Part 2!

(Really quick before I start--- Edward, your birthday present is finally going to be in the mail tomorrow. It was tough finding time to get to the shipping station on campus- it's open 9-3 every day (and for the most part, I have class from 9-3 every day). But tomorrow I get out at noon and I'm bringing your present with me to class so I can just go right there. So sorry it took so long!)

So here's part two! As you all know we went to Key West on Saturday; and it was an absolute blast. We went on a big bus with 4 professors that lead us around (and as you could have guessed, they knew 500x more about the architecture of every single building we saw than a tour-guide could have told us). Aside from it being 108 degrees (and that's not even a joke, it was the 2nd hottest day of the year in the Keys), it was so much fun. Also, it was "Bike Week" in the Keys, so every street was filled up and down with motorcycles. Which was cool, no doubt, but it caused the entire day to be loud and smell like gasoline.

A fact I found interesting was the fact that it's actual name, "Caya Hueso", doesn't translate to 'Key West'. The only reason we call it Key West is because when Great Britain took control of the island they thought "Caya Hueso" (pronounced Caya wesso) sounded like Key West and the name stuck. The literal translation of Caya Hueso is "Key of bones", because by the time Ponce De Leon and the Spanish Army took over the island, it was littered with the remains -- bones -- of it's earlier inhabitants. (The fact that it is in fact the western-most Key is a coincidence). I thought that was pretty cool, so I thought I'd share it with you!

Alright, here are some pictures!




An old house we visited, they said the items in the house have been
kept in-tact for close to 70 years; Key West was the first place
to begin recognizing the importance of preserving history.





This is my friend Troy I've been telling you about. He's drinking a
Coconut. I love the taste of Coconut, but the Coconut milk is
definitely NOT the same thing... yuck.

This is what every street looked like. With a bunch of bikes,
obviously there were a lot of bikers. I felt like I was at a
Nascar race with some of the people that were there...
we literally had to spend 5 full minutes explaining to one of
the guys that we were here touring the *architecture* of
Key West, NOT the bikes. He in turn told us that he had
no idea what the word "architecture" was. We didn't meet the
brightest crayons in the box or the sharpest tools in the shed
on our tour. But it was still fun!! 

Awesome looking old church.



The house shown in picture 1 from the outside.