My best VIP visitor - Justice Clarence Thomas

As loyal readers know in Jordan, the Embassy had LOTS of VIP visitors nearly all of whom were using Jordan as their layover on their way to Baghdad (a subset of VIP visitors had met King Abdullah and Queen Rania somewhere and had taken seriously their invitation"you should come visit Jordan")

Here in Trinidad, while we have had more houseguests (yay!) there are fewer VIPs coming to visit - but last month, I was the control officer for the BEST VIP visit I have ever done - Justice Thomas.

Some visitors are smart and other visitors are kind and Justice Thomas was the rare visitor who was both. I would put Senators Lieberman and Reed in the same smart+nice combination but they are now ranked second and third on my list after Justice Thomas. Justice Thomas gave motivational talks to school kids on the same day that he spoke to judges about framers' intent and the death penalty.

Here are some pictures from the visit. He has promised to come back - I hope he does.

Here is me and the Justice at the Diplomatic Center where we (and by that I mean he with me as the lackey taking notes) met with Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar



Here is an actual picture of me being a notetaker. Here we are at the Tobago House of Assembly meeting with the Chief Secretary Orville London.

Here are me and Dan. The Justice took pictures and chatted with every single member of the Embassy, and as a former maintenance guy and son of a domestic worker he started with our maintenance and janitorial crews.

Dan's Parents Visit.... Fort George

Dan's parents visited for the first two weeks of October and they visited everywhere on Trinidad - Maracas beach, Asa Wright nature center, Petrotrin's wild fowl sanctuary, Caroni swamp and then spent a week on Tobago. One of the last stops was Fort George. This is a hill pretty much overlooking our apartment and the rest of the city. We had never gone because their had been some nasty muggings there right before we arrived in country. But when the security office decided that the site was safe enough to bring a high-level State Department official, we figured it must be safe enough to bring Dan's parents.

The site is mostly a terrific view of Port of Spain and the ability to see both the north and south sides of the islands but it also has this cute station house.

Eid Rum Festival

We suspect that Trinidad is the only country where a Rum Festival would be held on Eid (the holiday that celebrates the end of Ramadan). While we did go to iftars during Ramadan, we opted for the Rum Festival on the Eid holiday.




The first display was angostura art ... this one is a steel pan player

This was the crowd for the free rum drinks...
This was the smaller group listening to the lecture on how rum is made which featured a lot of jokes in the vein of "friends don't let friends drink Barbadian rum" or "I don't know what they make in [insert country name here] but it isn't rum."

Three new beaches on Tobago

Trinidadians and Tobagonians are connoisseurs of beaches with strong opinions about the relative merits of some beaches over another. Nowhere on either island are you more than 30 minutes away from a beach and still when people go on vacation their most common destination is Tobago to go to the beach or Isla Margarita to go to the beach or Miami to go to the beach (and go shopping). We were on Tobago for Labor Day and visited three beaches that we hadn't visited before.

#1 Englishman's Bay - this beach had a very nice picnic pavillion with a swing.





#2 Parlatuvier




#3 Bloody Bay - named for a violent slave revolt that occurred at the site that made the waters red.

Maracas Falls

Also earlier this summer (note: when the weather is high 88 low 72 everyday it is very hard to remember what season it is) - my colleague Stephanie, our Ambassador and I joined the terrific girls from Sophia House, a foster care program, for a hike to Maracas Falls. It is rainy season so we got some rain but it also meant that there were beautiful falls.

Emancipation Day

This holiday was over the summer but I am just posting photos now. Trinidad has a holiday for every religion (Christmas, Diwali, Eid) and every ethnicity (Indian Arrival Day) - hence Emancipation Day. We watched a parade that featured African dancers and drumming, as well as big music trucks blaring soca and little music trucks featuring steel pan - because all events here feature soca and steel pan.

Follow the rules (or not)

Posts here are admittedly few and far between. In Jordan, seeing camels on the side of the road seemed novel every time it happened - which was all the time. Here life seems normal and we're more likely to see friendly street dogs than exotic wildlife.

Trinidad is in many ways a fairly lawless society - there is a large sense of live and let live and universal loathing of the police. Red lights and one-way streets are routinely ignored. Cars park anywhere without fear of citation. Even when breathalyzers were put into use last Carnival for the first time there was widespread moral outrage about entrapment and convictions based on their use are still newsworthy.

In another example of the casual approach to rules: last night we went and had a drink at Drink! Wine Bar and we saw that the lights were on at the nearby cricket oval (note: the cricket oval is owned by a private posh club - this is important to note for the rest of the story). It was a nice night (note: almost all nights are nice) and we thought we'd go get tickets for whatever match it was and watch for a little while. We walked to the ticket office which was oddly closed so we walked back to where we had seen cars driving into a parking lot. We asked the security guards who was playing and how do we buy tickets. The security guards said it was a private soccer event for club members but added, "you look like members - you could just go in if you want." These are the security guards encouraging us to crash the party!

Given such lax security - imagine our surprise then when the movie theatre was a huge stickler about the age requirements. We went to see "The Other Guys" with friends and their two boys - I think they are 13 and 15. The movie was rated 14+ but their parents were with them. The box office didn't want to sell the boys tickets. When we tried cheating by having some else buy the tickets, the box office called the inside ticket takers to make sure that the boys did not enter the theatre. We can think of no other rules here that are so vigorously enforced.

p.s. The Other Guys was good. The Social Network was excellent.

A Summer Week in New York

We spent a week in New York City and upstate New York during our Rest and Recuperation break. "You need a rest break from your assignment to the Caribbean?" you ask?

Here we are on the hottest new attraction in Manhattan: the High Line Park, a grassy walking trail situated on a reclaimed freight rail line 30 feet up in the air, above 10th Ave. Empire State Building is in the background.



Walking through Central Park, between stops at the Museum of Natural History and the Apple Store on Fifth Ave.

Moving up state, and keeping with the re-purposed rail line theme: the Walkway Over the Hudson in Poughkeepsie. This one is 210 feet off the ground, and is billed as the longest pedestrian bridge in the world.


Hyde Park is nearby, the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and site of the first Presidential Library, which was launched by the President himself.

Dan relaxes with Franklin and Eleanor, in happier times

Leatherback Turtles

We have loved seeing the Scarlet Ibises fly across the Caroni swamp and daily watch brown pelicans dive into the ocean but this morning we saw the coolest thing we have seen in a long time. Leatherback turtles laying eggs and heading back to sea.

At 9:00 last night we went out to the beach with a guide who explained that leatherbacks which can grow to 7 feet long and 3 feet wide and 800 pounds lay eggs 8-10 times per season - laying 80 eggs each time in the hopes that one or two will survive to adulthood. The females come onto the beach, dig a deep hole, lay the eggs and then head back to shore.

We watched for a couple hours last night and then I got up at 5:30 this morning to watch the sun rise and to take some pictures. In the daylight there were only a few turtles (and a lot of well-fed egg-eating vultures) but at night they get 300 turtles and at times we were startled that while we were watching on turtle that another had come up to shore right next to us (remember these are the size of overstuffed armchair).

We also saw some hatched baby turtles which were unbelievable cute and had already survived long odds by hatching.

Barbados - not cricket

Last month, I had a work trip to Barbados and our very nice boss said that if she had a work trip to Barbados she'd want to bring her husband and gave Dan the time off. We had a really nice time - Barbados is very pretty and clearly designed for tourists. There was lots to see and we only saw half of what we wanted to (given the time commitment required for cricket). The pretty yellow house above MAY have been the house that George Washington stayed in when he came to Barbados - his only overseas trip. He and his brother came to help his brother's TB. If the movie at the museum is to be believed George Washington would not have amounted to anything had he not learned about agriculture, commerce and culture during his short stay in Barbados. The house was cute though.


Barbados is much smaller than Trinidad (and that is saying something) we were able to circle the island in a day AND see the George Washington exhibit. On the north coast the beach was impregnable cliffs and here on the east (Atlantic) side it was rocky with large boulders.
Our favorite stop was St. Nicholas Abbey - a 17th century Jacobian plantation house that has been renovated and now has a pretty cafe, gardens and a rum distillery. We had a fun talk with the owner's son who was incredulous that we hadn't yet been kidnapped since we live in Trinidad. Nothing we could say about Trinidad would dissuade him of the notion that we should plan on being kidnapped soon.
Cliffs on the north side....

Cricket in Barbados

I admittedly go through hobby-phases - obsessing over learning how to make puff pastry; teaching myself book binding which doesn't come in handy as much as you'd think; and I have cross-stitch projects that can last a decade. Finally Dan and I have a hobby together - trying to figure out cricket. We expect that it will take us the entire time we are in Trinidad and may necessitate tours in other cricket-playing countries (yes this includes England but also includes Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan - thanks to the greatness of empire).

My work trip to Barbados (yes it sounds funny) coincided with the 20/20 World Cup. I think it is safe to say that when you can buy World Cup tickets that weekend that either there is a recession OR 20/20 cricket has not entirely caught on.

As a reminder 20/20 cricket is a type of cricket where each team plays 20 overs each (baseball translation: an over is kind of like a mini-inning although cricket has their own innings - always in the plural)



Our seats for the World Cup were in fact in the party area which featured stiltwalkers. All-you-can-drink Bajan Banks beer and a lot of sun. I never remember to pack hats which is why I purchased this - one of the ugliest hats ever.





The event was held at Barabados' Kensington Oval. Here is me buying tickets on a day with less sun (and no Chester Cheetah). The event was England vs. Australia - England won handily. Earlier in the tournament the Windies had actually beaten England but they won because of the dratted Duckworth Lewis scoring system that determines a winner in the event of rain. No one believes that the Windies are better than England.

We also decided to test our cricket attention span by moving from 20/20 cricket (a 3.5 hour game) on to One Day International (ODI) which is essentially 50/50. We only made it through half so we saw the Windies batting their 50 overs atrociously and we skipped the South Africans batting but heard that South Africa won. The next day at the airport I saw many Windies heading home to Barbados and they seemed a little too jovial given their loss.

Hanuman Murti Hindu Temple

Heading south from Port of Spain, you'll find Chaguanas ("sha-GOH-niss") the de facto capital of East Indian Trinidad. East Indians make up 40% of the country's population, first arriving in 1845 when colonial sugar plantation owners sought labor following the abolition of slavery. Though they initially came as indentured servants, many elected to stay after their indentures had elapsed. Indian Arrival Day is celebrated here every May 30th.



This is the gloriously detailed Dattatreya Yoga Center and Ashram in Chaguanas, which is home to the Hanuman murti, an eight-story tall statue of the Hindu monkey deity.





Prayer flags like these adorn the yards of many Hindu homes. These are near the Waterloo Temple.

April tourist destination - Macqueripe and Tobago

My parents also visited in April. We tried to show off Trinidad including a trip to one of our favorite beaches at Macqueripe. My parents saw monkeys on Trinidad before we had seen them on one of their drives around the island. They showed us the spot so we can now show off red howler monkeys to any new visitors.

Macqueripe....






Monkeys....

Dad on Tobago...