Through Bajan Eyes

One thing that has been quite interesting in some of my travels is how people respond to me as a black person. So far (perhaps I've been lucky), I've not had any really negative experiences, just a few strange ones. The other thing is because I also have dreadlocks, and that seems to add additional exotic impact to my appearance.

Even here in England, I get lots of compliments about my hair. But no experience was more bizarre than in China. I started off in Shanghai, and every where I went I seemed to cause a bit of a stir. I attracted a lot of attention - people staring (blatantly and not even looking away when you catch them), people giggling and pointing etc. Some of the bolder ones came up to me and asked to touch my hair. Some of the not-so-bold ones snuck up behind me and touched/tugged my hair when I wasn't looking. A few asked if they could take my photo and some people wanted to have their photos taken with me.

This all took me quite by surprise. I just wasn’t expecting it. And as a matter of fact, I didn’t even notice until my travel companion pointed it out. Like I said, it’s not particularly negative but it is rather strange – knowing that you are being noticed to that extent. And it becomes tiresome after a while.

But one of the first places I can remember causing a stir about my appearance is in Thailand. I visited a poor rural village in Thailand. I was treated like royalty. Lots of people from the village came out to greet me on my arrival. Special dishes were prepared for me, and I was given the best room in the house to sleep. I was later told that many in the village had never seen a black (of African descent) person before and that I was probably the first to have visited that village. You can read more about this experience here.

Generally, Europeans don’t seem to react much. I guess they’re more used it. There are quite a few blacks in Europe, especially western European with its colonial ties. However, I went snowboarding in Poland one winter and that was probably a bit unusual to some people. I even had one guy wanting to take a photo of me with his son.

Another bizarre incident occurred in Irkutsk, Russia. My friend and I were being shown around the city by a guide. We were in the main public square, and I stopped to take photos of the surroundings and the Tsar Nicholas. There was a wedding party there taking photos to commemorate the occasion. So I tried not my best not to get in the way of the photographer. Suddenly, I became aware that there were people surrounding me so I moved to one side. The group moved with me. Then I realised they were trying to get my attention. They wanted me to be in the wedding photos! So there I was, in my cords and looking shabby, next to the smartly dressed couple, in the wedding photos. Then I was given champagne and invited to the reception. I didn’t go.

I’ve also had minor incidences in Mongolia where, instead of watching the soldiers march, the kids were busy looking at me. And where a woman walked up behind me and pulled my hair. I had people requesting photos in Moscow . . . in Red Square.

Sometimes I think I could charge money. . . Hmmm, might help offset the cost of the holiday.

I've noticed some similarities between foods that come from diverse cultures. At a Uzbekistani restaurant I ate some thing called 'plov'. Plov was basically what we in Barbados would call 'pelau' and other places would call 'pilaf'. You take rice, meat and vegetables and you cook them in the same pot.

I also had some soup in Siberia that was nearly like Bajan soup – there was mutton, potatoes, carrots and other vegetables. The only thing missing was the dumplings.

I find that all across the tropics, you find similar fruit and vegetables. Some are exactly the same as we would find in the Caribbean. For example in Thailand you get guavas and mangoes and tamarinds. Judging from the different cultural events I've attended here in the UK, you get things like plantain, yam, sweet potato and cassava, in many different places. Actually I've noticed a similarity in cuisine within many parts of the African Diaspora.

Some fruit and veg are similar, not quite the same and you know that there has got to be some relationship. For example there is a variety of tamarind in Thailand that is sweet. And another related fruit called 'look yee' (photo below) - it's like a tamarind but the shell is dark. Then there are fruits like rambutan (photo to left) and lychees, which are similar in form to what we Bajans call ackees. I ate so many rambutans that it became my nickname. There is also a fruit called Durian (renowned for it's smell), and another one called Jackfruit, which have just got to be family to the soursop and/or sugar apple.

When I was in China, I came across some fruit that looked a bit like dunks. So I signed to the shopkeeper (cause I don't speak Chinese) that I wanted to try one. The flesh was very much like the flesh on a dunk, but it wasn't as tart. And the seed was a different shape from a dunk seed. I just know that whatever it was called, it had to be family to dunks. I bought some and, just like dunks, two to three days later, they started to go a bit 'pappy'.

Here in England, I have friends from many different nationalities. And every now and again we like to have a dinner party where we each bring a dish from our native land. At the last one we had dishes from Barbados, China, Colombia, Croatia, Italy, England, Romania, Scotland, Uzbekistan, Wales and Zimbabwe. So even when I'm not travelling, I still get to enjoy my international cuisine.

I like my belly bad. I love to partake of local cuisine when I travel.

For me food is a major part of the travel experience. I love to sample the local delicacies when I visit a place. And I’m not satisfied to just eat in tourist-trap restaurants which serve sterilised version of local cuisine. I want it cooked up in the traditional way – even if that means it was cooked on a few rocks in someone’s back yard. Restaurant fare often differs from home-cooked food. It’s too sophisticated. I prefer what I like to call ‘folk food’. I.e. what the people prepare and eat in their homes, far from the tourist trail.

So to this end, I will buy food from roadside vendors; old women with baskets and I especially love if I’m invited to someone’s home for an old-fashioned, home-cooked meal. This has provided me with some memorable culinary experiences. For the most part these have been quite good, but there have been one or two incidences that I’ve chalked up to experience though.

Some of my best culinary experiences were in Thailand. There, I was staying with a friend who lived with local Thai women. One of these women, Kung, cooked for us and was also able to take me to some of the more 'local' restaurants and food establishments. Spice food is extremely spicy, so it was good to have some local knowledge as to which dishes were hotter.

My favourite Thai restaurant was at Laem Hin. It was part fish-farm, part restaurant. You can only get to the restaurant by boat and the fish is caught fresh from the fish pens that are actually part of the restaurant.

Another Thai experience that I remember fondly was when I visited a small village near Surat Thani (read more about that here). The women of household I was staying with, prepared for me traditional Thai dishes. This was a fantastic experience even though some of the dishes were too 'spicy' for me.

I love trying new foods. Some of the 'stranger' things I've eaten were reindeer and moose meat in Norway, along with lungemos (which is similar to chitterlings, I've been told). I also drank horse milk and ate the cheese made from it in Mongolia. In China, I ate cuttlefish and things that I still don't know what it was (and I'm probably better of not knowing).

Some tips that I use in deciding what to try:

1.If it looks strange and smells bad, don’t eat it.
2.If a restaurant seems popular with locals, then it’s probably worth a try.
3.Take tips from locals – ask them to recommend things or if something is good.

Most of the time, I've enjoyed my new foods. But there have been things that I thought were horrible . . . and things that actually made me ill. But that won't deter me. When I travel, the food is a very important part of the culture and so I will continue to indulge in 'folk food' wherever I go.

Travelling around the world on a Barbadian passport can be quite an interesting experience in itself. What will happen at that first point of contact . . . where you hear those magic words “Passport, please!”

Visas!

First things first, you’ll need a visa to go quite a few places. The procedures for obtaining visas can vary from consulate to consulate. Some are dead easy – fill in a form, send off your passport and they’ll stamp a visa and send it back within 2-3 days. Others require you to book your whole holiday (flights and accommodation) first before they will grant a visa. This can prove to be painful if they then decline your application, as you’ll probably lose some money in the process.

Flights and visa fees aren’t usually refundable. Some consulates allow you to apply by post, others let you use an agency, and some insist that you have to be interviewed in person. Even the validation period of the visa can vary a lot. Some visas last only as long as your holiday. Some visas can last up to 10 years and allow multiple entries into that country. In the UK, nearly all of them will involve calling a premium-rate number and you paying £1.50 a minute to make an appointment.

So you’ve got your visa and everything is in order and so you hop on that plane excited to be visiting a new destination. The fun is about to begin. For me it begins at the immigration/passport control desk. It will usually take me much longer than anyone else on the aeroplane to get past this point. I’m considering getting a t-shirt printed which says, at the back “Choose another queue. This queue may seem short now, but I’ll be at that desk for a while”. Despite my many experiences though, none of them have ever been particularly negative – just a bit slow and I do get restless sometimes.

The Airport

I usually try to learn the basic greeting in the native language of the country. I step forward, with my fingers marking two pages in the passport – the one with the visa and the one with the photo and information. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible. I say “Good day” in a cheery voice and I smile. I try to keep this smile on my face as long as possible. It usually starts to hurt after about five minutes, but I keep it there. Actually, I practice this beforehand as part of my holiday preparation. Smile in the mirror for up to half an hour at a time – start off with five minutes and gradually increase it. Make sure it’s a genuine-looking smile. The beaming ones hurt more and are harder to keep anyway. Immigration people are trained not to show emotion so this is always an unreturned smile.

Now in most of Western Europe and the Americas this is pretty straightforward. They’ll take the passport; look at the country on the front; look at the information; look at the visa; ask a few questions; apply a few stamps; and you’re in.

But in other places, the Barbadian traffic is a little less frequent, so the procedure is a bit different. I’ll hand over the passport and a couple of things will cross my mind at this point. Have they heard of Barbados? I’m aware that Barbados is a very small country and doesn’t always feature on standard-scale world maps. So it wouldn’t surprise me if half the world hasn’t heard of the place. So it has crossed my mind to perhaps travel with an atlas.

No matter how long I’ve stood there, I try not to ever let my eye roll up to the top of my head (it’s a struggle). I never sigh. I never look pissed off. And most importantly, I never let my smile drop for more than a nano-second. Always make eye-contact as much as possible.

You see, this is the most vulnerable part of any journey. One false move, the officer might be having a bad day, the slightest thing and, visa or no visa, they can refuse you entry. This has never happened to me but I imagine it would be very heartbreaking indeed.

My Experiences

Let me tell you about some of my experiences:

On the border from China (read more about my chinese experience) into Mongolia, I was keen to be on the train when they changed the bogeys. The passports were collected from the passengers and processed en masse, so when they'd returned my travel companion and I took the opportunity to go to the shop in the terminal, knowing that we had a few minutes before the train went to the workshop.

So having been in the shop, we were headed back to the train when one of the passport control officers stopped us. She asked to see my passport (not my friend's); she looked at it, then called her colleague over to see. After a minute or two scrutinising it, she handed it back to me and the two of them went off. No big deal . . . except the train drove off and we didn't get to see the bogey training.

Only two things could've made her detain me (for no reason): 1. My 'unusual appearance' - they don't get too many black (with dreadlocks) people at that border; and 2. my unusual passport!!!

Another experience which happened only a week or so after the chinese one, was when I was trying to leave Russia to go back to the UK. Pass the airline check-in, pass the security checks and we've reached passport control. I walked up to the desk and handed the lady my passport. She looked at it. 5 minutes later, she was still looking at it. Then she called her colleague - they looked at it. Then she told me wait to one side while she checked everyone else in the queue. Then she left her booth and went somewhere with my passport. 5 minutes later she came back, stamped the passport, gave it back to me and I had to run to catch my plane.

I can only conclude that it was the passport. She'd never seen one before. So she just had to be certain it was all above board, right?

Well in my mind, passport control officers play a game. You score points according to how unusual a passport is. For example an Uzbekistani passpot might be common in Moscow (and score onlny 1 point), whereas it would be rare in Port of Spain (and score many more points).

I can only conclude that my Russian agent hit the 'jackpot' on the day that I walked up and she had to make sure she had enough witnesses to verify her claim!!

A Barbadian at a China-Mongolia border crossing is a strange occurrence. It is almost as strange as a Barbadian on a train full of Mongolian traders trying to cross the border from Mongolia into Russia. Many things cross your mind - Have these people heard of Barbados? Do they know that such a country exists?
What about in places not quite so far-fetched?

The entries in this blog are based on my experiences travelling in various parts of the world. . . with a slightly humorous slant.

I have a great passion for travel and have visited about 25 different countries (Europe, Asia and the Americas) with plans to visit as many more as I can. I am literally on a mission to see the whole world. I take the opportunity to mingle with local people as much as possible and experience the real culture and cuisine and not just the ‘tourist-trail’ versions.

For these reasons I believe that I can give a perspective on people and things that you wouldn’t find in standard guidebooks.