History, Culture and Food
On the 6th day of vacation, we
all woke up late, around 10:30, since we woke up early the day
before. The hotel provided us with a fancy breakfast of orange
juice, Jamaican flatbread, and hand cut fruit. It was good, but
different. Emma didn’t like it at all so she spit it up and went
upstairs to her suitcase and got pop tarts and then came back down to the
table. Next, we took our pajamas off and got into casual clothes for
a cultural day at the hotel. The hotel provides Jamaican cooking,
music, and woodcarving lessons. First up on the list was
cooking. We went down to the kitchen where the chef was setting up
for the hour he had with us. First we started to make Jerk
chicken, which is very popular in Jamaica; almost like fried chicken in the
USA. “The seasoning and sauce that we dip the chicken in has to be
just right”, said Chef Lang. While the chicken was cooking, we all
went outside and chopped down coconuts from the trees. We brought
them back into the kitchen and made coconut cups! We put the straws into
all of them and then drank them after taking the chicken out and slicing/eating
it.
Next up
on the schedule was music! We met Kurt by the ocean. He
had a setup of many musical instruments ready for us, such as the drums and
maracas. First he gave us each a drum and taught us the position it
had to be in, which was between our legs. Next, he told us to never
hit the drum with your fingers, and only to hit it will the bottom of your palm
to get a better beat. After we got some rhythms in, Emma’s ADHD kicked in
so she decided to get the maracas and dance around with them and make noise
that went well with our drums beat. We finally made up our own
musical and headed back up to the hotel for woodcarving lessons.
We
saw the carvers carving and headed over there. They let us watch
them a bit, to see how it is done. Lloyd was carving a bear, and
Harry was carving a Jamaican man. We saw their strategies in order
to make them nice and smooth. After this, Emma carved a dog, Emily
carved a turtle, Renee carved a hippo, Shannon carved a foot, and Nicole carved
a bird. They were all really bad, especially Emma’s, even though we
tried our hardest. We learned a lot that day about the culture of Jamaican
and their different lifestyles than ours.
We went up to happy hour at the hotel where we got drinks and chips and salsa. After this we all went for a walk on the beach, except for Emma, because she fell asleep. When we got back it was dark so we woke up Emma and went to our rooms, where we ordered room service for dinner. We ate our Jerk chicken that we made earlier for free and some fruit cabobs. We finished and then watched a movie and all fell asleep in the same room.
