We’re here in Jamaica. First day… this is my view. Sigh. From the balcony of our villa.
Being the nerd I am, I’ve busted out my laptop amid the beautiful sea and greenery that surrounds us. As we speak Sven and Charlie are getting creative, “working out” on the balcony using the furniture. Sven tries out the baby freeze.
Today was devoted to the shock of adjusting from our capitalist work-hard-every-minute mentality to shit-so-breakfast-is-over-what’s-next-oh-yeah-i-guess-how-about-just-relax. A thorough food post to come soon (a lot of local Jamaican goodies already, made by our charming chef on staff, Winston!) But for now, some snapshots of our doings below.
Beach shot! We snorkeled and paddleboarded.
While snorkeling we spotted some spiky little sea urchins on the floor of the ocean. We dove in to fetch them for closer examination, and they were such curious prickly little things! They were a lot smaller out of the water than they appeared on the ocean floor. But the coolest thing was that they were very much alive and moving. Their little spikes were waving back and forth in a very deliberate, pulsating manner. It looked like they were breathing.
Trisha, our butler, told us at breakfast that some Cuban visitors once noted how much money the villa could be making, harvesting and selling these plentiful sea urchins in their Jamaican waters. In fact, one of the Cubans proceeded to pluck a sea urchin out of the waters, cut it open, put a little lemon juice on it and eat it right then and there. The sea urchins look a little scary to eat if you ask me.
Mid-day coffee break by the pool. Local Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, mind you. Em originally planned to set up a tour of the Blue Mountain coffee plantation but the day trip would have been a 5-hour van ride, so we decided against it.
We did some poolside reading later in the day. I’ve been reading J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun – not exactly an appropriate read for the occasion. In fact it’s a terrifying read hehe. It’s a bleak war novel about a little British kid living in Shanghai who gets separated from his parents after the Japanese have attacked the city, his parents and all other Europeans and Americans have been interned into prison camps, and meanwhile rotting Chinese corpses float everywhere in the port area on a day-to-day basis. Basically for this kid, suddenly just being British made him an enemy of the occupying power.
I would get so deep into reading this that I would suddenly look up from the book and become paranoid that I, too, like the protagonist, was sitting here in a totally foreign country, miles and miles away from any port that could take us home if, say, the Venezuelans decided to attack Jamaica haha. But then Scragga, the friendly gardener, would stroll by and wave and point out various flora and fauna around us. And I would be put at ease, and all was well.
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