10 Days in Jamaica, 10 Lessons
Published in
3 min readNov 1, 2016
It has been ten days since I flew down to join Kate in beautiful Kingston, Jamaica. Here are some early thoughts and lessons from a brief time in town:
- Jamaica = Banana Paradise. Our first farm share box came last Thursday. As you can see above, it included four different types of bananas including the best bananas in history. Seriously. They tasted like the Platonic Form of bananas with several other tropical fruit tastes rolled into one. Each was like a pina colada in a peel. ZOMG.
- Campari is ubiquitous. The Campari Group is a major player in international booze. They produce Campari here in Jamaica and Campari also owns several rum distilleries in Jamaica. There are Campari billboards everywhere and supermarkets put Campari displays out front (sometimes bundled with a 2L of Ting ← and I really recommend you click through this hyperlink for a nice Jam song).
- If you’re in Portland, get your jellies from Andrew. Andrew sells young coconuts on the highway near Somerset Falls and was the one who recommended the waterfall hike for our hiking group. He’s awesome and his young coconuts (“jellies”) are the best we’ve had so far.
- Fish Escovitch is super tasty. Fish Escovitch is fresh fried snapper with spicy flash-pickled onions and sliced pepper. Delicious. And spicy. Especially the onions.
- Festival(!) is a festival. And the early winner for best-named food goes to Festival. Here’s a recipe. It’s like eating a freshly made corndog and they forgot to put the hotdog inside. Yuuummmm.
- So this is how to eat fresh guava. For those of us that didn’t already know.
- Leave your hat and beer outside the Hash Circle. We will post about this later, but Jamaica has a very active chapter of the Hash House Harriers. Bringing your own beverage or wearing a hat in the Hash Circle seems to be some sort of desecration and the constable may force you to chug more beer.
- If you go to the gym, don’t jump rope right below a ceiling fan. Yeah…the less said about this item the better.
- Apprentice River Guides may have it rough. It is very popular to raft down the Rio Grande in Portland or the Martha Brae near Falmouth. Raft guides know the river, take you on bamboo boats, and receive good pay. Not so much the case for their apprentices. According to some experienced expats, the Apprentice River Guides prep the tour by carrying each raft back from the beach to the headwaters in the Blue Mountains miles inland.
- We live in a Pink Elephant. Embassy-type folks live in the converted Crowne Plaza Hotel in North Kingston. It is known as the “Pink Elephant.” It’s not really too terribly difficult to see why:
