For some reason I'm having major troubles getting motivated to write anything lately, so I'm going to sit here and make myself expound upon the trip to Barbados that Beth and I just returned from tonight, and you'll just have to suffer along with me. If I'd been really organized (and wanted to spend my time on a tropical island sitting at an internet cafe) I could've been logging this info as it happened, but since I decided to spend a few days completely away from the internet, if not the outside world in general, it's now or never to write it all down before I forget everything (like the Worldcon, which just seemed like too much trouble to write about, so I just posted pictures instead).



Beth and I started talking idly a few months ago about going somewhere for our 15th anniversary, and ended up settling on the Caribbean, and finally on Barbados. Our first thought was the Bahamas (specifically the Atlantis resort, as Beth had seen some of it on the Newlyweds show and thought it looked interesting), but some further investigating showed that that wasn't really our type of vacation (i.e. not much to do other than gambling and beach-bumming). As it turned out, they were also pummelled by Hurricane Jeanne this weekend, so it's just as well. Also thought about the Cayman Islands, but again there's not much going on there besides the resorts themselves, and, since Grand Cayman is just a big sandbar in the middle of the sea, no one lived there until 1950 or so, so there's no indigenous culture or anything. This train of thought led to Barbados, which has been populated since the Portuguese stumbled upon it on the way to Brazil 400+ years ago, and while it's pretty well built up, it's not very touristy, at least not in the offseason.



For us Barbados was a great choice, the hotel was fabulous, the beaches were varied, there were lots of little nature-type things to see, there were some good restaurants. But make no mistake, Barbados is not a thriving island paradise, but rather a hot, humid, grubby little place that is perpetually under construction and always looks half finished. Starting with the airport, which boasts pictures of what it plans to look like in the future and plenty of construction barricades but little evidence of anyone actually building anything. And then our hotel, which was at the far end of an area called St. Lawrence Gap on the south coast, which starts out promisingly with some colorful, brightly lit restaurants lined up behind wide sidewalks fashioned by making the road a single lane, looking very festive at night, but the further down you get the more you start to see empty buildings, overgrown lots, hotels with pieces of trees piled up in the parking lot, and sections of road blocked off and torn up for construction but no one in sight working on them. And Bridgetown, the capital, jammed full of people, but with narrow, broken sidewalks, few street signs (signage in general in Barbados doesn't seem to have caught on yet), and a harbor that can only accomodate a few boats at a time. If you're looking for a disneyesque experience, you won't find it here.



But all these things are also part of its charm, and what makes it seem like a real place where people actually live, rather than something manufactured for Americans who feel the need to escape reality for a while. Maybe for that reason, most of the tourists there are from the UK, and they seem to feel right at home even as their lily white skin is being fricasseed in seconds under the tropical sun. While I would suggest there probably is no "real" Aruba, say, or Grand Cayman, and the "real" Jamaica or Haiti isn't a place you'd want to spend any time in or even feel safe in, you can't help but see the real Barbados unless you sequester yourself inside your hotel and don't go out for any reason (which is definitely an option at most resorts). And while, unlike Maui, I wouldn't ever entertain the notion of living there, it's engaging enough and unique enough of a place to make it an interesting experience, and a culture that we were able to directly interact with yet barely scratched the surface of. Not having been to any other islands there, I don't have a frame of reference for it, but my guess from surveying the literature about the rest of the Caribbean is you have islands that are either very tourist-oriented (the afore-mentioned Aruba and Caymans), islands whose residents predominately live in abject squalor such that you couldn't really enjoy yourself at your posh resort (Haiti, Jamaica), islands that are so small or behind the curve that they're basically unspoiled but primitive (Grenada, Nevis, Bonaire, etc.), and islands with a dominant American influence that make them seem like an extension of Florida (Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Virgin Islands). Barbados doesn't really fit any of these categories.



In fact its lack of American influence is maybe what endears it to the Brits but keeps it from being a primary American destination (plus it's almost as far south in the Carribean as you can get). Things like lack of signage, roads that go every which way (not to mention driving on the left), and some fairly lenient natural preservation laws bespeak at least a different attitude than what we're used to here. Most of the literature proclaims the people of Barbados to be the friendliest in the world, but I don't know that I believe that. While most everyone you pass in the street will look you in the eye and say hello, there were still plenty of people in the service industry who were disinterested, sullen, or just plain unhelpful, and while in most places you wouldn't think twice about it, here this flew in the face of their friendly image and made you feel cheated. The general pace of things (which goes for most islands, I would imagine) drives some people crazy, but in general things ran on schedule and started on time. And since Beth and I are anglophiles anyway, the British influence there was part of its appeal.



That's the overview anyway, for a start, let's see if I can get the details of the trip down next before I forget everything.