Living in Grand Cayman

At work its the annual “busy season” ; lots of client and lots of work. Few US trips to Miami, NY & LA coming up. This period usually goes from January to March ; perfectly normal in an accounting firm. Its also busy season for visitors! After Julie’s parents, Laurent & Terri-Ann, Julie’ best friend will be over in 4 weeks. Then a buddy of mine will be over for easter in March.

During one of our east end drives, we stopped to look a bit at the blowholes. These holes, which are found in the iron shore give a pretty good show. Below are a few samples of the blowholes. Also, here is a short YouTube video of a larger and more impressive blowhole. (This video was taken by Julie’s dad) As you will see in the video, we almost got very wet since a very large wave can in as surprised us.

http://www.youtube.com/v/usxEj8LRjcM

This last picture was taken by Laurent when he was with us. Although I am very used to driving on the other side of the road and having the wheel on the right, I must admit it still looks funny when you actually look at it in a picture. I guess thats what happens after 15 years of driving on the other side does to you!

Laurent, a longtime friend of mine from Luxemboug and his GF Teri-Ann are now staying at my place!  We are thrilled to have them over ; I worked with Laurent in Montreal when he did an exchange from the Lux office for 3 years back in the early 200o’s.  He promised he would visit us in Cayman and he has delivered.  Now its up to me & Julie to visit Luxembourg to deliver on our part of the deal 🙂  Hopefully in the next 1-2 years we will make it to Lux for a  visit.

On their first full day, we took them to the main highlight of Grand Cayman ; stingray city.  It was a windy day, but it made for great sailboat ride.

Here is a picture of all of us on the sailboat.

Would you trust these two guys to be the captains of your boat? 🙂 Laurent is an avid cyclist ; notice the tan line on his arm from his cycling jersey!

Finally, a local Cayman sight.  I must see this daily and is so terribly dangerous that I am surprised the police don’t crack down on this.  Often you see 2-3 people, usually with 1-2 dogs and just seem to be having a good time while going somewhere.

This week-end was very easy going. On Saturday, Julie & her mom just felt like staying home & doing nothing. Guys being guys, my dad in-law & myself wanted to do something. So we went for a drive to Grand Cayman’s eastern district (locally known as “east end”) and even took the dog with us.

Some people have their homes near this shore. A short swim away to a lovely coral reef.

Aipa taking a pose for the camera

Quite windy today ; lots of waves. very few people in the east end. Lots of peaceful & beautiful places to visit though. Its about a 25 minute drive from where we live to get to the east end and 1h+ (depending if you stop or not) to do the whole eastern loop and drive back home.

On Sunday, we went to the Queen Elizabeth II botanical park. The park is in the “Frank Sound” area and is about a 20 minute drive from where we live. We did not know what to expect but very much enjoyed our visit. In the park there were some poisonous trees/plants. Good thing they were well identified.

A small snake crossed the path right in front of us.

Not sure what this was, but it was sure a huge plant!

One of the highlights of the park are the blue iguanas. They are an endangered species; only a few hundred remain. At the park they breed and release them. During our walk, was saw about 5-6 of them. They actually are blue (with shades of dark blue) and are quite large ; like a medium sized cat.

The rest of the park was plants/flowers. A wide variety were present and were very pretty as you can see below. All-in-all, a very nice Sunday afternoon activity.

Hi everyone,

Happy new year to everyone who reads my blog. The weather here is beautiful and we brought in the new year taking it easy! At midnight, the Cayman sky lit up with a massive amount of fireworks. It seems to be very popular on the island ; many people buy these and set them of from their backyards. Everywhere you looked, there were lights in the sky ; it was spectacular and went on for almost an hour.

On another subject, a few days ago, we had the opportunity to visit a condo on Seven Mile beach that is currently for sale for 7.5M$. We are not in that market yet, but it was amazing to visit.  Here are some pictures, but in real, this place is absolutely stunning.

Here is the “community area” at ground level.

The huge private terrace where you can have 30-40 guests

The kitchen.

The view from another balcony in the condo building

Infinity edge pool

A final picture of Julie & I from this fabulous place 🙂

Merry Christmas everyone.

Here are some pictures of a house about 5 minutes away from ours.  On the front lawn, there were many displays and all the trees were full of lights.  The public was welcome to stop and wander around to look.  There were so many things to see that it took us about 45 minutes to check out the whole thing. Quite impressive.

This was his driveway

From the other side of the street ; I tried to get the whole property, but I could not get it to fit all in one picture. Gives you a good idea though.