Bahamas – photos

Am feeling lazy today, so am getting around writing a post by putting up photos instead!

This is lunch as it was prepared on the sailing boat. Ribs, chicken, bread and salad. Excellent! Just what was needed after a hard morning of snorkling.

And it was followed by an afternoon snack of fresh fruit and rum punch. If anyone is going to the Bahamas, I strongly recommend ‘Barefoot Cruises’.

Atlantis from the outside. Truely amazing. Not my style at all – too opulent / obstencious. And it felt odd to be walking around a place where some of the rooms cost US $25,000 per night, after being in meetings all week discussing how many children, young people and families live on under US $1 per day.

Christopher Columbus surveying Nassau Harbour. The first place he landed on by accident in the Americas was one of the Bahamas islands so I guess they should have an impressive statue of him somewhere. This photo was taken with my back to the residence of the Governor General (GG)…

which looks like this. We were wandering around the place as we were having an official reception there. As it was a commonwealth meeting, we were all comparing the residence of the GG in the Bahamas to the houses of the GG in our own countries! Just so you know, Jamaica’s GG has a nicer place…

And I was very impressed by how much the Bahamas love pink! It is the colour of choice for all their public buildings – the Parliament, the GGs residence, hospitals and churches are all pink!

Back from the Bahamas

I’m back in Jamdown – tired, over-worked and sun-burnt!

Bahamas was good – the meetings were long and tiring, but the hosts made up for it with some good parties in the evenings… I have to admit to being very impressed with the Royal Bahamas Defense Force Band – those guys can move a party. However, their best moment was when they were playing music before the start of the official opening ceremony. This is a big ceremony, flags everywhere, people parading around, anthems being played etc. The last piece of music they played before the event began was a version of a song called ‘What Happens in the Party’ which is about how anything that happens in the party, stays in the party – so if you misbehave, no one will know. I am not sure what message they were trying to send to all the delegates!

Nassau felt to me like a smaller version of Georgetown in Cayman – very americanised and first world – not enough potholes or animals wandering around to make me feel like I was still in the Caribbean. And I did laugh lots at the t-shirts on sale with photos of Bob Marley on them and the word ‘Bahamas’ – who were they trying to fool? We had an offical tour one afternoon (by official, I mean heads of delegations in one bus, plebs like me in the other buses, police cars to escort us…) which took us over to Atlantis – I have never been anywhere so OTT in my life – gold figures, carved horse heads everywhere, fake lakes etc. It was truly amazing.

I also managed to get a day off on saturday where I found myself a day out on a sailing boat – bliss. Lots of food, amazing snorkling and good company – a perfect chance to relax and switch off. Moments like that, I love my job! I have now put that photo on my desktop to remind me that I love my job sometimes while I try to clear the backlog that developed in my absence…

My 100th Post!

I am in the process of preparing for my trip to Bahamas – I am filling my MP3 player to keep me amused on the flights so am writing while loading!

I drove home about 9 last night and had to stop at traffic lights. At these traffic lights, there is always a guy sellling his drawings. They are usually very inspid drawings, pictures of streams with colours never seen on this planet, pictures of ‘pretty girls’ (i.e. light brown skin, barbie figure and very long hair) or bad copies of a car he has seen in a magazine somewhere. But yesterday, he had something different on display – a ‘romaniticised’ picture of our Prime Minsiter, Portia Simpson Miller. She had some nice long flowing hair (and while Portia’s hair is always immaculate, it never looks like it would move of its own accord) and she had some very light brown skin!

While I am very pleased that Portia won the Presidential race as I feel it reflected the will of most Jamaicans, I am worried for her. Everyone has these high ideals for her, views of the amazing changes that she will bring about, convinced she will solve crime and poverty. Yet she has no more resources to work with than an other Prime Minister has had and has the same harsh international environment to deal with. I wish her luck.

While sitting here writing this, I have heard a lady walk past my gate. She was calling out at the top of her voice

‘Slippers, $50
Brand name Slippers, $100
Panites, $50.’

(NB – US$1 = JA$65)

I was tempted to go out and look, see if I could find something nice for my trip! But I resisted.

Brief summaries

Life has been busy – that tends to be the case when I am not posting. It also means that lots of things have been going on which would make intersting stories, but unfortunately all I have time for now is some very brief highlights!! I went on a Jamaica Geographical Society trip the other week to the Goat Islands. It actually was more of an ‘expedition’, complete with ancient ruins, smuggling routes, getting lost in a forest, finding our way out with GPS and being rescued by boats. Excellent time was had by all, with the day ending in a fish place with well earnt cold red stripes. Was on retreat this weekend with a group of young people. It was at an all-inclusive hotel complete with ‘authentic jamaican entertainment’, i.e. Peter the Fire Man. Hmmm, always amusing and our young peopel joined in the fun! We also had a session on HIV / AIDS awareness, complete with a fake vagina – never seen one of those before. Next week I’m off to the Bahamas for work which would be great aside from the amount of crap we have to do to get ready for it – I hate paperwork so if I see another claim form for a per diem, I am going to scream. So I had better go and rescue myself from a pile of paper which is attacking me… if you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I’ve drowned!

Tagged!

I’ve been tagged by beaver…

If you have been tagged, you are to come up with 7 qualities of your perfect lover. Do specify the gender. Then list down, and tag, seven other bloggers on their pages. If you’ve been tagged, you need not do this again.

This reminded me of a list I drew up when I was about 17 – in my first year of university. All the girls who lived on my corridor did and list and we stuck them to our doors, hoping that mr perfect would walk along and see them, realise it was him and come on in!

For some strange reason, I still have that list. It is in my shoebox of random papers I keep… so 7 extracts from that!

1. Ethusiastic to travel
2. Must be able to cook (or find good restaurants)
3. Taller than 5ft 6
4. Likes hot weather and beaches
5. Good teeth and broader shoulders
6. Not an American
7. Haircut within the last 3 months.

They all still apply, but here is a more updated list…

1. Intelligent and able to hold a good conversation
2. Interested in the wider world, cares about it and wants to see it
3. Able to deal with me in a bad mood – they never last long but can be bad while they are around
4. Wants children, and realises how completely it would change his life
5. Must have ‘it’ – doesn’t need to be mr gorgeous, but must have something that makes me go mmmmm
6. Must have a steady income – doesn’t need to be loaded but neither do I want to have to support both of us forever
7. Must be willing to try different types of food – I find that men who won’t try food are often closed minded in other ways and don’ have any sense of adventure!

Tag 7 other bloggers… beaver tagged most of the people I’d get!! So, anyone who feels like it, drop me a comment and I’ll tag you!

Cloudy day

I am having a bad mood day. You know one of those days when nothing really is wrong… but nothing seems to be quite right either?

I’ve been asked to go to the Bahamas through work for some big meetings that are going on there. Now that’s really cool – i’ve never been there and it looks that the way flighs work out, we’ll have a free day there at the end to enjoy. However, the accompanying problem is that my Jamaican passport expires… in a month. So I went this morning to try and renew it. And walked into the place and left. There were over 200 hundred people queued outside. They had yet to get in the building! So I turned around and left – I’ll see if I can get it done through the Ministry some how instead…

Then I went to look about my car insurance. In the last year, I have gained a year’s no claims, I have passed the magic age of 25 and my car value has decreased. So I thought my insurance premium would decrease too. Well, yes it did. By less than 5%. Huh??? Tiefs!!!!!!!

On the way back to the office, I decided that I had earnt a frapuchino – there is one place in Kingston that does them really well and it was on the way back from the insurance office. So I tried but could find no parking anywhere near the place.

Then the computers in the office are working against me. The printer is printing everything funny. And the common area keeps crashing.

All in all, not a happy bunny.

And to make it worse, the get over man is off the island so i can’t even go and see him after work and get spoilt!

So now I am sat at my desk, trying to decide on some happy music to listen to – any suggestions?

Lost!

On Friday night, the girls decided to go out. A group of mainly single girls who have taken a decision to be proactive. We’ve realised that we all spend a lot of time complaining about how none of us can find Mr Right (or for several people, even a Mr Right Now would do!), so we made a decision to be more proactive. We all called our male friends and did research – where do guys tend go on a Friday night after work. From our different sources, 4 places kept coming up, so we set out on Friday to find out if this is really the case.

We drove into the first place at around 6pm – Carlos Cafe. Now this place is near lots of offices so we thought it would be a good after work place. I’d also been later in the evening before and hadn’t seen anything exciting! Well, that source was wrong. Not a single person was in the place!

The second place on the list was Christophers so off we went. Now Christophers is somewhere I frequent quite frequently and hadn’t seen anyone in the target age range (hey, we’re looking between 26 – 36, a fairly wide range we thought!) but i thought maybe they were near the back and I was at the front usually…. Well, there was a group of men in that age range, but they were all surrounded by girls about 5 – 10 years younger than us, all slim, brown skinned girls with long curly hair who were giggling aimlessly at their every comment. There was no way we could complete with that!

We decided to miss place number 3 on the list – Peppers. That decision was taken based on the experience we had last time some of us went there. We couldn’t face the overly friendly man again!

So that left place number 4 on the list – Up on the Roof. So we headed up the steps and onto the roof above New Kingston. And into a foreign world. Yes, there were people there. Yes, there were youngish men there. However, not one of them was Jamaican. We appeared to have found the place were all foreigners hang out in the city. And although we have nothing against foreigners, we were hoping for men who intend on being in Jamaica for longer than a 6 month contract.

So that was that. No luck at all. So if anyone out there has any suggestions, please let me know… In the meanwhile, I’ll just continue to enjoy myself with my get over man!