Jamaica

I am in Kingston, Jamaica for 10 days. I am here as a part of my scouting trip/world tour. I am hunting for a new home. I am untethered and very recently too. I suddenly came to a knowing that I am free to roam and do me. Maybe that comes with the 35th birthday. A sudden knowing. A facing of the abyss. A deep, inner knowing that regardless of anything, I can trust fall and I will be just fine.

I am writing this in a cafe, with reggae music playing in the background. Me with my very sweet iced coffee that tastes very slightly burned but a flavour i can work with nonetheless. I am not alone in this cafe, attached to a Hilton chain hotel, Rok hotel, to my immediate right is an Asian-presenting woman and to her right is a Caucasian couple, male and female presenting. Across from us is the Jamaican employee. A trite representation of this country when it comes to really nice spaces. Too expensive for the average Jamaican. Actually too expensive for tourists even, if we were in our home countries, but of course when we are on vacation that all changes right?

I am sitting in this cafe on the Kingston waterfront for two reasons. One, is to finally get past my writer’s block and just share, and two, to pick up a seafood boil plate at a place not too far from here.

Jamaicans are not very different from Ghanaians. The seafood boil place says available from Thursday to Sunday. I went there on Friday and they tell me to try my luck the next day, Saturday at 2pm. A very specific time. Anyway, that’s why i am here waiting. I joke with my friends that food is the one thing that can always be used to lure me to a place i have no business being or to people i have no business being with.

Anyway, the title and an explanation. Once I let my family and friends know I was going to Kingston, there was no end to all the counsel that I not go for my safety. I had to remind them that Accra was sort of supposed to be safer but my new iPhone was stolen from my bedside while I was sleeping in my parents’ home! Which has high walls! And the thief had the effrontery to leave through the gate, which he incidentally left open, as if to send a final fuck you! That let them know my mind wasn’t to be changed. If every time i wanted to leap, I listened to people, there is no way I would have accomplished all I have to date.

Well, I get to Kingston and the first thing I notice is the number of services related to funerals. Headstones, funeral homes, you name it, you got it. It was one of my Uber drivers who explained. He said currently things are calm here but there was a time where there were a lot of gang-related flare ups, with the attendant demand for funerary services. And of course, demand and supply took care of the rest. The coffin shops I saw though were of the boring kind, just plain rectangular boxes. Nothing like the Ghanaian stylistic ones that some people like.

Speaking of my Uber driver, why does this man start telling me how he has four daughters with four different women, who incidentally haven’t been able to have other kids with their new partners. Was that my own encouragement to have a baby with him too. Oh well, on sais jamais. I smile as I write this.

Jamaica was a trip, i mean an LSD trip.

I flew out of Jamaica by way of Montego Bay. Another experience on its own. I rode the Knutsford Express, a bus service that connects all the regions of Jamaica. On our way we passed the beautiful, lush countryside of St. Ann county and I promised myself to return to spend some time there.

Anyway Montego Bay. We get there, and i decide that my lodgings are just, according to google maps, 20 minutes walk away. So of course i decided to walk. Jamaican men serenaded me the entire way. I did enjoy the attention. Old men offered me rides, as did the young Turks. I bantered back and forth as well as I said no. It was all laughter though until I got to a steep hill, the top of which supposedly held my accommodations for the night. By the time i made my way to the top i had promised my ancestors to take exercise seriously and work out regularly as one does. The lodgings was a let down too. How did i do all this work, that hard climb and my reward was not heaven,. The price should have given me some warning. Anyway we live and we learn. Just to give you, my dear reader some idea of how bad the room was, my flight the next day was for 2pm, i checked out at 7am. It was that bad. I promised myself never again. But of course, never say never. Nairobi, Kenya was to come.