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Eating Flipper
This may appear racist, but our presumption that all Caribbean people are musically gifted was patently wrong. They can be every bit as hideous as most of their paler counterparts and if last night’s effort in the Hercules karaoke bar was anything to go but they can murder a Cindy Lauper song as well as anyone else in the world. Karaoke is only good when done badly and the locals were so splendidly bad it seemed inappropriate to try and compete, although we suspected Fleur’s schoolteacher colleague from Canada was itching to have a go and would be right up there belting out one of those tunes we are rightly unfamiliar with the moment our backs were turned.
Across the road the town was humming, Friday being fish-fry night when tourists and locals from across the island converge on a series of huts-come-restaurants on the beach to eat fresh fish with salad and chips and drink rum punch or beer and generally hang out. There were a few market stalls and a stage where young people do strange things like break dance under a cloud of marijuana smoke but mostly it is a place to socialize and it is quite magical. On one side of us the sea lapped the shore and on the other, reggae music blared accompanied by the smells of fish being cooked. Sacrilegiously, or so we thought, we tucked into plates of flying fish, the Barbadian national emblem, but it turns out these little critters form part of the islanders staple diet. They travel in large schools and, according to the guide book, leap out of the sea and hurtle through the air for distances of about 20 metres at a time at a speed of around 55 kph, their side-fins fan out acting as wings and tail fins as rear-end propellers. We imagine that fishers just sit out at sea with their nets suspended in the air and wait for a passing school to leap suicidally into the trap, and with catches of up to 4,000 a time we thought we might go out with frying pans at the ready and wait for some hapless strays.
But there are not just flying fish on the menu, as well as all other delights including lobster, two of Fleur’s colleagues and one of their friends ate dolphin, or Flipper as we chided them. Others were quick to defend the choice attempting to explain that the dolphin they serve here is not one of the cute talking mammal variety that perform for humans or star on TV shows, but the local name for a fish called Mahi Mahi. But we were having none of that and tried to convince the lovely young Frenchwoman that the vivid red stain that had smeared on her trousers from the freshly painted table was actually the blood from murdered dolphin. One thing is for sure, murdered dolphin blood would be easier to remove than paint and those soiled trousers will remain forever a grim reminder of the perils of eating Flipper.
While the rest of us (us being a group of teachers from Fleur’s school and hangers-on) ordered meals and drink, we were bemused by the Canadian colleague. Not only had she eaten prior to coming out and so didn’t actually dine with the rest of us, she produced from her bag a bottle of liqueur someone had given her, a mixer, then a glass and, believe it or not, her own bag of ice. The wages for teaching in Barbados, she told us, were quite low and the cost of living very high. It made perfect sense but we turned down her offer of a ride home for fear she would want us to push the car to save petrol.
We have already noted how friendly people here are, which in itself is quite remarkable given the island’s history in slavery, but here is a good example. While waiting at the bus stop for our first exploratory trip to Bridgetown, the capital, a car pulled up and the occupants offered us a lift to the bus station at Oistins. From there, they said, we would get a more frequent service than on our rural road. Once at Oistins, one of the women took us over the timetable board and gave us the pointers to make our trip home easier. Then, on the return journey and even after Marty had tried to short-fare the driver, he asked where we were going and dropped us right at the corner of our road. That was the pattern; it seemed the driver would pull up not only at the actual bus stops but also anywhere else en route that a passenger wanted to alight. Nothing was a bother at all as the driver cruised along, tooting the horn and waving to his mates or, it seemed, anyone he vaguely recognized.
We reflected on our bus travels in London where, it seemed, that drivers wouldn’t pull up at scheduled stops if they didn’t feel so inclined, or in Abu Dhabi where the driver would have preferred to remonstrate with a passenger or even throw them from a moving bus rather than interrupt the journey. Life here is very different.