If you want to know about people’s experiences with the recent visa waiver agreement between some Caribbean countries and the EU, check this out. I’m going in September, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on which countries seem to have informed their immigration clerks!

Part 3. This might be a 3-parter; we’ll see.

Barbados is pretty British, and one reflection of that is Bridgetown. I don’t know what it is that the British have against grids, but they seem to hate ‘em. While the Spaniards gave Port of Spain a nice orderly arrangement, in Bridgetown, the streets meet at odd angles and generally seem to lead nowhere in particular. Makes for a more interesting walking (and driving) experience. The picture above shows Broad Steet, the main shopping strip, looking towards Parliament and “National Heroes Square” (formerly known as Trafalgar Square; I told you they were British). Also, The Cave Shepherd in this picture was one of my favourite places in Barbados as a child. I think I really liked the in-store cafeteria.

Part 2 of a series of indefinite length

Back when I would visit Barbados a couple times a year, I feel like you didn’t have to spend half your beach trip asking vendors to leave you alone. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that when I was a kid, we avoided the tourist beaches. Well, don’t tell anyone I told you, but Brownes Beach, pictured above, is just south of the capital, filled with the white sand and turquoise waters of tourism ads, and vendor-free. It’s where I spent many a school vacation years ago, and it continues to be a locals’ beach today. Check it out if you get sick of being offered “ganja” (they are so brazen about it, I swear it must be oregano).

I recently read a quote from someone (I think it was Paul Kedrosky) who called California a Latin American economy in the US. Struck me as quite an insult at the time, and the rating agencies can back me up — Trinidad and Tobago now has a much better credit rating than California.

Part 1 of a til-I-get-bored part series.

This is the Animal Flower Cave, which is along Barbados’ stunning but also dangerous north coast. I remember it being closed for a disconcertingly long time during my childhood, but it appears to be operational these days, complete with admission fees and personal tour guides and the odd sea anemone (from which it got the name – there used to be several).

The “School of Philosophy“, last seen making the odd choice to advertise their “classes” on the NYC subway, apparently runs a primary school in Trinidad. And, apparently, that school is doing well:

A fledgling school that sent its first batch of pupils to the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination this year has achieved tremendous success.

Seven pupils of the Trinidad Renaissance Preparatory School at Vistabella, San Fernando, sat the exam.

All passed for the schools of their choice.

Personally, I find any organization that claims to be all about answering life’s most burning questions to be highly suspect –hence my lapsed Catholicism — and these folks look particularly questionable. They don’t even have paid employees – major red flag in this cynic’s book. Still, you can’t argue with results (unless you pay attention to sample size, of course), and I must say that I found their techniques intriguing:

“We offer swimming, dance, music, karate, Spanish and Sanskrit and homework is done at school in the homework club,” he said.

I’m very big into the idea that our schools would perform a lot better if we made the students spend more time in them, and so the idea of keeping kids around for an extra couple of hours to complete their homework seems appealing indeed.  Probably not the most scalable approach, but certainly worth investigating further.

This is pretty upsetting, though not shocking. If you’re blind or metnally challenged, well, I hope your bank (you have one, right?) is nice enough to accept IOUs. No cash for you! But if you are a legislator who failed to pass a budget, or a prison guard in California’s overbuilt prison system, here, have some cash!

The blind better form a union if they know what’s good for them…

Also, California is officially paying people with IOUs. That’s pretty damn crazy.

Whenever I hear Americans whinging about the rare occasions on which they need to get a visa to go somewhere, I just roll my eyes. They usually think they are going to impress me with their tale of woe dealing with Brazilian bureaucrats, and I end up brusting their bubble by explaining to them that whatever they've told me is basically the same thing the US does to visitors, if they're lucky. Anyway, that came to mind when reading this article about a Trinidadian Muslim organization having a representative from the US embassy at their event yesterday. Specifically, the representative, Len Kusnitz, is told this (all too common) story by an attendee:

One of those who complained of victimisation to Kusnitz yesterday was Farouk Khan, public relations officer of the Trinidad Muslim League (TML).

Khan, a former primary school principal, told Kusnitz that during one of his annual vacation visits to the US in December last year, he and his family, including his 83-year-old mother, were interrogated by US security officials for hours, eventually had their visas revoked, and then, were sent back home.

"It is not my intention to make you uncomfortable; I'm not even begging for my visa back, but I just need to have my good name cleared," Khan said.

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Americans tend to think that all Caribbean islands are pretty much the same – some mix of beaches, cane fields, and money laundering (and associated problems). And while it’s true that there are more similarities than differences, this is a pretty mistaken impression. Despite being from the region, I sometimes slip into the same laziness, but nothing will snap a Trini out of that quicker than a visit to Barbados – and I just got back from a week there, so the differences are at the forefront of my mind right now.

Among West Indians, or at least among Trinis, Barbados has the reputation of being like an anal-retentive roommate. Trinidadians seem to revel in the low-level chaos that characterizes daily life there, but not so in Bimshire. It’s reflected in the uproar over documenting illegal immigrants on the island, which I’ve spoken about before. It’s my understanding that this policy is *very* popular there, even among other (legal) immigrants. Part of it is a desire for documentation, but the more common point made to me during my stay was that Barbados is, frankly, full. Admittedly, Barbados is densely populated, but people there seem convinced that there is just physically no more room at ALL for all these new residents and their “stuff”. Who will keep the schools good and the roads clear and the place clean with all these folks running around? See? It’s like that neat freak college roomie.

The love of order there was also brought home by a minor scandal that erupted during my stay. You probably don’t find Robert’s Rules very exciting reading, so I will be brief – the basic outline is that a former Prime Minister was seen as being slighted by his Opposition party colleagues, and as a result, the Opposition members staged a parliamentary walkout (which is exactly what it sounds like). This walkout was basically treated by the Barbadian media like the nuclear option. Every call-in show* was dominated by the topic for the rest of the week, with people hotly debating the ethics of the walkout, and the potential medium and long-term effects on parliamentary tradition on the island, and would the BLP (the opposition) recover from this kind of behaviour? Meanwhile, in Trinidad, opposition walkouts happen pretty much every other week. I’m not sure they even make the news at this point.

But there are benefits to the anal-retention, and you have to wonder why Trinidad hasn’t followed some of the Barbadian example. The beaches are pristine. Crime has increased on the island, but it’s nothing compared to the gory spectacle that Trinidad’s become. Every student – every single one!! – is entitled to a free university education. And once they decide that they need one, I suspect that they will be able to build a flyover in less than a decade, and won’t act like they launched a space shuttle when it’s done. If I had to choose, I think I still prefer the more bouncy Trini life, but you can’t say a life in Barbados wouldn’t be easier in many ways.

* The radio in Barbados is atrociously bad, unless you love really bad Bajan soca. Hence, I did a lot of listening to call-in shows. If you are fortunate enough to visit the Caribbean, please do listen to a local call-in radio show. It turns out that small island life produces a truly unique breed of call-in show crank. It’s a delight.

Great graphic from the NYT about the decline of the big mall chains (although, are there a lot of Costcos in malls?). (via CR)

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