition to paint people at the Jouvay, so we became a rainbow mess by the time we headed home from the Jouvay, but it was well worth it. It was hilarious fun. I ended up loving the celebrations.
The next day, Mum and Paul went with Vanessa and Gary from Neptune II to the Light Festival. I spent the night on Neptune II with their children, Marina and Elliott, while our parents waved their lightsabers in the air, rammed on their literally flashy fedoras, and strapped on their light-up bracelets in the crowded streets of the light festival. Everyone at the festival wore similar clothes and paraded down the streets, music blaring, light blinding, sporting Carib (local beer) and Guinness t-shirts.
The final day of Carnival was on Wednesday - the Pretty Mass. We went to the street we had the Jouvay in and watched thousands of people dancing in fancy costumes down the streets. Some costumes were so massive it was hard to believe how someone could carry them around. You'll see what I mean by that in the photos below.

Okay! That's all the highlights of the recent events in Grenada we've had. Only three months until we're in the sea again!