My Life in Barbados: Phase 1 - St. Lawrence Gap

While the word 'awesome' is an apt characterization of my experience in Barbados thus far, I think it fails to express the multitude of emotions involved in an 'awesome' experience. To date, my blog has expressed snippets of particularly fun and memorable experiences, but the big picture is lacking. The first thirty days have been a whirlwind of traveling, learning, working, meeting people, and having fun. I think my experience can best be described in phases, and the first phase I'm going to call the "St. Lawrence Gap Phase."

The St. Lawrence Gap is a one mile stretch of road along the southern coast of Barbados that is the main tourist destination on the island, with plentiful hotels, restaurants, bars, and clubs. I decided that it would be nice to arrive a week before work started and live. I made arrangements to arrive in "the Gap," as it's called.

The 'awesome' part of this week was the feeling of discovery involved in exploring a new country and experiencing the carefree and whimsical nature of travel. Traveling alone can be fun. You meet many interesting people, and you have the alone time necessary to process all the information you're picking up in the foreign place.

 

But being alone quickly gets lonesome. Luckily, I stayed in a cool guesthouse on the main road of the Gap. It's a small cottage with four rooms and a common living and dining area. It had no air conditioning, the fan didn't work and I had to use a mosquito net at night (which I learned the hard way), but I had a great experience hanging out with the people there. There were Manon and Yunel, a French speaking couple from the island Martinique, Ali and Nellie, a young Austrailian couple who had traveled the world all over, Karan and Andrea, Germans who spoke no English, and Rod, an awkward Scottish guy who'd come to Barbados all by himself to watch Cricket matches. It was like being in a nice hostel. I only paid $30 a night.

The cottage. Just 100m from the beach.

One stretch of the Gap right in front of my house.

Rod.

Me and Yunel. We would always go across the street to my favorite bar - the Southern Palms Beach Club. It is right on the beach, always empty because it's the off-peak tourism season, and has a killer two-for-one happy hour for cocktails. Hence we each have two fruity drinks. 

Yunel and Manon offered to take me on a taxi-tour of the island, and Nellie and Ali asked me to join them on a catamaran cruise. However, I elected to explore the capital city, Bridgetown and the nearly town of Oistins

Bridgetown is beautiful in its pictures in Wikipedia. Wikipedia also makes Bridgetown sound like a sprawling metropolis. It is neither beautiful nor sprawling. There wasn't much shopping either, besides jewelry. The best shopping is to be found in strip malls, which I learned later after befriending people with cars.

The harbor in Bridgetown is pretty. All the Wikipedia pictures are of the harbor, of course.

The rest of Bridgetown looks more derelict.

The town of Oistins, meanwhile, isn't really a town, but merely a continuation of the highway that runs along the south coast, with buildings on either side. The highway isn't actually a highway but a narrow two-lane road with aggressive bus drivers. I tried jogging along this road every morning from the Gap to Oistins but stopped after a couple of tries because I feared for my life.

The main attraction in Oistins is the fish fry, where each Friday dozens of vendors gather in a picnic area and fry lots and lots of local fish and serve it with local side dishes, beer, and rum. The local fish would be snapper, kingfish, mahi mahi, marlin, and flying fish. The local beer is Banks, and the local rum Mount Gay Rum. These are served with such staples of Bajan cuisine such as yam pie and macaroni pie. 

I had a plate of each fish besides flying fish and several Banks, and it only cost about $30 USD. When you go to these things by yourself, there isn't much to do besides to keep eating until you can eat no more.

And that is my first week in Barbados in a nutshell. I took it frugal - no long trips, taxis, or expensive watersports. I spent a lot of time watching Euro 2008 and walking around the Gap with my laptop trying to discover a mysterious source of wifi. These are good things because I dropped some serious coin on food, drinks, and activities in the following weeks. By the next Monday when I reported to the Embassy for my first day of work, my face and shoulders were fried, my liver needed a break, and I was almost sick of the beach. I was ready to sit at a desk from 9 to 5.