Snapshots
of the Caribbean
Part 5:
An Unexpected Snowfall
Monday, it's back to the office again. As an ex-pat, I am
lucky to have a job where I mix with local people most of
the time. My colleagues are on a mission to teach me to
speak the Bajan dialect, and each morning they give me a
'word of the day', while I amuse them with stories of life
in the UK.
On
Tuesday, one of my team has trouble understanding the fact
that I feel cold in our office, where the air-conditioning
has been set to 'Arctic'. "But you're British, you're
used to the cold," he tells me. I try to explain that
we have central heating and we wear warm clothes, but he
is not convinced.
He
also has trouble believing that it ever gets hot in Britain,
and he thinks I am lying when I tell him that last summer
we had several days when the temperature reached 36 degrees
Celsius. I also show them pictures my family emailed me
from the UK in March, when there was an unexpected snowfall.
Most of my
team have never left the Caribbean, and cannot imagine what
snow is like. My descriptions are woefully inadequate.
Friday
afternoon I leave work early to pick up an English friend
from the airport. Unfortunately, we are in rainy season,
and as his plane lands, the heavens open. Like my colleagues,
he has a slightly skewed notion of the weather in a country
thousands of miles from home, and expected non-stop sunshine.
He is disappointed that it is raining, despite me telling
him numerous times that it rains almost every day here.
We
have dinner at a bar near where I live, and I am reminded
how much I take for granted living here, as my visitor is
delighted to be eating freshly-caught fish in the open air,
overlooking the sea.
Part 6: Old
San Juan
