Twitter / AsburyWGM

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Tuesday in St. Croix (with lots of pictures!)


We survived our first day alive! Exhausted, but alive. Last night, Mel lead us in detailed scheduling for today while Nathan was helping the Prince’s set up wireless in their office. Now we can sit outside of the church office and get wireless access. Can imagine that it willl look rather funny with our whole mission team sitting in the van by a half completed church on laptops. Media Com nerds at their finest.
Today the rooster decided to start screeching around 3 am. Apparently I was the only one who woke up and heard it, but thankfully I was able to get back to sleep. We all dragged ourselves out of bed and got some local pastries from the bakery up the street for breakfast. Apparently it is the ‘it’ place on the island to get breakfast sandwiches and foods, and Nathan and Ben found themselves waiting in a long line of school children and people on their way to work. They ended up getting 3 different kinds of breads. There were this little ‘turnover pasty’ things that where filled with different fruits like pineapple, guava and coconut. Another was more like a small loaf of bread with strawberry and coconut baked inside of it. And interestingly enough, they also had raisin sconces. Sometime soon we hope to try a traditional Cruzan ‘johnny bread’ from there, which Marie Prince strongly recommends. They sound like a loaf of bread with your choice of fish baked into it. Yummy.
We had an interview set originally for around 9ish this morning, but it ended up getting pushed back to 1. This gave us the morning to explore a bit and get some B roll and behind the scenes footage. We started by poking around the church. Construction of the building has stopped now due to a huge theft that left them without much of their building equipment. The church in the meantime is meeting in the completed basement, and the main building has the outside walls and roof up. Hopefully they will find someway of starting up the work again, because the building will be beautiful and so useful to them when it is done. Anyway, we spent about a few hours on the church site. JimBob was running around with his hulking steady cam equipment on. Erika was taking some stock and artsy shots with her new snazzy camera. Mel did some camera work and got to experience the crazy reactions of drivers going by. Ben did a mix of still and film camera work, and managed to get this really awesome shot of a lizard. And I did some behind the scenes camera work and when nobody was doing anything worth filming, I ran around chasing the anola lizards that were everywhere. Didn’t manage to get one. Yet…


Ned Prince then joined us to be our guide as we traveled to the East side of the island (the place with the best beaches). Again like typical media com nerds, we spent the whole ride looking out the windows and yelling out in excitement whenever we saw something that would make a great shot. We stopped in downtown Christiansted by this awesome yellow fort over looking the harbor. Christiansted is more of the ritzy area of the island, so the water was filled with gorgeous yachts and 5 star hotels lined the shore. We all managed to get some amazing footage and stills and Erika and I waded into the water. The water was so clear and warm! So warm, that you wouldn’t even know that you where in water if it weren’t for the slight waves. Can’t wait to go swimming or snorkeling on Buck Island now!


We wrapped up on that location and then traveled out to the most Eastern point of the island and of the United States. It was a breath taking drive up the coast. We were driving for miles on a small mountain ridge that sloped down to the water. When we finally got to the point, we didn’t have too long to spend there, so as soon as the van stopped, we all ran out, grabbed cameras and started working like crazies. From where we were we could look down the whole coast, see Buck Island and look out to the ocean for miles on 3 sides.

When time was up, we herded everyone together and took a team photo (as seen at the top) and then decided to try a little experiment. We wanted to try and get some moving car shots of the coast on the drive back down. Now this would be fine except this would involve JimBob hanging out of the car with the van doors open and Ben holding on to JimBob’s shirt so he wouldn’t go flying out of the car. Somehow we managed to complete this task pain and injury free, and hopefully we will see if we got some good footage at dailies tonight. (Editor's note: Dear Mrs. Hiatt, JimBob was not really hanging "out of the car" He was fully seated in the van seat. See picture below.)

We grabbed a bite to eat at this wonderful place loved by all Cruzans called KFC. Being the veggie of the group, my lunch consisted of mashed potatoes, coleslaw and biscuits. The saltiness felt amazing after spending the day in the sun.
We then headed over to the notary office where we would be shooting our interview with a church member. It was short and sweet and just what we needed. So 1 of our 8 planned interviews are completed! We then crashed back at the apartment for a few hours and then while the cooks of the house, Erika and Mel, made fajitas for dinner, I sat down to do a blog post and the guys logged some of the footage to help with the editing later.

And shortly we will be heading back over to the church around 7 for the Wednesday night prayer service where we will get to meet some of the congregation and get some more footage if the situation allows. So we’ll be back with more tomorrow!
Ta-ta for now!
~Kristen
PS- Thankfully no one is sunburnt yet. Or at least badly.
PPS- And Nathan shattered all our hopes and dreams today by revealing to us that there is more than one Shamu at SeaWorld! We were all very distraught upon hearing this news. Hope I haven’t ruined your day by saying this disturbing news on our blog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for all the great pics! Keep it up! Who took the photo of the lizard? That was really cool!

Cydil said...

Ben Corwin got the cool lizard shot.