Cook Like an Islander!

Before:

After:

Happy Easter!

Port Royal

The other weekend Andy and I visited Port Royal, a small town which sits at the end of a long peninsula jetting out from Kingston bay.

In the late 1600s Port Royal was the capital of Jamaica, its largest city, and the center of England's "buccaneering" activities in the Caribbean. It's most infamous resident was Captain Henry Morgan (right), who got rich organizing pirate invasions of the Spanish Main and continues to be a mainstay in current pirate pop culture. He also proved a bona-fide role model for his salty contemporaries, leading a highly publicized life of quick-riches, violence, and self-destructive behavior. For all these things he was knighted by King Charles II, and at one point was even appointed Lieutenant Governor of the island. Political corruption indeed has deep roots in Jamaica. Today his rebel-come-big-man story continues to inspire lawless Jamaicans ... he may be the island's only white historical figure with positive street cred.

Buoyed by its theft-based economy, Port Royal was also a thriving commercial hub. Its population and trade rivaled colonial Boston and Philadelphia, and it exceeded both in wealth. But all this success came with a price and by the 1690s Port Royal was a favorite topic of England's dimebook industry, earning the moniker of "wickedest city in the world."

All the fun came to a literal crashing halt in 1692, when a massive earthquake sent two-thirds of the city SINKING INTO THE SEA. Thousands perished before noon and eyewitness accounts talk of the ground literally opening up and swallowing people by the dozens. (See diagram below). Morgan had died a few years prior, and his ostentatious tomb disappeared beneath the waves where it still remains. Jeremiad preachers had a field day, just like today.


Reduced to 30% of it's former land mass, Port Royal could no longer support a thriving market community so people moved across the bay and built Kingston. Today Port Royal is a quiet shadow of it's former self, and again my Jamaican guidebook contained an apt description:

"Port Royal today is a dilapidated, ramshackle place of tropical lassitude, replete with important historical buildings collapsing into dust."

Port Royal once had four forts guarding it from enemy ships. Only one survived the quake: Fort Charles. The building continued to serve as a naval installation until 1945, and is now a Jamaican Heritage site.


During the American Revolution, a younger Horatio Nelson was stationed here as fort commander. Rumor is that he used to pace in this tower all day, looking out for French ships and praying for a fight. But the feared French invasion never happened and Nelson would have to wait for the next war to earn immortal English war hero status.


All historical plaques are instructive to a degree. I like ones that don't beat around the bush in this regard.


In the 1890s, -- about 200 years after the earthquake -- the Brits installed a new navel battery near the fort, complete with a state-of-the-art, 14 ton breech-load gun. Then in 1907 a second earthquake hit the town, sinking the turret 8 feet into the sand. Doh!


It also sank this storage building into its present state, now called the "Giddy House" because of the vertigo you receive upon entering.



















Aside from the fort, there's little to do in this former capital, which is now only a collection of about a thousand isolated fisherpeople.

Typical Street.


Official practice grounds of the Port Royal Football Club. Don't know if they're any good, but they were out practicing earlier that day.


Andy showing off his fortitude in front of the abandoned naval hospital -- another old imperial building, now derelict.


Uneven modernization is typical of third world nations. Here are some fishboats moored for the evening. Many Caribbeans still make a living catching large ocean fish using traditional methods in these tiny boats. In the distance, a world away, are the cargo container cranes of Kingston's enormous international harbor.


More fishing shanties.


Di hot Spot!: "Downtown" Port Royal


The scene at "Gloria's" -- the town's most popular restaurant. Started by one Gloria, who was once a simple fish-cleaner. Today the owner of a thriving fish cafe. On weekends they break out the soundsystem and blast oldies music that can be heard across the harbor.


Barrel-broiled lobster. It's what's for dinner.

Sound System Carnival

Last weekend the University had their annual Carnival -- a 3-day bash which proved to me that UWI could hang with even the rowdiest US schools. Friday night was a party on campus at the Student Union. I didn't attend because I was out sightseeing at Port Royal, but when Andy and I got home that night we could hear the music playing until around 4AM ... and campus is over a mile away.

Saturday was the official Carnival Parade and Dance Competition. There were a half dozen "floats" that paraded through campus, starting around 5PM.

As you can see they weren't so much floats as rolling noise machines. Welcome to the "Jamaican Sound System," one of the island's more notable contributions to world culture. A sound system is essentially an enormous collection of speakers -- sometimes on wheels -- assembled in an outdoor location so that party people can dance till dawn.

Each of the trucks had between 20-30 speakers thumping bass at max volume. Each sound system is operated by a different "selecta," (aka a DJ/MC) who plays a hand-picked collage of the latest carnival hits, while also using his own mic to hype up the crowd. Each selecta was competing to get the most people dancing around their particular rig ... hence volume was key. Even outdoors, it was still louder than most indoor concerts I've ever attended. So loud you could watch the whole tractor-trailer literally vibrate to the beats. This is why we could hear last night's party over a mile away.

Aside from the stacks, Carnival consists of throngs of people, organized and otherwise, dancing along the rolling sound systems. The "official" Carnival participants are groups in matching costume, have a semi-organized routine, and compete against each other for judges stationed along the route. The rest of the people are in the parade the public ... who join in the fun. I'd say more about the kind of dancing that goes on, but this is G-rated blog. Google it if you're really that curious.


The parade took a couple hours to roll through campus and then stopped near the library for the final dance-off and awards competition. By then it was dark and the rigs then rolled off to the student center again, for another 4AM blast. Because Andy and I are old, we left at this point for home.

Sunday night was a third party at the Hellshire beach. Hey, a beach-themed party at a real beach! Quite a novelty for this Minnesotan. Hellshire is a suburb of Kingston and about a 45 min drive from campus. The area also has the honor of having the only beach in the Kingston metro. Andy and I caught a ride from our neighbor Satchi for more sound system fun.

These pics are from Satchi's camera ... and turned out surprisingly well. No live music here ... and no reggae either, which went out of style in Jamaica over 20 years ago. These days, parties are strictly sound system based and feature dancehall, the Jamaican musical form which has dominated since the late 80s. I spent some time near the selecta booth and in front of the stacks to get a sense of it all. Until this weekend, I always thought "bone-rattling loud" was only an expression...

Ha! Two swinging white guys doing their best to fit in...

That's the lights of Kingston in the background. Like previous nights I'm sure this bash went until the wee hours of the dawn, but we left earlier because our ride didn't want to make the long drive back after too many hours of surf and thump. (Roads are narrow, bumpy, and not well-lit here.) Still, good times were had by all. Monday morning, campus was noticeably emptier than usual...

Sunday Afternoon at the Zoo, pt. 2

So, on to the zoo!

The first thing you see is this cool tower, promising vistas of Kingston all the way down to the harbor. Alas, it's closed because the stairs are falling off. Underneath the building to the left (also closed) was a cage area, housing some peacocks and parrots. See pic below.








Usually when zoos have have a critter on display, they tend to advertise its more positive aspects to the zoo-going crowd. In the case below, you instead get a sad tale of man's attempted manipulation of nature for the public betterment, gone horribly awry. Maybe the mongoose sign is an example of that famous Caribbean sarcasm, or maybe the story is told on purpose to accent the zoo's aura of industrial blight.

Pretty cute for a ravenous ecological catastrophe, eh?

About 40% of the cages were like this one. Overgrown and empty.

The other side of the wall below is not actually the end of the zoo. It's an abandoned exhibit reclaimed by jungle. Look close, and you can see a derelict animal shelter in back.

Here's a crocodile! I wasn't sure if it was real or not, because it didn't move a muscle for the whole time I watched it. But the zookeeper told me he was just saving his energy and trying to collect sunlight. I don't know if the water was brackish on purpose, or what the sign on the back wall used to say.

Later that same zookeeper took one of the Boas out of its cage to "give it exercise" which he says he does a few times a week. It was funny because I was alerted to this event by a half-dozen women and children dressed in bourgeois church finery, screaming and running across the lawn, down the hill and away from the snake. (They were the only Sunday zoo visitors besides myself.) When I walked past them to check things out, the kids were quite concerned: "Um,Excuse me! Mr! There's a really big snake over there! Mama, why dat man crazy!"

The zookeeper was nice enough, and knew some tricks to keep the snake coiled up and looking at me so I could get some good pics.

More zoo grounds.

Finally no dilapidated public Caribbean space is complete without an artifact from its colonial past. In this case it was an old sign, slowly corroding in the sultry air. It warns zoo-goers not to "stone" or "molest" the animals, or to face prosecution.

I feel genuinely bad for the people running Hope Zoo. No doubt they all love animals and are discouraged by the current state of things, but like everything else in Jamaica their efforts are crippled by a lack of revenue. The whole park speaks of an older period when British bureaucrats made funding decisions for the island, deciding that what Jamaicans needed most was a good dose of British civilization in the heart of their capital. Then after independence a new government is left to pay for the large, foreign artifact. Meanwhile, this new nation then inherits a slew of typical third-world issues such as trade imbalances, government corruption, and IMF debt. Such problems leave basic civic essentials like paved roads and law enforcement underfunded, never mind a late-Victorian park and zoo.

My Stupid Day

A sample of daily Jamaican logistics and their inane complications. Most mornings I travel downtown to their National Library but today I need to finish and email an application to the history department back in MN. Should take an hour or two. This task requires a computer, internet connection, and a desk. Simple right?

Problem: my apartment has a computer and internet, but no desk. Or at least no desk you can actually sit in (see pic.) Not ideal for extended office work. When our apartment was advertised as coming with "2 desks," I had more in mind. Also, you can't buy used chairs in Jamaica (people are too poor to throw furniture away), and the local general store sells new chairs (lo-grade Chinese office diddies) for about $100 US. Too much. Solution: leave my apartment for campus, where the library has comfy chairs and desks galore.

It's about a 20 minute walk to campus, however recently we've been told not to do that if you're carrying a laptop, which I do. Lately thugs from neighboring August Town have been roving into the area, targeting students. During the day they usually don't risk bothering people in the open, but if they see a laptop bag and think they can net a big score...

So you take a cab. Today I was lucky because my upstairs neighbor Satchi was headed to campus. She's a student there, owns a car, said I could catch a ride if I waited until around noon when she left. Score. So in the morning I read part of an archival manifest and did laundry. We have a washing machine but there's a drought here so usually there's no running water (subject of future post). Instead, we have a big cistern which you use to bail buckets, filling the machine by hand. You have to do this at the beginning of the wash, and again for the rinse cycle. Then you hang it out to dry. It's relatively labor intensive. Shortly after I finished hanging the wash, it began to pour.

So Satchi came by and said we should wait until the storm was over, as she didn't want to drive in the rain. Fair enough -- it was coming down in sheets and the streets were underwater. As a typical tropical storm, we expected it to last for ten minutes. It lasted an hour.

Finally around 1pm we left for school. I was starving because I didn't have much food in the house and planned on eating at campus, thinking I would get there long before 1. When I arrived all of the food places were packed. Since it began raining right at noon, my guess is the hungry campus lunch crowd hid in their classrooms and dorms during the storm, coming out en masse right when we arrived. First place I went had a 20-min line. Second place had a 20-min line. I finally ended up at the school cafeteria which only had a 5-min line -- cuz they serve school food.

After that it was near 2pm. To enter the library you have to check your bag, meaning once inside you have to carry your laptop, books,notebooks, power cord, etc. with you by hand. They can't afford an electronic alarm system and don't want people to steal books, hence the bag check. I have a library card, but because I'm a foreigner I have to show my MN state ID and complete a logbook entry every time I enter. Then I found a big comfy desk upstairs to set up shop.

90 minutes later I had finished my revisions. Ready for email. The library has wireless, but you need an account to log on. That account is different from the account you use to enter the library. I have the second, not the first.

Not to worry, the library has a computer lab, with internet. I load my files on a flashdrive and shutdown the laptop. The lab has about 50 computers. Typically about 40 are full, 8 are broken, and if you're lucky there's a couple available. This time, the last remaining computer was missing a track-ball in its mouse. So I find another broken workstation (the second one had a bad monitor) pull that mouses' track-ball, bring it over to the first station, and log in. It takes about 15 min for the computer to recognize me as the school network is overloaded because the majority of the students in the lab are not working on papers, but rather streaming videos or playing computer games, jamming the bandwith. While I wait, I watch the kid next to me play Grand Theft Auto. He's pretty good and shows me some secrets I didn't know.

After plugging in my flashdrive and uploading the grant materials onto my email, I realize there's a third form that I still need from my laptop. So I log off, go back outside, powerup the laptop, transfer the third file to the flashdrive, shutdown, go back to the comp lab, and find a new computer.

Grant application submitted! Still, I didn't sign the application form ... can't via email. I send my dept an email asking if this will be a problem. Probably ... we'll see. Anywhat, now it's almost 5PM and I'm ready to actually start doing research for the day. There's a UWI dissertation from 1995 housed here on eighteenth-century sugar plantation management techniques and I want to look at it. It's in the "special collections" room, which is where they hold their rare materials. It's a small reading room with super cold air conditioning (which can be good or bad, depending on circumstances). After filling out more forms and submitting my card and Minnesota ID again, they give me the book.

A half hour later, I have to pee. All of the bathrooms are permanently closed in the library because of the drought (despite the earlier downpour). So I check the book back in, take my books, notebooks,laptop, etc. out of the library, stand in line to get back my bookbag, put my things in my bag, and walk across campus to the KFC. (Yes, they have a KFC on campus). For some reason the bathroom works there. Then I walk back across campus, stand in line again to return my bookbag to the bag people, get my check card, and go back in the library. Fortunately the same guard woman is working the door as before because I no longer have my card or ID ... the special collections people still have them from when I checked out the dissertation! She lets me in and I go back to work.

Funny thing about KFC: They have both french fries and mashed potatoes, but their meal deal comes with chicken and fries and you cannot sub the potatoes for the fries. You have to order them separately, which would give you fries and potatoes and who wants that. In Barbados if you asked nicely they'd usually let you do the switch even though they weren't supposed to. But people in Jamaica are less helpful and I've tried a couple times without success. In fact, none of their combos come with mashed potatoes. Nor can you buy pieces of chicken a la carte, thereby creating your own combo of chicken and potatoes ... so you're stuck with fries no matter what you do. Why even make the damn potatoes in the first place? The same is true with their corncobs and delicious biscuits, which are also unreasonably hard to acquire given the logistics of their menu. So people eat fries.

Back at the library now reading the dissertation, and I find a cool chart inside. I take the book to the copy machine, which I discover I can't use because my copy card is out of credit, the machine doesn't take cash, and the cashier who turns cash into copycard credit is gone for the day. None of that matters anyway becuse when the librarian sees me she scornfully states that photocopying out of the dissertation collection is forbidden. Any other book is ok, just not the kind of book I happen to be reading.

Finally it's after 8PM and I call it a day. I check in my book, get back my IDs, exit the library, show my books to the exit guard to show I'm not stealing, get outside, wait in line at the bag claim, give my claim number to the bag man, get my bag, fill it up, and head east to the taxi stand.

The taxis at the east stand are called "robot taxis" which means they're very cheap but only travel along a certain route, like a bus. Usually the taxis drop me off a few blocks away from home and I walk the rest of the way, but I'm worried because it's after dark and I have my laptop on me. Problem.

Solution! Further down the route the taxi goes past the supermarket. I'll stop there, do some grocery shopping, and take a regular cab home. Regular cabs are more expensive but on grocery day you suck that cost up anyways, so this way I'll kill 2 birds with one stone. Plus I know one of the cabbies who stages his business out of this supermarket parking lot. He and I worked out a deal where he picks me up on the mornings I go downtown to the above-mentioned National Library.

When I get to the supermarket it's closed, and my cabbie friend is gone. Now I have to spend for a cab and with no groceries as compensation. On the way home I ask the driver when the supermarket closes. "Nine" he says. "But it's 8:45," I respond. "Yah-mon, a sometime close early, um-hm."

So there it is, a day in the life. Now I'm at home, sitting on my bed (not the metal deskchair!), drinking a Red Stripe and trying to forget about my tension headache as I write this to share with you all. The catharsis and alcohol must be working cuz I'm feeling better. Time for bed -- tomorrow is another day.

Sunday Afternoon at the Zoo, pt. 1

I spent the first week staying mostly indoors, only slowly inching out into my new neighborhood bit by bit. But by the sixth day I was restive and fed up with my bunker so I walked to the zoo....

Hope Gardens is one of the few "attractions" in what is otherwise my non-descript suburban neighborhood. It's a large park, built by imperial urban planners in the late 1800s as a place of leisure for the growing city's middle classes. It has a zoo, conservatory, pond, and other parky attractions . As such, it's very similar in size and function St. Paul's Como Park. My Jamaica guidebook, which usually has spot-on descriptions of things, states that "although the gardens have been in steady decline for some decades and are now in somewhat of a sad state,... the spacious lawns and towering palms provide lovely respite from the urban jungle." True.


It was about a forty-five minute walk to the park (I had to find it), and a like amount of time exploring the expansive Hope Gardens before I actually found the zoo (although once here I was also taking time to smell the roses, etc.) Here's a typical shot of one of the park's more scenic sides. Note the Blue Mountains in the back.


Here's some rows of flowers which one can walk through if one feels so inclined.


A nice mahogany tree -- quite big. Note the fella relaxing to the side.

All of this was quite nice, but was merely a prelude to my afternoon's main entertainment of a bona-fide zoo. Again, my guidebook was instrumental in letting me know what to expect:

"The frankly pathetic, ironically named hope zoo, is home to a motly crew of disenchanted monkeys, lions, tropical birds and other unhappy creatures. Visitiors are apt to marvel more at the sad state of the surroundings than at the wonders of the animal kingdom."

Again, the guidebook did not disappoint. Come with me for a tour, not of the animal kingdom, but of what chronic underfunding in a debt-stricken country nets you.

To be Continued...

Ring deh Alarm...

Now that I'm back in the Caribbean, I though it appropriate to resurrect the blog so all you snowbound types up north could stay current.

This time I'm in Kingston, capital of Jamaica and its largest city. Definitely a shift from the tropical tea n' crumpets getup which was Barbados. More it's opposite, in fact.

With a population of about 750k, Kingston's about the size of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined, and one of the Caribbean's largest cities. After Jamaica's independence in the 1960s Kingston's population bloomed as people from all over the island came to find work within the new government's public labor schemes. By the 1970s, Kingston had absorbed many more people than it had work for, culminating in massive joblessness.

Today the unemployment rate for people under 30 hovers around 25%, contributing to expansive ghettos and a crime rate which makes it the #2 murder capital in the western hemisphere (after Port au Prince). Drugs are the main issue for current gangs, although interestingly enough, the gang warfare started in the 1950s and was initially instigated at that time by the newly-independent nation's incipient political parties. More about that in a future post.

Despite all this, Kingston has it's safe, upper sides too. Fortunately, that's where I live!


Here's my home, in the suburb if Ligenea, Kingston's upper east side. (You can click on any pics for larger versions.) The house is owned by a Gale, a biology professor at the University of the West Indies; and her husband Kingsley, a doctor at the Spanishtown hospital. They live here with their 2 kids, dogs, and nanny. In the back are three apartments that they rent out to university students.

I'm on the ground floor. Above me live Satchi, a Japanese girl working on her Masters in Jamaican history, and Nicholas, a Trinidadian undergrad in management. I share the third apt. with my friend Andy, who is a Phd candidate from McGill University in Montreal. Andy and I met in Barbados last summer, and as we both had plans to do comparative research in Jamaica, we decided to team up to make logistics easier.








































Above are pics of the inside, taken about a half hour after I arrived. It's a studio apt, pretty small and spartan, esp. for 2 people! It's a lot like living in a dorms again. But it's only for three weeks, after which Andy's moving a few blocks over to a nicer apt. for the duration of his stay.

Here's the view from my front door. Not the serene sunsets I had in Barbados, but the mountains are nice.

While our residence and neighborhood is safe enough, there constant reminders that we're still in Kingston. Here's the "fence," separating our property from the next. It's about 10 feet high. Note the broken bottles affixed the top.

The backyard of Gale's house is where her kids play. It's protected by razor wire.

Kind of makes you feel like you're in an Iraqi green zone, although after being here a couple weeks I can tell you that it's not as bad as it seems. To the east are more quiet residential suburbs, which continue to the village of Papine and the beginning of the Blue Mountains. To the south is the University, which also quite nice. To the west things start to deteriorate, although the ghettos mentioned above are still a couple miles off. Walking to the store or to campus during the day is no problem. Andy and I still like to be inside by dark, however. Probably the worst thing about it all are all the damn mastiffs and pit-bulls everyone keeps in their yards. They all bark, all night long.