ST. KITTS (week of 2.10.11): I had my first visits to the islands of St. Kitts and Antigua. I flew into Antigua early Thursday morning and had one appointment for work which took 30 minutes, and the rest of my time was spent in an internet café in the airport, so I don’t have anything really to say about that small island. The café was called Big Banana, and it had good service, good banana bread, and fast internet. I’ll most-def be back there!
St. Kitts, on the other hand, brought an unexpected cultural experience. I was there for two days and had two hardware stores to visit. Again on this island you must be 25 to rent a car, so I taxi-ed all over. I spent most of my time in my hotel room trying to keep up w/ the computer work for this job, but Ernest (or ‘Honest Ernest’ as his business card says) provided me with the exciting and unexpected experience of tasting fresh sugarcane, right from the field. He had dropped me off at a hardware store and said he’d be back in 30 minutes. I got out of my meeting and he wasn’t there yet. I ended up waiting for him an extra 15 minutes, but I’m learning to be on island time and not sweat the small stuff you can’t control, so “no worries, mon.” He felt really bad, and so I think he wanted to make up for it somehow. We drove past an old sugarcane plantation, and he says “That’s a cane field…have you ever had fresh cane?” And I told him yes, I was raised on cane up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. …JUST KIDDING.. I said “Nope.” So the guy cranks his taxi van off the road and into the ditch, mumbles to himself “I think I gotta knife in the back,” and goes into 8 foot-tall stalks of sugar cane to chop one down. At this point I’ve got my van door open, standing there, open-mouthed, wondering how this dude knows how much I love cultural experiences. I jump out and shuffle around for my camera and he emerges from the sugarcane stalks with a small one in his hand. He peels and cuts it, and I had my first taste of real, natural, fresh sugar! It was kind of like chewing on soft bark (not that I consume bark), where you had to bite down and gnaw on it and suck the sugary-ness from it. I asked him if it was legal to chop down cane like that, and he assured me it was, although years ago it was St. Kitts’ main export so it used to be forbidden. Ernest went on to tell me when he was a boy he used to play soccer right by a cane field, and he and his buddies would sneak into the field - each with a pearing knife in his hand, and hide there eating cane. The imagery from that story is good—I can just picture a bunch of young boys sneaking into towering cane fields to illegally gnaw on cane. The equivalent to that in my childhood would be sneaking into a corn field in Wisconsin to chew on cobs of corn. I actually never did that, though, so I guess his cane story trumps it. One conversation I vividly remember having with him was our last one, on the way back to the airport on the last day. We were discussing traffic, and how there are only 2 lane roads on these island roads that tend to get island traffic jams during rush hour but are nothing compared to the traffic in the big cities in the U.S. He commented on driving in Miami. Below I’ve attempted to write out what he said, exactly how he said it. I’m not trying to poke fun, but you can’t get the full effects unless you hear it with his island accent:
“Yah I gone to Miami one time. De roads are busy. You hahf tree lanes, and one is foh cahs with tree or more people. It crazy you know.”
He was referring to the HOV carpool lane, where you can only drive in it when you have 2 or more people in the car. That astounded him, but when I look back at my first days living in Dallas last year, I had never seen a ‘carpool lane’ back in Wisconsin either. J
Well, that’s it for now! I have a few more stories from a few more islands, so I’ll just keep updating every once in awhile, attempting to keep things interesting but not long-winded. The work aspect of my job is going fine, busier than ever, but with rewarding experiences like the one above. And pictures are coming! They’re all on Facebook, but I’ll try to put some on here for my family and non-Facebooking friends. Thanks y’all and have a great week! God Bless!!
