Fun fact: The name Barbados is derived from the Bearded Fig trees once found in abundance on the island.
Fun fact: There are only three known ghosts on the entire island.
Fun fact: Barbados is the birthplace of Rihanna who lived here until the age of 16.
Fun fact: If a beach hustler with a gold tooth asks you if you want to buy a coconut or a seashell, he might mean cocaine or weed.
Fun fact: Bicyclists in Barbados do not wear helmets and shoes appear optional.
Fun fact: You will only see white women, as if in a movie they once saw, jogging on the beach.
Fun fact: Tiger Woods chose to have his wedding in Barbados in 2004.
Fun fact: Chickens roam as freely on the streets of Barbados as squirrels do in Toronto!
Fun fact: It is embarrassing to have your wife pull you to shore from an undertow when you were pretty sure you didn’t need any help at all, especially when cool looking locals playing dominoes were watching.
Fun fact: The people of Barbados have a long ingrained history of Christian principles.
Fun fact: Homosexuality is illegal in Barbados!
Fun fact: Some women in Barbados dress like superheroes– like those who wear capes and control the weather– for church on Sunday.
Fun fact: The middle-aged British women who sun on the beach all prefer reading crime mysteries to any other genre.
Fun fact: Sand crabs are faster and more perceptive than you’d think.
Fun fact: Finding an artificial flower petal washed-up on a gorgeous, dream beach is entirely dislocating.
Fun fact: The Six Million Dollar man is not a cultural reference widely understood by most Bajans.
Fun fact: Women who look like they might have worked at Coyote Ugly back in the day really enjoy the attention of beach hustlers.
Fun fact: Squid are also known as Seacat in Barbados.
Fun fact: Sometimes it is easy to mistake a night diver’s flashlight exploring the water just beneath the surface for sub-aquatic UFO activity.
Fun fact: In Barbados, one drives on the left side of the road, which is easy to forget, especially if you only have your Learner’s Permit.
Fun fact: Sometimes a monkey, as fast as a demon, will dart in front of your car.
Fun fact: Monkeys are not supernatural and can be killed upon impact with your car.
Fun fact: Monkey deaths are very upsetting.
Fun fact: The monkey face is very human and expressive and it is heartbreaking to see a dying one reach out to you with its little monkey hand on the side of a tropical road.
Fun fact: My wife can’t stop crying and I am pretty sure she now hates me.
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Cuba, I guess, was a bitter pill. Our frail efforts at visiting the “Real Cuba” as opposed to the “Tourist Cuba” only served to prove that we don’t like the real Cuba, and neither, of course, do most Cubans. We stayed in three different cities, two of which (Havana and Varaderos) are tourist centres, so the crippled, interior poverty of the country was absent from our experience but only hinted at as we took a cab from city to city, passing by thatched roof homes with working donkeys living on the front porch. Our time there was one guided by hustlers, zombies and dead-eyed bureaucrats. Of course they would hate us, seeing in us only a mythic, superhuman capacity– one that was randomly dealt– to change their circumstances without damaging our own in the least. There’s an obscenity to wanting to have a fine lobster dinner in such a context, a very obvious one, and that tension was everywhere, invisible yet humming. We were billboards from the west– white, covered in corporate logos and sufficiently arrogant as to not know a word of Spanish. You know, I wanted to feel some sense of gratitude for my “charity” but what I felt was resentment and entitlement, which is probably the way that it should be. But in each small moment when we encountered what we hoped was the milk of human kindness or just a native curiosity about another human, it quickly revealed itself to be a prosaic, economic transaction.
The world is unfair in many, many ways.
