For Strategic Sheep Purposes

[Journal Entry 2/13/08]:

My first impression of Barbados was that it was obvious that this place was once a British outpost. They still drive on the left of the road, and the locals have an accent that is clearly the 'Queen's Eeeeeenglish.' My first thoughts were that I would bet that they would have been as reluctant to give up Barbados was they were the Falkland Islands. However, the sad reality of being a former British Colony is the obvious divisions by race. Knowing that the British historically exploited the local people (in this case the native people of Barbados have basically been wiped out), and brought is thousands of slaves to serve their exploits.

If that doesn't make it clear enough, then this should: The moment we stepped out of the airport it became crystal clear as soon as we tried to hail a cab. When we attempted to hail the first cab (a 4 door sedan), the guy passed us off immediately hoping to get a better fare from the white family behind us with their 3 kids. It didn't seem to me that there was much room in the guy's car for the 5 of them and their stuff, versus the two of us, and our stuff. Instead, it didn't make sense that we ended up with the station wagon, and all of them ended up in the sedan. *sigh* The drivers were so much more obliging to serve the white family than us, and passed us one to the other until we could find someone who was willing to take us the 5 miles to our hotel for the night.

In the morning, we were taken by taxi to our apartment where we'll be staying for the duration. We stopped by the Silver Sands hotel/resort and ate breakfast at their buffet. While it was a pretty expensive breakfast, it was really fantastic. Not only did they have fresh watermelon, pineapple, bananas, canteloupe, and fried fried potatoes that you can see above, but they also had some pretty fantastic omelettes being prepared fresh for patrons, as well as hot tea and coffee, and some pretty awesome juices. I went with the pinapple coconut juice, and topped it off with a bit of orange juice. Talk about fantastic! You can also see from this picture that we were given an entire basket of toast. Little did they know how much Brian loves toast. Let's just say there was much more than a dent in the basket pictured above when we finished.

While enjoying our food, we even had a little friend join us in the open-air restaurant

One of the best things that we got to eat was Bajan Sweet Bread. At first, I only grabbed one slice, judging it only by how it looked, and it did look pretty dubious. It looked kind of like thickly sliced, stale toast bread. Hmmm...I almost didn't taste it at all. I couldn't have been more wrong. At the end of our meal, Brian asked me if I had tasted it it, and I offered him 2/3 of my slice. Once I tasted it, however, I wished that I'd kept it all to myself. I went in search of more, but by the time we were finishing up, the buffet was closed, and they'd taken it away. I savored the small bit with my hot tea (thankfully ours didn't have any raisins or other fruit). Perfection!