Saturday 30th September
Visiting Port of Spain
It is only half past eight in the morning and we are being dropped off near Port of Spain on the way back from the market. It is early and Saturday so the business area downtown is quiet. Most of the banks and some government buildings are along a beautiful avenue, with tree and checkers table and seats in the shade. Feels quite orderly and it is extremely clean. Further up town, we come across Trinity Cathedral, a glorious building, so English, I always find it incongruous to find such edifice in other places than home. All around there are many reminders that the British were in charge for many year. The parks, churches, shops and even housing estate are to my eyes ever so English. There are however a certain otherness about it. It is really weird, it all looks so familiar but also very alien, more attractive in a way...hard to describe. Even the names of the streets are so very evocative of London, we have Charlotte street (without my favourite Hotel!) and Oxford street (without my favourite shops!). The grand old buildings and tidy parks soon give way to more modest and more colourful buildings. We have reached the heart of the old town with what is left of the original market building given over to malls now. But the fun is on the street, it is lined from end to end with street vendors, busy whereas the malls feel definitely deserted. The best preserved buildings seem to be the churches and the schools attached to them. Superb art deco example remain and in very good shape. Steel ban practise in a girl school keep us entertained. I would not have thought a waltz as obvious rehearsal material for a steel band, but it does work. We found the cemetery, always a favourite of mind if not of Ian’s. He is very tolerant and understands that for me it is like checking out the history of the town. Loads of French, Spanish, English and surprisingly Syrians an Lebanese buried here. And Chinese too... you can see how the nationalities mixed or not by just looking at the names on the tombs. You can see who where the rich and who were the poor, sometime what kind of trade they were in... some very old tombs are very well kept implying that the family has been and is still around for that long, some are just left to go wild, probably no one left to take care of them. It is a fascinating place. We reach the Savanah, glad we went around it apart from finding some other magnificent buildings, we also stumble upon a Haagen Dazs parlour. The best ice creams in the world. It does feel special to be sitting in this air conditioned designer shop looking out to the clouds rolling over the savannah. The last stretch of our walk takes us past another incongruous building, the national academy of performing art. Very much the modern building, all glass, and curved stainless steel, it look fantastic and would not be out of place on the south bank. Actually thinking of it, it is reminiscent of the mayor’s building in London, or is it the Thames Barriers?
