Christmas in Tobago

Hello Everyone,

We had a fantastic Christmas in Tobago this year with the Dickson clan. Stu's parents, aunt, sister and brother-in-law (yes Kate is writing this blog...don't be too shocked) arrived the Friday evening before Christmas. We had one quick tour of Port of Spain on the Saturday and then off to Tobago on Sunday. The boys and Marie-Louise (Stu's Aunt) flew over and the women took the ferry. This was an adventure. I was still nauseous from morning sickness and both Heather and Sarah get sea sick. We made it over unscathed...barely.

We did a lot of relaxing, reading, swimming in both the pool and ocean, played some scrabble and went on a few walks. I will let the pictures do the rest of the explaining.

Christmas morning....Santa Arrived

In case you're wondering about the shirts we're all wearing, they were a surprise from George and the logo on them was:

Christmas cocktail time:

Christmas Dinner

A trip to a local waterfall

The boys went wind serfing...

...while the girls relaxed on the beach.

A walk through the mangrove

A full day boat tour which took us to a great beach, went snorkeling and had a bbq lunch of fresh fish and other local dishes.

A relaxing walk along the beach at the Hilton.

A drive to Englishman's bay -another great beach.

A steelpan band at "Sunday School":

New Year's Eve (or Ole Years as they call it here):

One final sunset:

Finlay Family Visit

On November 21st, Bob and El arrived in T&T for a visit, followed by Jenn on the 26th. It was great to see them and share our new life with them. Their visit included some touring around Port of Spain, a couple of games of golf for Bob, a (rather loud!) Parang party, lots of chats, nice dinners and another visit (for Katie) to Tobago.

Here is Kate and El at the lookout by Maracas Beach - the closest beach to POS and arguably the most popular beach in Trinidad. Although they went during the week, so it wasn't too busy. But it was still a beautiful day on the beach!

Enjoying a nice dinner at our house:

The Finlay foursome at our favourite restaurant, Paprika:

The Finlay's went to Tobago on Thursday and Stu joined them on Friday night. This was the Villa we rented for the weekend. There were a couple more nice meals out on that nice big patio.

That's Jenny and Katie in the blue waters of Tobago. They had lots of time to catch up and it was nice for Kate (and Stu) to catch up on the pregnany and to meet Lilly. Although she was only the size of a spagetti squash, it was nice to get to know her!

The Finlay ladies on the way to Englishmen's Bay..... Eleanor, I know that this picture must seem a world away now that you're under a couple of feet of snow. You're welcome back anytime!!

Kate and I both really enjoyed having you guys down here. Thanks for coming and hopefully we'll see you again down in the warm climate of Trinidad!

Visitors and Tobago

Tobago has been a common theme lately - Kate was there with her friends Nat and Tara, we were there with the Finlay family (another post to come shortly), and we're getting ready to spend Christmas over there with the Dickson clan.

Nat and Tara were down from November 10th to the 18th and we had a great time with them. There was lots of nice dinners, some partying (we had to check out the clubs here in Port of Spain!) and general exploring of both Trinidad and Tobago.

Here we were enjoying some wine and appy's at a nice wine bar here in Port of Spain called More Vino:

Here are the ladies enjoying the Nylon Pool near the world famous Bucco Reef in Tobago:

Another beach the girls enjoyed in Tobago:

We also did a tour of the Caroni swamp. I know what you're thinking, this isn't the kind've place that Kate, Nat and TP would hang out in, but it was quite impressive. Any ornithologists out there would really enjoy this place.

We saw hundreds, if not thousands of birds. They all spend the day over in Venezula and then come back to this swamp to sleep. There were primarily two types of birds that we saw, the Scarlet Ibis and the Egrett. The Scarlett Ibis is the national bird of T&T and is a stunning colour of red.

I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see it over the net, but it was absolutely amazing how many birds are nesting in the trees on the island. In the 30 minutes we were waiting and watching, there were at least 500 birds that came to nest.

On the last weekend that the girls were here we also went to a Pan Yard to see some Parang and steel pan music. Parang is a type of music that is performed here around Christmas time by a small group consisting of voices and very basic instruments (like the bass box!).

Below is the steel band that we saw:

It was great to have Natty and TP down for the week as our first visitors all the way from Canada. Thanks for coming, guys. Sorry you had to go back to the cold weather! In case you're wondering, it's still about 28 degrees here - everyday!!

St.Lucia

Since it started getting cold back home in Canada, we've had a few visitors down, so I haven't been able to get to our blog as regularly as I'd like. My apologies.

Back at the end of October we went up to the beautiful island of St. Lucia for a weekend. We had heard really great things about the island so we wanted to go. We'd also heard about a fun festival that was being organized by a friend of ours from here in T&T - The Second Annual Food and Rum Festival. So we decided to go over that weekend seeing as we like food and we like Rum!

St. Lucia is a really beautiful island. It is the second island we've been to (the first being Grenada) and we enjoyed it much more. Not sure if the weather played a part (we were in Grenada for Tropical Storm Felix!) or the festival, but it was really very nice.

There is a lot of development going on there - and a lot of high end developments - and it's clear to see why!

I'm going to let the pictures tell most of the story, but quickly our weekend consisted of:

• An afternoon boat cruise sponsored by Appleton's rum which included lots of Jamaican rum, a great lunch at a nice resort and a viewing of the Piton's - two large spikey peaks - the island was formed from volcanic activity.


• A wonderful dinner at a very fancy resort, cooked by Art Smith (Oprah's ex personal chef)
• An afternoon tasting rums from all over the world and a nice dinner with friends from here on T&T that were also in St Lucia


• A day on the beach


• A hike up a hill to an old fort


• Exploring the capital city, Castries (not very exciting, actually!)

And now for some pics....

The Pitons:

Rodney Bay:

This was where we waited for our flight, after checking in!

New Office.....and a 7.3 Quake!

I think I told you earlier that we were moving our office to one of the newest, tallest buildings in Port of Spain. Well my group moved about a month or so ago. Although we don't yet have cubicles, proper desks or telephones with an outside line, it is a big improvement. The telephone line is supposed to come any day and proper desks and cubicle furniture should be here early in the new year.

Check out my old office (that I shared with Raul) ....

And now the new one......

Quite an improvement, wouldn't you say?! This is the view from my "desk".

We are on the 20th floor of the building so we have a great view of the entire city of Port of Spain. Of course, this also made for an interesting experience last Thursday when we experienced the largest earthquake ever recorded in the eastern caribbean. It was a 7.3 on the Richter scale and was centered deep below the French island of Martinique. This island is quite a way north of us, so it was pretty widespread being felt on most of the islands.

There was no significant damage here in Trinidad, but it was quite a traumatic experience being 20 floors up. The entire building was shaking for about a minute or so, and then it went for a big enough sway to open up the doors of the filing cabinet near my desk! That's when I followed the structural engineers out into the core of the building!

Like I said, there wasn't any major damage here in Trinidad and Tobago, so we're all OK.

Carnival

As we have reported in earlier posts, Trini's love to party. And the biggest party of the year for them is Carnival. It happens every year on the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday and the start of lent. It is the culmination of a whole year's worth of planning and parties (you know, to get ready!).

The festival has deep roots and is a long standing tradition which goes back to the times when there were slaves here in Trinidad. They were permitted to party for these two days and they started dressing up in costumes and parading in the streets. The costumes became very ornate and usually made fun of the 'masters' in some form.

It has evolved with the times, but many of the old traditions still exist. The different groups which parade through the streets are called bands. There are still some bands which are very ornate and serious about the costume aspect. They have themes and compete for the best band award every year. Other bands have evolved into more fun themes, like the HARTS Band which we have joined. Their theme this year is Tribute to Hollywood and the costumes are named after various movies, we are part of the The Last Samurai group.

Here is a link to their site you can see ours and other costumes:

http://www.hartscarnival.com/

We've been told that this band is much less serious and many of the people (especially the guys) don't wear the entire costume (which is good because I'm not sure I'm interested in the big hat!). The ladies don't have a lot of costume to leave off!

If you go to the site you can see that this band is more about the party. Check out the pictures from last year. Did we mention that the basic premise of the carnival is to parade through the streets of Port of Spain for two days - Monday and Tuesday. There is lots of music, dancing, drinking and wining (trust me boys, you will like wining!).

According to all of our friends, Carnival is the party of the year here in Trinidad. If anyone would like to join us, you are more than welcome to head south, we'd love to share it with you.

Where has September Gone?

I just looked back and saw that I hadn't done a post for a LONG time. You should consider that a good thing, really. It means we're out doing cool stuff and not sitting around our apartment on the internet! Actually I've been surfing the net quite a bit this week as Katie is back in Toronto visiting friends and family and so it's a little lonely here at night. She will be returning next Monday morning and I can't wait for her to return.

I just hope we still have some readers!

So what have we been up to for the month of September?

Just after my last post we went off to Grenada for the long weekend. Aug 31 was Independance Day here in Trinidad so we took advantage and went to the next island north from here to check it out. It was a really nice island, unfortunately the weather wasn't very good - Tropical Storm Felix was just getting going actually! Despite that we had one day to explore St George's (the capital) and the rest of the island in our rented 4x4.

Us with St. George's behind us....

The island was heavily damaged a few years ago by Hurricane Ivan and it was nice to see that they have recovered well. Although not all buildings were salvageable I suppose....

We had a couple of nice dinners and relaxed with a couple of days on Grand Anse Beach. The last day we went on a catamaran sailing / snorkeling trip. It was fun but we got some rain which made the water very dark.

The weekend after that was spent here in Port of Spain. We actually went to another concert - it was headlined by Deloris O'Reardan. Not only is she the most Irish named person, but she used to be the lead singer of the Cranberries. The concert wasn't the greatest, but we were hanging out with some new friends so that was why we went.

We have been continuing to meet lots of new people here, both local and expats and we are having a good time with them. It's nice to have people outside of work to hang out with - particularly for Kate. Kate has now been gone over two weekends leaving me to fend for myself. And I've done pretty well for the weekends, if I do say so myself.

Two weekends ago I went "Down D Islands" again with Evran, my local buddy from work. His good friend was hosting a large party for his 30th birthday at his parents VERY nice house. It was a great afternoon and I ended up staying over for the night. That lead to an afternoon of relaxing in the pool and ocean on the Sunday after.

This weekend just past was another long weekend (Yes, Trinidad has a lot of holidays!). This Monday we celebrated Republic Day - I celebrated by playing golf on both Sunday and Monday. It was another course which I hadn't played yet, so it was nice to play somewhere else.

So, that's not a very exciting update but that's what we've been up to. Looking ahead we are excited to be hosting our first Canadian Guests in the beginning of November when Nat and Tara are coming down. Now that the Canadian summer is over and the days are getting shorter, perhaps some more of you may be thinking about a trip? Anyone is welcome anytime....

We miss you all very much but be assured we are really enjoying things down here.

We will talk to you soon. I will make sure it's sooner than a month from now!

Stu