Davidson and Helen at the bar.

Last Sunday Jeff spent the day at Rodney Bay doing the final repair work on Wine Down. I spent the day travelling the Island with friends looking for the Jounen Kweyol events. Our first stop was just outside a small fishing village called Dennery. Here we tasted great fish cakes and had a local juice and listened to very loud music thumping out of ten foot high speakers. We moved on quickly and headed south. There were a few more roadside happenings but we drove past them in the hope of finding the big event with crafts and demonstrations. After a few more stops, more local juice, more fish cakes and a slice of cassava cake we hit Fond St Jacques. We had to park the cars and walk up the last few hills to get to it, so it really felt positive. Alas, this festival is similar to The Bath and West Show without the organization and vision. We watched guy’s plant dasheen and coconut plants; they dug a hole and popped them in, et voila, planted! Then we watched some Rasta’s dancing around with large coconut fronds on their heads, holding a banana in the other hand. Neither rhyme nor reason to this, even the locals looked a bit bemused. After that we tried traditional dishes, the good ones were squid stew, more fish cakes and coconut sweets. The bad ones were cows head soup, cows heel soup and, wait for it, cows skin soup. All a bit raw tasting and gloopy, umm yum, yum, cant wait for next year!

Trying out the local dishes

The house building programme is going well apart from the window maker who appears to have slowed down to a snails pace, we reckon we shall be living in the place before he finishes all the windows, at least it will be dry season by then. I had to do a big paint buying session this week, so I took my book with me and settled down to several chapters and actually finished the book, whilst they made up the paints. After I got it all back on site I realised the light pistachio was actually grey and they had mixed up a whole five gallons wrongly. This resulted in the inevitable argument about whose fault it was but as they had written down the numbers from a piece of paper I had given them they could see that they had made a mistake.
Jeff has managed to find yet more dowelling to do now that the architraves are being put on the window frames. He has also been sanding and sealing the balcony wood. The whole place is covered in sawdust, which is carefully collected at the end of each day, as Kenrick says it is great for the garden landscaping. I love the way that so little is wasted here.

Tonight we are off out to The Rainforest restaurant for a farewell meal with the crews from the big yachts. This has coincided with a gourmet evening in the restaurant to celebrate St Lucia’s food and rum week, where celebrity chefs have been cooking all over the Island. We were planning to go to Discovery, as they had Oprah Winfrys chef, but it appears he only does diet meals; it was three courses of bland lightweight stuff, whereas everywhere else is putting on six courses for the same price. Bring on the cream and chocolate!!