Hi everybody, here’s another post…it may be my shortest one ever. No lies, no lies.
St. Thomas, as I’ve written about before, is one of the U.S. Virgin Islands. I go there about every 2-3 months, and the last time I was there I traveled with Mike, a door and window sales guy who lives near Miami and does the same thing I do on the islands – only I sell tools and he sells doors and windows. I met Mike last year at a big hardware store event on a different island, so like I’ve done with numerous sales reps, we exchanged information and once in awhile we’ll shoot each other emails asking where the other person is traveling in the next month. We ended up going to the U.S.V.I. for the same week back in February, so while we each had our own rental cars and agendas, we were able to meet up at night a couple times for dinners and then ended up on the same return flight back to Miami at the end of the week. Mike is in his 40’s and can sell ice to Eskimos. He’s good at what he does and is hilarious, so what happened to him came as no surprise to me. Mike was getting off of a ferry in St. Thomas from being on the island of Tortola all day, and when he was crossing the little bridge from the boat to the main land, he saw something slip out of the portfolio he was holding and into the water. He noticed at the last second that it was his rental car keys. Oh no! He calls Avis, and they say it’s a $300 fee to replace the keys. He gets stressed and frustrated, asking around if anyone’s a diver…to no avail. What does Mike decide to do? NOT pay the $300. He finds someone with a mask, asks the local boatmen to spot him, and he dives down into the ocean IN HIS JEANS to try finding the car keys! He said he dove down about 25 feet (typical salesman because when I heard him telling the story the 2nd time, he said it was 50 feet…), and as it got darker and colder and “there were these huge barracuda fish swimming around me,” there sat his keys at the bottom, on a rock! He grabbed them, swam up to the top, and went to his Toyota Yaris rental and the remote to unlock the car worked! He’s gotta write to Toyota so they can use that as a testimony to their keyless entry technology. So I wasn’t there when it happened, but I was finishing up at my own customer’s store a few miles down the road and walking out to my car when Mike pulls up and rolls down his window saying “Anna! I don’t have any pants on!” My first thoughts and response was “What? Mike it’s only 5:30 have you been drinking already?!” And sure enough, I walked over to his car and he was in boxers sitting in the driver’s seat. He dove down in jeans, so he ended up driving back to the hotel and walking back to his room in boxers. Maybe you had to be there, but it was hilarious. He told the story that night at dinner (when he said it was a 50-foot dive) to the other guy we’d met, who happened to be a Canadian sales rep who covers the same islands I do, selling JEWELRY! (Side note. Picture that conversation: “Hi my name is Martin, I’m here for work.” “Hi I’m Anna, I’m here for work too. What do you do?” “I travel the islands as a jewelry sales rep.” “Oh, I travel the islands selling power tools.”) If what happened to Mike happened to me, I honestly don’t know what I’d do. Probably cry and get a guy to dive down and get them since I can’t hold my breath more than 8 seconds!
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| Mike is the 2nd one in, going left to right. A hilarious sales guy who can sell ice to Eskimos, no doubt. Picture from when we met in Feb. of 2011. |
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| Random picture of me trying to climb a palm tree in Babados. Feb. 2012. |
A couple other things about St. Thomas…it’s a typical island with small windy roads and no speed limit, but you can never really get above 35mph. One thing you can do, though, is get pulled over for illegally talking on a cell phone, like I did. Now don’t picture a cop coming up behind me and turning his lights and sirens on until I’m pulled over. Basically I was on the phone (for business!) and rounded a corner going up a hill at about 20 mph, and right as I turned the corner there were 2 cops, and they got me. One just looked, pointed at me, and then motioned for me to pull over. It was a bit unorthodox and I thought about speed off at 29 mph, but I abided. I did not know there was a cell phone law, so I was thinking that my 20mph was somehow too fast. At any rate, I had to pay a small fine (yes, I tried playing dumb and smiling…I guess I should have tried crying too), and I’ve learned my lesson.
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| Random cloud formation from an airplane. |
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| Sunset with the moon coming up, on an evening flight to Grenada. |
Another thing I’d like to share about the islands in general (with a specific example from St. Thomas) is the radio stations and some of the songs. I couldn’t stand it at first, but both the Caribbean music and the way the DJs talk on the radios are a lot different. Sure, they listen to the music we do (even some country on a few islands!), but much of the stations have Caribbean calypso and Soca music. Calypso is lighter and happy with the steel drums, and Soca is more like native dancing music (I’d compare it to merengue if you’re familiar with Latin merengue), really upbeat and intense. If you listen hard to the lyrics, you might understand some of them, and if you do, they’ll probably make you smile. Here’s an example of a Caribbean-style song from Youtube (click the link):
Now, this song doesn’t have these lyrics, but some lyrics I wrote down while listening to a song similar to this style in St. Thomas went like this…I’m going to spell out some of the words as they pronounce them to attempt to make it more real, haha:
“I love when dee mango stick in dee teeth. Dats when you know dee mango is sweet…She gone took me mango, what I to do? She gone took me mango, what I to do?…”
Now imagine the accent from the Youtube link, with lyrics about anything random (not always rated G, but the innocent mango song is pretty funny), and THEN you have to add in the DJ. Can you say ‘interruption?’ That’s all that happens during many, many songs on different Caribbean radio stations. The DJs will just turn the song volume way down and ad their own comments. So with the mango song, the DJ would cut in and say things like “not dee green mango!” music music music “she ain’t sweet” music music music “oh no man dee mango be green!” music music music…then the DJ takes a caller who says “I like dee mango with meeelk! (milk)” And then music music music and the DJ responds “What kinda ting is dat a mango wit meelk?”
Please understand – I’m not bashing the music or the DJs at all. It’s simply different. At first I couldn’t listen to it much, but it has definitely grown on me because I tend to leave the radio on these days, and sometimes I even recognize songs. That’s when you know you island hop too much… The accents you hear in the songs are also how they speak, so one could say that I speak 3 languages: English, Spanish, and Island. This sort of stuff fascinates me. As you know, I love different languages, diverse accents, differences in word pronunciations and local customs, and culture in general. I guess if I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t blog about it and wouldn’t probably survive in this job. The difference in the English accent (which is ‘different’ to me…but I sound foreign to them…remember it’s all relative) is a part of this whole experience, and one must embrace it!
That’s it for now. Enjoy your week, everyone, and thanks for reading. Or should I say “tanks for readen.”
