21 July 2004 22:13
alright, the other month (may to be exact) my brother (kyle) and i went to goof off in jamaica for two weeks. why jamaica? well, hmm.we'd planned to go to albania, where our maternal grandparents currently are. but we were planning on taking our sister with, but she wound up planning to go to albania with another group (she's actually there right now). so with her not going, kyle and i didn't know if we still wanted to do that country or not. we opted to try something that we were both more familiar with, namely jamaica. before albania, my grandparents had spent a large amount of time down there as missionaries, and we had been to jamaica as a family to visit twice. in addition, kyle had been there on a vbs team a couple years ago. plus it was a lot cheaper :).
we had friends in two places down there, roland and philip/danny/shirley. roland works for the same company i do, he's on contract there in kingston. the other three work at a school for deaf children (hereafter called maranatha) ran by our church denomination in the area southwest of mandeville. seeing as we had two weeks on our hands, kyle and i decided to split the time 50/50 between the two locations.
i left LA here on the 12th, for the redeye through newark, nj, thence to kingston jamaica. i was originally supposed to join kyle in newark, but i had kinda missed my flight two days earlier. so i was $100 poorer, and 48 hours behind schedule. i was also somewhat ignorant as to roland's mailing address, since kyle had it and i was expecting originally to enter the country with him. and what more excellent time to discover that i had not copied down his cell phone number, than when i arrive at jamaican immigration and need his address? ah, but the beauty of credit cards. i spent three minutes on the phone to our headquarters in va to get his phone number. i got home at the end of the month and discovered that that three minute phone call cost me $12.60. i don't know whether that is trying to teach me to be more prepared, or whether it's trying to teach me to be more compassionate to those in need :). oh yeah, and by the time i got through immigration, the baggage carasel had stopped running and they had locked my bag away in a corner room, quite out of sight. i was another twenty minutes trying to claim the thing.
i finally made it through customs around 1300 on thur the 13th, where roland and kyle were awaiting patiently. we headed out for lunch, which happened to be patties. kyle and i (and dad, incidentally) have two jamaican foods that we have a particular fondness for; hamburger patties and champagne kola. the patties are probably the societal equivelent of hamburgers to americans, it's a spiced beef mix that's wrapped inside of a flaky corn-meal shell. you can also get them wrapped inside a sweet bread, which is also muy goot. champagne kola is in the cream soda family, fairly sweet, with a distictive syrupy smell, other than that it's like all your other carbonated beverages. here, i rummaged around and found a picture. i wouldn't pay a buck forty-five for it though, you can get it for 45 to 50 cents in jamaica.
at any rate, that was lunch. we hten headed out on a reconasaince run to mavis bank, a small town on east of kingston. it's a starting point for to hike blue mountain, the highest peak in jamaica (7400 msl or so). we were just figuring out how long it would take to get there, where it actually was &c &c. a point to note, we never actually made it there, but we were well asured by a local at the point where we turned around that it was just down the road. in the meanwhile, we got to observe firsthand roland's driving "skills" firsthand. (sorry roland, i'm going to get personal here :) ). he isn't a bad driver by anymeans, and he handles the car very well. lets's just make three observations. one, he's acclimitized very well to the local driving habits. two, my mother would NOT be impressed. three, the phrase "defensive driving" is not really part of his mentality. after all, if you're on the offensive all the time, who needs defense?
we arrived back at his apartment sometime after five, and had a nice liesurely supper and evening. that is the beauty of visiting a tropical paradise when you have nothing to do. the evenings laze by in a very pleasent and peaceful manner. roland has a sweet apartment, it's situated on the north side of the city, well up on the mountain sides surrounding the flat that makes up kingston proper. in this way he has a good view, less noise, and much much less crime. kingston has a somewhat high crime rate. it's more the "real jamaica", whereas the west and north coasts are the tourist jamaica (negril, mobay, ocho rios, port antonio, &c). hmm, this perhaps is the spot to put a bit on my feelings re. jamaica. the last time i'd been i was 11 or 12 i think. needless to say, i had this rather naive view of the social state of island. kyle, having been two or three summers ago, had a lot more realistic viewpoint. i meanwhile was somewhat nonplussed to hear that grandmother had been horrified when she heard what we were planning. then i met a bunch of people before i went down who were telling me how bad of a state jamaica was in and how i'd need to be careful etc etc.
i took it all with a grain of salt (remember, i'm still young, ten foot tall, bulletproof, and proud of it), but i did end up somewhat paranoid upon arriving. wait, not so much paranoid as depressed. so roland was busy regaling us of stories of gun battles between local dons and the police, of police coverups because they'd shot some of the wrong people, of kids getting kidnapped for ransom, of car hijackings and so on. it gave me a rather dim outlook on the whole thing, and i was beginning to wonder why on earth i'd wanted to visit jamaica in the first place. now don't take all this too seriously, because i wasn't either, but it was having a dampening effect on my vacation...
sitting on his balcony, bare feet on a cool tile floor, the lights of kingston twinkling below us, watching a small thundershower move across the western edge of the city. it was the first lightening i'd seen and thunder i'd heard since leaving virginia last september.
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