TriniBlog Day 2

I had a little trouble sleeping last night.

Here's the view out my window...

That's a waterslide that's only open on weekends and national holidays unless you have a group of 75 or more and they will consider opening it during the week. So unless I can find 74 people and TT$ 1,500 (US$ 250), I won't be riding on that.

Hear's the view if I lean off my balcony. I might get a dip in the pool, and I will spend some time in the gym - that sort of peachish red building is the gym.

Lester picked me up this morning and I went to the Voice Outsourcing offices at 9:00 as agreed. There was a wicked downpour, and Jerome got held up. So did Steve. And they had a crisis conference call on a project in Haiti. So we had a brief meeting and did some work. After their conference call, we went to the Woodford Cafe and I had some local food.

I had Pork Stew, corn pie, and Callaloo Soup. The soup is spinach boiled in cocnut milk. And it had a consistency like pudding somehow. I think there was some egg in it or something. And rice with Okra.


Here's (L-R) Me, Jerome, and Steve at lunch.


Then Steve took me here, the customer site. It's a lot like customer sites in the States. Badges and all. A cold server room, and less than ergonomically ideal working conditions for consultants. We did some work, but hit a road block when there were no DBAs there to help us get the data we needed. I did load the new grammar I built and it worked pretty well. Better than what they had before, anyway. I also discovered that a lot of names that were last name, first name were doctors and lawyers and architects. So there might be something we can do with those if we can get the right fields pulled from the database.

Lester pciked me up. I priced steel pan drums. TT $3,200 after haggling for a pretty new one. That's over US$ 500. So nope. Maybe I can find an inexpensive used one somewhere, but Lester says they are hard to come by because for Carnival, every Steel Pan band wants as many people as possible.

Then he took me to the The Hot Shoppe for Roti. It's grubbin'! It's like a burrito but it's got different tastes, and curried potatoes. And the wrap is roti bread - a whole wheat bread, I'm told, but it tasted like it had chick pea or corn meal in it.

Cars here are either really small or really big. There's a Ford Ka. Teeny little thing. Looks kind of like a street legal golf cart. They make a 1.6 liter Jetta- no turbo. Ours is a 2.0 and a little underpowered. They tax you based on engine size here. A lot of Lancers. And a lot of Used cars importaed from Japan (I think because of the laws there about how many miles you can put on an engine). On the big end, I've seen a few Land Cruisers, a couple of Land Rovers, and one old Defender 90. No Hummers. No Ford Expeditions or Lincoln Navigators. The small cars make sense because the roads are narrow. The big cars make sense because some streets are practically off road because of the steep hills and pot holes. Rims are a big deal here. I've seen several cars where I'm sure the rims cost as much as the vehicle. And in addition to alarms, they have these transmission locks that look like the put The Club to shame.

It's a little weird being one of the few white people. It made me a little uncomfortable at first. But people don't seem to be at all racist here. And they had people of African descent working at the Indian Restaurant last night.

I've never seen anyone not Indian in one of those before.

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the ethnic groups are: Indian (South Asian) 40%, African 37.5%, mixed 20.5%, other 1.2%, unspecified 0.8% (2000 census). I guess since I'm Swedish, Spanish, Itallian, and Irish, I'm technically in that 20.5%, but it feels more like I'm in the 1.2%, if not the 0.8%.

I commented to Lester about how the women here are strikingly beautiful and he said, "It's the mix - the mix is good to us."

More tomorrow.

Sis, don't call back - it's four hours ahead here and I'm for bed.