Sam's Letter Misfortune Bad Bajans! History and Transportation Housing Fauna Submarine Trip Croton Inn Not-so-good Tour Good Tour		Housing, Food and Cricket First, thanks to all who sent words of encouragement and reassurance. There was a while in there where I really thought I was too old to be doing this, but I never really believed it. Today (Tuesday) was the day my friend Dawn was supposed to arrive. But her Mother's health kept her from this adventure. So let's all send a star for her crown and some genuine regret that she's not here with me. I'm perservering, the only disaster to report today is that I have totally failed digital camera, it says something's wrong with the card. I'll take it out to cool tonight and try again tomorrow (might work). We had a large thunder and rain storm last night and it still looked threatening today so I decided to take a bus ride "cross-country" from Oistins to Speightstown (Spicetown) to check out the country-side, the shopping and the length of the trip (remember Adrian, the All-Wise, said it was 15 minutes). We started out with a little Caribbean time. The bus runs every half hour, except, apparently, when the bus driver stops for lunch. Fortunately, I'm nearly in tune with "tropical time" and had brought a book, so exactly half an hour after we were due to leave, we did, with another bus right behind us. Being at the beginning of the run, I got a seat! Yay! Cross-country means the bus doesn't go to Bridgetown. We wandered through all the suburbs to get from the south-central to upper-west side of the island and the only country we saw was a few vacant lots. The west and south coasts (the Caribbean side) are very densely populated. But if I didn't see any countryside, I did get a better sense of neighborhoods and housing and I'm still wondering about zoning. There must be some, but I can't figure out what. Here's what I've extrapolated. You can have any kind of business in a residential neighborhood as long as it doesn't take up more space than a single-family lot. Multifamily dwellings, outside Bridgetown proper, appear to be mostly, although not exclusively, for the tourist trade, you can rent a "fully-furnished" apartment for about $1,200/month US. This compares quite favorably with the $250/night (and up) the resorts charge. That's about all I know about the resorts except there are lots of them and a chef in a beach lobster shack told me that the world was quickly coming to an end because they were all building on sand and the Lord didn't like that. By comparison, the oldish guest house I'm in charges $45 US a night, but when you want clean towels, you have to ask for them and you have to make your own bed (or not). The single-family housing stock is of two primary kinds -- "block" houses (built of concrete blocks and then stuccoed) and "board" houses. (I learned these terms when being questioned by the police.) Scattered here and there are some double-wide trailers, excuse me, manufactured homes. And then quite a few newer block houses built to loook like double-wides. Hmmm. The board houses are often brightly painted, the block houses not so much so. They're mostly white or cream. But the porch (verandah), usually within the house roof-line, is often a contrasting color -- pale blue or green or sometimes hot pink, orange or bright blue, all over, walls, ceiling and floor, more so in some neighborhods than others. In the Thornbury Road area where I first stayed, they told the man who was bringing my luggage that the house was white, "with a white porch, because it's new paint, you see." Some houses have light cast-iron filigree decorative burglar bars on the outside or inside and often the railings have such decorations, but security doesn't seem to be a huge problem. What I do like, though, is the cursive wrought iron that many people put on the front of the house with their chosen identifier. It might be a name—Chichester or Monte Edwards or Alice Villa—or, it might be more descriptive--Rock Villa (in the Black Rock area) or Riverdale Manor or Caribbean Dreamin' (a foreigner for sure). I'm tempted to run down the source; Carol (the bartender here) tells me you can buy them as individual letters, but I'm afraid it just wouldn't look right on my Portland bungalow. Maybe in the back yard on the fence. Now the board houses. These are often, although by no means always, the poorer houses and built in a variety of styles. The unique thing about many of these houses in Barbados is their design heritage. After the emancipation of the slaves and after nearly the entire island had been planted in sugar cane, the workers had little job security, were no longer provided housing by the plantation owners and had no opportunity to buy land even if they could afford it. So they devised a movable house. Called a "chattel house" after the legal definition of chattel as a movable possession, these were truly mobile homes, maybe 120 to 200 sq ft, built of cheap (imported) pine planks with a limestone block and rubble foundation. And they just moved them to the new work site by wagon. Often now they will be larger, or perhaps maybe one left over from the 19th century that has been doubled and then a verandah and shed added. And some of these are extremely imaginately painted. I think perhaps these are the homes and shops of artists and crafstmen, celebrating their ancestors' ingenuity. This photo is a very nice one, but many of them are badly in need of paint and windows panes and reinforcement to the foundation. These are, of course, the homes of the urban poor here. Speightstown has a nice little shopping area and several good restaurants. I ate lunch in a roti shop that seemed good because the proprietor had a properly Indian look about him. And the chicken and potato roti (like a burrito or mushi pork, but curried) was excellent, made, they said, with freshly-made dalphuries, a bread I never ran into in Malaysia where the Indian food was very good. Roti and beer and a little pickled carrot for garnish was about $6.50. They had a great garden and outdoor tables and lights which would be quite enchanting in the evening. But I can't find out anything about Indian bread called dalphuries. Anyone? Speaking of food, I don't want you to think what I'm quoting are typical prices, they're the ones I'm proudest of running down. Most everything is pretty high here, only the local fish is relatively inexpensive. A steak or pork dinner will rarely be less than $30.00 US and a breakfast of 2 eggs, bacon and hashbrowns (and baked beans, often called peas!) will be $10.00 US. My problem is there doesn't appear to be an option of soup and salad, or just a salad and a half order of shrimp. It's all a full meal. Where I'm staying they do typically Bajan cooking and specialties. I get the protein, usually fish (fried or grilled), vegetable rice or rice and peas (which is really rice and beans) or french fries, vegetables (plantain, carrot, okra, bread fruit, sweet potato in some combination) and salad. If it's fish it's $14.50 US, if it's shrimp, it's $20.00 US, pork or beef is more, chicken is the same as shrimp. The salad is kind of a kick, one piece of iceberg lettuce, two slices of tomato, two slices of cucumber and you have to request dressing. I have noticed that my lettuce leaf is getting a little larger since I eat it all. But at the resorts a hamburger will be $12.00 US. Not bad I guess, but it looks scary when it says $24.00 plus 15% VAT and 10% service charge. (At my place the VAT is included and you tip if you want to. I do.) Barbados claims not to have fast food restaurants here, but Kentucky Fried Chicken is everywhere, guess it doesn't count. And then they have a home-grown one called Chefette. I had a roti there for lunch one day, and it wasn't bad, but it was mostly mashed up potato and little shreds of chicken in a flour burrito. I think you can see the Chefette menu here. I still haven't found a good place to buy gifts to bring home, but I did find a wonderful art gallery in Speightstown and spent all the money I had allocated for gifts on the ultimate piece of yard art, made from a piece of an oil barrel by an artist named Robert Thomas in Haiti. The gallery website shows samples of the work of the many Caribbean artists they represent. Here is a picture of the piece in my back yard. Then, the last adventure of the day was a nice talk with another guest here, a delightful man from London, called (phonetically) Show-way. No clue how to spell it, he wasn't Scandinavian (Sjoei?); more likely originally Nigerian. Although he's been in London all his adult life, he says his bones just know it's too cold for him, so every year he takes his holiday and travels the hot parts of the world, looking for just that right combination of warmth and sophistication. He's knocked off about eight of the Caribbean islands and says he keeps coming back to Barbados. He's a solid waste expert. You'd think he could get a job around here if he wanted to. But the most interesting part of the evening was learning about cricket. They're very big on cricket here and I am working hard to understand enough to appreciate a tenth of a game or so (couple of hours). Actually they do play practice games that are scheduled from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, but the regular games can go for days. The World Cup will be here later this year (which is one of the reason all the streets and alleys are all tidied up). So the Scots team and the #2 British team are here now doing demonstrations and practices to try to acclimate. It being not quite this warm in the British Isles. Show-way (boy, do I feel like a fool writing it that way) patiently explained things like LBW (leg before wicket) which must be called by the umpire and the number of runs you get for an uncaught fly-ball over the boundary (6) and for a bouncer (4). And how you get out. And, you can have as many strikes as you want and the team with the most runs doesn't necessarily win. Mainly I guess I wanted to be able to say I went to a cricket game, but boy can it get hot on those fields, even if you're not running around. Taking the bus home today, I saw the Brits (#2) playing Barbados and I saw two bowls (pitches) so that may be enough to make me an expert. At least in my circles. AND, the 15 minute trip from Speightstown to Oistins takes at least an hour, no matter what Adrian says. Next