Faces at the Market

This blog entry will feature some of the people we see at the market every Saturday morning.

Thanks to Sue Ross, our roommate, who took many of the pictures and agreed to share them with us.

This is who everyone in the house calls Norm's grapefruit lady. We call her ''Miss Emilia''. When Norm first met her, she would never speak. She would simply hold up four fingers when asked how much for a mound of grapefruit. Now, she smiles every time she sees us and even keeps the best grapefruit aside for Norm. We gave her a copy of this photo that Sue printed up for us. It brought tears to her eyes.

Many of the vendors bring their kids along on market day. There are alot of cuties like this little girl.

It's not unusual to see women walking around in bright colored curlers. Sometimes, they have matching flip flops.

Mmm. Don't think I want to buy his produce.

This is one of Carl's so called girlfriends. (Carl is another one of our roomates. He's Sue's husband.) There are several women at the market that he's friendly with.

This is one of the more vocal women at the market. She loves to debate the issues of the day. She always has a strong opinion and everyone at the market is sure to hear what she has to say. She sells good quality baskets and placemats, etc... and it's very difficult to get her to lower her prices.

Rasta Man.

Not a face but interesting anyway. These are brooms that are sold at the market.

Rhythm & Spice, it was nice!

Sorry to anyone who has checked the blog lately. We had more company to take care of but we’ve also been busy making plans for next year. We’ve decided to stay a second year so we need to find a new place to live. Our room mates are going back home so we won’t be sharing a big house & the rental costs. We’ve started looking at houses and condos to rent. It’s a challenge to find affordable places that also have a pool. We could find something close to the beach but it gets so hot that it’s nice to be able to take a quick dip in the pool before going to bed.
We’re considering one house without a pool but it’s very close to where we live now and just a five minute walk to the beach. It’s on a hill so the view from the balcony is pretty amazing. It would be the perfect place to watch sunsets.

Our son Deny is leaving home in September to pursue his Masters in quantum computing in Waterloo. So another big challenge for us is to find a place or someone to take care of our two dogs. We’re looking for someone to either take them in, or for someone to rent our house in Dieppe at a cheap rate, in exchange for taking care of the dogs. We might even offer whoever takes them in a free trip to St. Lucia :-)




We made a new discovery this weekend. It was an event called the Rhythm and Spice Festival. It was held at the Pigeon Island Historic site, a park where we often take visitors to see the lovely view from the top of the old British fort.
The event was put on by the Hotel and Tourism Association. It’s an opportunity for the local resorts to showcase what they offer in terms of food and entertainment. The best part was that it was very inexpensive. You could eat a plate of food for 5 EC’s…which is close to 2 dollars Cnd.






Some of the chefs also got to show off their amazing carving techniques.




















The two carvings were at the Sandals kiosque.

One of the resorts was serving red snapper. They’re quite common here but I’ve never seen one this big, already cooked and ready to serve. The choice was amazing. They were serving ribs, corn, conch chowder (which I got for $1 EC a bowl because it was the last bowl) crab cakes, fish cakes, mahi mahi cooked in banana skin or skewered on a piece of sugar cane, chicken & pork brochettes with mango or pumpkin chutney, banana ketchup, fried plantain, mango ice cream, the list goes on and on. We ended up eating several different meals between noon and 7:00 pm and spent very little.












Many of the resorts went out of their way to decorate their booths. One of them even cut dow a papaya tree to add as a decoration. They do tend to grow like weeks here. And there was an amazing display of fruit.






We were treated to a traditional folk dance group, the St. Helen Dancers and several bands played throughout the day. When it got too hot, we walked over to the beach to cool off and to work off an appetite. It was a great event that few of our friends knew about. I guess it pays to listen to the local radio station.

Tete de chien, pas de cochon

The official language in St. Lucia is English but most people speak a form of creole, or patois, especially when they’re talking amongst themselves. We can pick out the odd word here and there but we still can’t follow a conversation.
Here are some of the similarities to French, some of them written phonetically.

Bonjour or hello is bonjou
S’il vous plait or please is sou plait
Pardon or pardon me is padon
Bonsoir or goodnight is bonsway
Hier or yesterday is yeh

The r’s turn into w’s so that
Work or travail is twa-vail
Write or ecrire is eh-kwee

Along with the language come the different accents which can sometimes make it difficult to understand what people are saying. All of this is a preamble to an interesting event that happened recently. We were visiting the Fond D’or Nature Reserve. Fond D’or means valley of gold. It used to be a sugar plantation. Now it’s a nice little park with a beautiful beach. As we entered the park the woman at the front desk told us to watch out for a couple of wild boars. She told us not to worry that they were harmless. We went on our merry way, happily looking out for wild pigs in the woods, as we did the 10 minute trek to the beach. When we returned she was disappointed to learn that we hadn’t seen them so she volunteered to take us to where they usually hang out. We walked for a couple of minutes, turned right at a big tree, and she pointed to what should have been, we thought, wild boars. Well they weren’t. They were wild boas. Boa as in boa constrictor to be exact. Which tourist destination do you know of that has wild boas roaming the property. Needless to say Norm would never have convinced me to go walking had I known there were boa constrictors on the loose. Dewey says I seemed to shrink as soon as I saw the two snakes and tried to make myself as small as possible. Meanwhile, the tour guide was quite amused that we confused boa with boar. Incidentally, the patois expression for boa is tete de chien, dog's head.

This all happened on the trip to the airport on Lou and Dewy’s last day.
We took them to get their boarding passes and then went to lunch at a restaurant in Vieux Fort. It was the same place we took Deny and Catherine to on their last day. It’s called the Old Plantation Yard and it serves traditional meals. The owner handed Norm a promotional pamphlet for the restaurant that they just received that morning. I looked at it quickly and noticed, with surprise, that my picture was in the pamphlet. Norm didn’t believe me at first but sure enough, there’s a picture of me, Deny, Catherine and Jan. A photographer was taking pictures the day we ate there. It was quite the coincidence that the next time we ate there was the same day they got the pamphlet with our picture in it. (The scan is not that clear but we're in the last photo at the bottom. I'm on the left wearing a white top.) The owner came over a few minutes later and said to me, I know you, you look familiar. When I explained that of course, I’m in the pamphlet and that should be good for a free beer, he just smiled and walked away. Oh well, the beer is pretty cheap anyway.

This week was the week of birds at the house. A few months ago, a bird used to come in the house for daily (or even hourly) visits. He would peck away at bananas or other food that was left out, he would land next to me on the couch or perch on the dresser while I watched TV. We were never sure whether it was one bird or several but he or they were well behaved so we didn’t mind so much. Unfortunately, the bird went for cheese in a mouse trap and that’s when we learned he was our only bird, because we didn’t get any bird visits for at least two months. But new birds have since discovered us and we’re having a heck of a time keeping them out of the house. We’ve had doves come in a couple of times and make a huge mess. And we have smaller birds who will around the outside of the house until they find a window with a big enough opening to get in. After closing everything up yesterday and still having to chase them out, we realized they were coming in through a bathroom window upstairs. At one point, both birds were perched on the patio table outside staring at me with twigs in their beaks as if to ask why they couldn’t come in to build their nests. We even had a pair of doves build a nest on a chair on the back patio. I removed the nest yesterday. But I guess I was too late because this morning, there was an egg on the patio floor. I guess once they start, they can’t stop.

Bequia & Beyond

Norm’s two week Easter break is over and that means it’s back to the regular routine of Norm teaching and me blogging, now and then. Yes, life is tough in the Caribbean. Our Sarnia friends Lou and Dewey were here to share the holidays with us. We took them around St. Lucia for the first few days and then headed off on some new adventures to some other Islands.

We flew from St. Lucia to St. Vincent and then took a ferry to the small Island of Bequia.
Lou is a sailor and we just happened to be in Bequia for the Easter Regatta. While it was fun for him to see all the boats he was a little frustrated that he couldn’t sail with them.
Bequia is a tiny Island, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It is 7 square miles with a population of 5-thousand. We walked from one end of the Island to the other, over a two day period. The weather was hot to walk in but there were several refreshing beaches along the way.

We visited a beautiful pottery studio that was built among the ruins of an abandoned sugar mill and finished our walk at a turtle hatchery.
It's run by Orton King, a retired fisherman who has made it his mission to save the hawksbill turtle from extinction. He collects the eggs, hatches them and keeps the turtles in pools for five years, until they are old enough to survive in the ocean. This one is his pet turtle.
http://turtles.bequia.net/

We took a day sale on an old schooner, the “Friendship Rose”. The crew was quick to offer sea sickness pills, ginger all and ginger cookies throughout the morning to prevent people from

getting sea sick. We didn’t take anything and were fine.

Once at the Tobago Cays there was a two hour stop for snorkling or swimming. The pictures don’t do justice to the color of the water. It was really beautiful.

From Bequia, we spent a few nights in St. Vincent. We hired a driver for a day to take us around the Western side of the Island. It's beautiful.

We did a 3 to 4 hour hike to Trinity Falls.
The walk was through a beautiful rainforest with awesome vegetation. Happily no snakes but I’m pretty sure I heard a wild boar grunting.

Our driver then took us to Dark ViewFalls.
We had to walk over a suspension bridge made of long bamboo trunks to get there.

Parts of the Pirates of the Caribbean films were shot in St. Vincent. Our driver was hired to help scout out locations on the Island. They’ve kept part of the sets intact for visitors.

That's just a small sampling of what we did over the two weeks. I'll fill in some more blanks over the next few days. Thanks to Lou for some great photos.