"I was touch and go there for a little while"

---

Thursday get up, get ready for work.
Go downstairs for breakfast, it's fish. CRAP! I thought we weren't going to have it anymore. Guess not.

Head into work, Rocky is running late (again). He has taken to getting shakes in the morning before he picks us up, and sometimes he's late to get us because he is enjoying his cool refreshing beverage.
Keith and I joke that we're clearly not paying him enough to have him bring us one too.

Get to work and do some internet "research" on recipes for when I get back to the states, furniture for my apartment, re-decorating ideas for my place, and dogs that are available for adoption. At this point in my trip I am a CRAIGSLIST pro - if you have any questions about it, be sure to ask me.

Leave work and wait outside for Rocky. About 10 minutes after he is due to pick us up, another taxi driver yells at us that he was told to take us home today. Rocky was suppose to call and tell us, but never did. [Side note: this is a driver that we have had before, who after taking us home once took to waiting outside of our office and waving us over to his taxi in an effort to take us home - despite the fact that Rocky was there waiting for us - we wonder if this time he’s doing the same thing.] Eehh…either way we want to go home, and Rocky is no where to be found. Hop in this dudes car.

We nearly get into a handful of accidents on the drive home. This guy has a nicer car than Rocky, but the way he drives it will not stay too nice, for much longer. We make it home in record time despite the extra traffic from the holiday weekend. You can sense a bit of excitement in the people out on the street - everyone is ready to party and let loose - I see more people out walking around and more cars on the road than I’ve seen since we’ve been here.

Keith later tells me that he was worried while in the car on the way home… Surprisingly I wasn’t. Accidents are a way of life down here.

We make it home and plan to head over to the market to grab food for breakfast tomorrow and snacks for us to have at Family Fun Day. I get distracted by a movie on TV, and Keith gets sucked into it too. We decide to skip the trip to the market, and go to the Thai/Indian place for dinner tonight instead.

Go to dinner and process our experiences, expectations, and outcomes of the time here in Jamaica.

Come home.
Go to bed early.
Sleep well.

Friday morning I get up early. We have a cab scheduled to come and pick us up from the guesthouse at 6:40am, we are suppose to leave the office in downtown Kingston at “7 am SHARP.” They specifically used the word “sharp” to describe the time the bus was leaving, we were surprised by this, and still assumed that it was highly unlikely.

We get toast, but don’t have time for coffee or anything else. 6:45am the cab arrives as we walk outside. This is a driver that we have not had before, and his car is nicer than the one we had Thursday afternoon. Written on the outside of the car doors, just below the handle is “DON’T SLAM.” As we climb in, the driver apologizes for the exterior of his car, he was recently in a bad accident and is waiting for a check from the insurance to get it fixed.

We get about 5 minutes away from our guesthouse and are stopped at a traffic light. I notice two guys standing on the sidewalk near the corner talking; the streets are relatively empty of pedestrians and other cars. It’s very early, and Emancipation Day. The driver suddenly locks all of the doors. About 15 seconds later I notice someone walking towards our car, it’s not unusual for someone to cross the street where they feel like it, crosswalks don’t always exist here.
Then I notice this someone has instead decided to walk up to my side of the car.
No, wait, my door.
Then he reaches for the handle.
He tries to open it a few times.
No luck, because it was just locked 15 seconds ago.
So he starts knocking on my window - let’s not be confused here, the window is not darkly tinted - it’s not lightly tinted - hell - it’s a crystal clear piece of class with me on the other side with my mobile phone sitting in my lap, my bookbag with my digital camera in it, $2,000 Jamaican Dollars, my ID, and my brand new sneakers that I bought before leaving the states.

I just sit there and look at the dude knocking on my window and trying to open my door.
The driver starts shaking his hand and loudly saying no.

The light turns green, and we drive away.

Hrm.
Weird.
I wasn’t expecting that to happen.
I notice my heart rate didn’t increase.
I wasn’t thinking about how I could tuck and roll out of the car what shoes I was wearing and how fast I could run away - I guess I’m getting used to this whole living in Kingston bit.

We arrive at the office at 6:55am, and get on the bus, we grab the only two seats next to one another that are open. It’s the row directly behind the driver, not much leg room, due to an elevated part of the floor. Turns out “7am SHARP” really means 7:30-7:45-ish. The driver gets mad and wants to leave. They are having issues with everyone not being on the bus and loading the bus. They open the back door of the bus which produces a buzzing noise that can only be described as “the most annoying noise in the entire world.” I’m sitting under the air conditioner vent that 3 minutes into the drive begins to drip consistently.

With the music playing almost as loudly as humanly possible we make about 4 stops at various points to pick up other staff and their families, 1 pee break on the side of the road, and 1 stop to buy fruit from people standing on the side of the road. Now, we are finally set to hit the “open road” - which, as luck would have it is really not open, due to the fact that we got a VERY late start. The stop and go traffic through the mountains prompts one of the women on the bus to ask the driver to drive faster “so that we can get a good spot at the beach” - UMM…LAST I CHECKED THE DRIVER WAS THE ONE THAT WANTED US TO LEAVE ON TIME…AND IT WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THE STAFF THAT MADE US 45 MINUTES LATE…AND NOW YOU WANT HIM TO SPEED ON MOUNTAIN ROADS WITH NO GUARD RAILS FILLED WITH OTHER VEHICLES ON A BUS PACKED WITH 28 PEOPLE…

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WTF!

So about half way through the trip my left leg started aching - due to the weird elevated bit of the floor right infront of our seat. Then my left hip started hurting. I kept shifting every few minutes to try to make the pain go away. By the end of the trip, I came to the conclusion that I dislocated my hip. Very uncomfortable - kids don’t try this at home!

Part of the drive from Kingston to Ocho Rios is called “Furn Gully” its about 8 minutes long, and you drive through this winding road, down in a rainforest/revine/canopy area. There are huge rocks on either side and its covered in growth and furns, the trees make a ceiling over the road. It’s my favorite part of the entire drive…

We make it to Puerto Seco Beach, about half-way between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay on the North side of the island. The parking lot is jammed with buses and people. We wait in line to get inside the park, and get a tent. We spend the rest of the day sitting around, grilling, and eventually eating. Incase you were wondering the hot dogs in Jamaica are different from the hot dogs back in the states. They are pink. You’re probably thinking that hot dogs in the states are sort of pink…and I would have to argue that they are more of a flesh tone. But, the hot dogs here are more of a HOT PINK. It’s unnatural really… Don’t get me wrong, who knows what’s in the hot dogs back home, but at least I can assume its probably meat…here I’m not sure that I can do that, nothing I’ve ever seen before turns HOT PINK when cooked.

There were games for the kids and the adults…turns out the beer drinking contest never happened - but what I now refer to as the “Rum drinking contest” did - which later almost lead to a scuffle between some staff and the people that worked for the park that came to take the tent down later in the day. The head of our office ended up having to de-escalate the situation…yeah…interesting to say the least (Keith missed this part because he had a migraine and was trying to sleep back on the bus.)

It began raining later in the day, around 4:30 and we decided it was time to leave. All of the staff boarded the bus, but the driver was no where to be found. We all sat on the bus for 30 minutes before someone decided to call the driver, that arrived about 15 minutes after that. Keith and I decided he was getting even with us for leaving 45 minutes late this morning.

On the drive back the police were out in full force. They seemed to be hiding around every corner, and were doing random searches of cars. Someone requests that we listen to the radio, because on the entire drive there (about 3 or so hours long) and about an hour on the drive back we have been listening to the same cassette tape - the driver while messing with the radio runs over a dog laying in the road - I decided that it was already dead.
Don’t tell me any different.

We stop part way through the drive at a jerk centre. And then make about 80 stops on the way back to Kingston to drop off some of the staff and their families. We end up getting dropped off at our place too, which makes me very thankful. It’s been a long, long, long day.

Happy Emancipation Day!

---