Speightstown

Yesterday Nora and I traveled north to visit Speightstown, a place I had yet to go to in my 2+ months living here.  Speightstown is the main town in the north of the island and was originally created to give planters in the north a place to offload their sugar for transport to the main port in Bridgetown.  Before automobiles and paved roads, the shoddy road system meant that traveling from the Speightstown area to the main port in Bridgetown could take an entire day (sometimes it seems like not much has changed in this regard).  Thus planters would smiply load their cargo onto boats in Speightstown which woud then bring it to the main ships in Bridgetown for export to England.  This is no longer done today because 1) traveling by car/truck is a lot faster nowadays and 2) because there are only two sugar factories left on the island.  Today, Speightstown's main industry is tourism, which Nora and I had a small sample of for the day.

We visited two places during our time in Speightstown.  The first was Arlington House Museum, which is a restored 17th century mansion located in the center of town.  It is an interactive museum with three floors of exibits on old Speightstown, plantation life, and life on the old Speightstown jetties.  It was a nice museum but the content was pretty basic.  I could see how tourists would find it informative, but even after living here for only two months I found most of the information rote.  Still, I did learn a few things about Speightstown I did not know and many of the interactive exhibits were fun.  One example was a scale which first weighed you (allowing me to confirm that I have lost about 10 pounds since being here) and then told you how much you would be worth in the 1700s if you were a bag of sugar instead of a human being.  Turns out I'm worth about 70 cents.  Nora is an even better deal, costing only 56 cents.

The second place we visited was the Gallery of Caribbean Art, which features  and sells paintings, pottery, and photographs by Caribbean artists.  We saw lots of really cool pieces of art and both agreed that if we were excentic billionaires we would have taken home a couple paintings each.  The exhibit on display was "Bygone Barbados" and it was interesting to see what Barbados was like generations ago, as depicted through the eyes of older generation artists.  One common theme was the use of vibrant colors, such as a bright orange sky or deep red shutters on a chattel house. 

We left Speightstown around 2:45pm because the place we had wanted to go to lunch had run out of food by that point.  Improvising, we decided to head south to Mullin's Beach, where we proceeded to have a nice lunch of fried flying fish sandwiches, french fries, and diet cokes while looking out over the Caribbean sea.  The sandwiches were delicious (first time I've had fried flying fish) and dining next to the water was a nice treat.  Unfortunately after luch we were only able to spend a couple minutes on the beach since I had to get home to prepare for my 5pm class.

The best part of going to class was getting to come home at 8:30 and find that Nora had already made dinner!  She cooked up some shrimp scampi over gnocchi with cauliflower on the side.  It was very tasty.  I wish I could find such delicious treats waiting for me every time I came home from class.

Today we slept late and stayed in the apartment in order to conserve energy for going out later tonight.  We are planning to go to Oistins for the fish fry and then perhaps St. Lawrence Gap for some nightlife.  I'll let you all know how that goes in another post.