The Conical Glass: Today: I buy a thousand-dollar skirt

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Today: I buy a thousand-dollar skirt

It's about 9 PM, and our housemates here in Jamaica are still not back from Negril -- if they go out dancing again, who knows when they'll be home. Most of them had a fabulous time at Margaritaville last night -- four came home at 3 AM. It's funny, even when I was in my 20s, I hated going dancing. I'd go see live music if I was interested in a band, but going to a disco? No way! It sounds like this is a great place for those who do enjoy nightlife, though. I'm already about 2/3 of book #3 (Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason). Reading mysteries -- that's my idea of a fun evening!

Joe & I walked down to Half Moon again and had a late lunch there to give our wonderful staff here a bit of a break on the cooking. It was pretty good, but I suspect that what Patrick (his aunt owns the house) told us is true -- the best food on the island is here. I think I could definitely adjust to having a personal chef. Anyway, Half Moon is so vast that we hardly saw anyone else walking along -- folks sped past in personal golf carts, marked with their suite number. It's probably about a mile from the entrance nearest us to the shopping village. By the time we finally got back to the house, we were both sweating like crazy, so we went in the pool. I only go in a pool about every other year, so you know it must be really hot. Right now, Joe is watching the A's vs. the Cleveland Indians in espanol on some Spanish channel. Who knew that you could see the A's play this far from home? (Drat -- they lost!)

One thing that really amuses me about Jamaica is the local currency. One US dollar is worth about 68 Jamaican dollars. One of the bottles of wine we had last night had a price tag of about $500 on it. We bought a couple postcards yesterday with American money and got a $30 coin back in change.

The biggest reason I didn't want to go to Negril was to avoid the hustlers who are continually approaching tourists and trying to sell them goods & services -- I had enough of that in Cancun, and found it really uncomfortable. We have gotten a little bit of that here, though; a local woman, who seems to be friends with one of the staff here, visited the house yesterday with a suitcase full of jewelry, straw bags, etc. She also offered to custom make dresses, skirts or shirts for us. We were on our way down to Half Moon yesterday while everyone else was looking at her wares, but she came back today when I was the only one around, with all the stuff people had ordered. I couldn't believe that she'd managed to turn around the order that quickly, but the clothing was really nice, so I wound up ordering a skirt. It was only $15 (that's a thousand-dollar item in Jamaican dollars!). The unemployment rate is so high here, I figure this young woman is probably employing at least a few local seamstresses to make the things she sells so I'm happy to do some small part for the local economy. I just don't want to feel taken advantage of.

Here's a pic of the house where we're staying:

house

I realize I'm not going to get a lot of sympathy about my reluctance to come here. I'm feeling a little better about it today.

I think our housemates want to go rafting tomorrow. I'm sure I'll pass that up, too, because I am the least adventurous person ever. At least I still have five books to read. Maybe I'll even go in the pool again.

posted by 125records @ 6:49 PM

1 Comments:

At 10:22 PM, neal said…

Even being taken advantage of in a place like Jamaica is not being taken advantage of. If you are charged $15 for a $10 skirt that would cost you $40 back home, what did you lose?