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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
