We had breakfast - coffee, porridge, orange juice and toast for myself and D, cinnamon pancakes for G - and settled in for a day of being absolutely lazy.
Porridge is a common breakfast offering here... at this particular restaurant you can get corn, oat, or cinnamon. Although I mostly opt for this for breakfast because of my allergies, it actually stands on it's own as a good breakfast food - D enjoys it as well. It's similar to malt-o-meal or cream-of-wheat back home, but very sweet.
After letting our food digest, it's time for a bit of swimming in the water and feeding the fish. (Although there was no fish-feeding today... the water was churned up a bit much so we cut our water time a little shorter than normal) Once we are feeling we've swam enough, we clean the salt water out of our hair and find lunch.
Lunch for us was a quick walk across the street to Best of the West for jerk chicken. There you order the amount you want, and a drink, and within a few minutes you are presented with a foil package of bbq chicken accompanied by a couple slices of bread, and a bit of jerk sauce on the side. Best of the West is a relatively mild jerk sauce, but has lots of flavor and I love it for a quick lunch on a lazy day.
D and G outside of Best in the West - those oversized cans are where the chicken is cooked.
Most stands serve jerk chicken this way - chopped up in a foil pouch with bread, you can see the foil pouch of jerk sauce to the side.
After lunch we wandered back to the beach, where D and G got in a lot more swimming (D's now trying to teach G how to do more of a dive in the ocean) and I had some book time in the shade. The sky stayed decently overcast, with bursts of sunshine, so the temperature seemed to be in the low 80's for most of the day.
One thing you'll hear about the beach is that there are vendors, all day long, walking the beach, trying to sell you stuff. You can get cigarettes, juice, patties, fruit, bracelets, bandanas, wood carvings, trips on a glass bottom boat, parasailing trips, horseback riding... Some people don't like the feeling of being "hassled", and normally I'd be among them, but it has yet to bother me here. Most of the vendors will simply walk by with what they are offering, and their voices drown into the background like the peanut and soda guys at a ball park. Some people are more aggresive in their approach, but they all back down if you very firmly and politely say "No." The worst I've had so far is one guy ask us if we want to go out to the reef to see the fish, and I said no, and he said "Why not? There are more fish, I will show you" and I said "No, we prefer to be on the beach, thanks," and he left. I think part of why they move on more this year has to do with being here during high season, there are a lot more tourists than our last trip, and plenty more people to try to sell things to.
There was a man selling fruit and D asked for a soursap. He didn't have any, but he said he could get it for us. A few hours later one appeared at the base of our chairs - he had come back while we were away... so he left it there for us and when he came back D negotiated the price with him, as well as picking us up some pineapple and coconut to snack on.
Once G was finally waterlogged, she came in to play in the sand for a bit and we were starting to feel like having a snack. The vendor selling patties was coming by, but had already run out, so we hiked up the beach a short way to another patty place we'd heard of, Niah's Patties.
Niah's (pronounced as it is spelled - Nye-ya) is a little stand in the market area just about a 5 minute walk from our hotel. They make the patties fresh, right in front of you in an old cast iron pan over a wood fire, and have an incredible selection even though they are vegetarian (they have chicken and lobster, but no red meat). We were feeling like a sweet treat so we decided to get a couple of banana patties.
They use a wheat dough, fill it with bananas and cinnamon, fold it over and drop it in the oil to cook. The taste of a sweet patty like this is close to an elephant ear, but with yummy sweet bananas folded inside. Back to our beach chairs, we settled in to munch on our snacks while G played a bit more in the sand, and D wandered over to the bar to find himself a game of dominoes. As G finished her sand volcanoe, we decided to head in and clean up for dinner, leaving D at the bar with Tyrone and Kingsley.
Serious game of dominoes, as seen from our balcony looking down on the bar.
D came up after a bit and we broke open a soursap. HERE is what it looks like!
The exterior - kind of like an avocado, but prickly. The little spikes don't hurt, they pop right off if you touch them, but it makes the fruit look sort of lethal or heavily armored.
Here we've split one open. Though it looks like a hard shell, the skin is actually very soft and you just squeeze it to pull it open.
As we ate we talked about how to describe this fruit beyond the photos. The flesh is similar in look at texture to that of halibut. There is a heart down the center, which is like banana mixed with palm heart in texture and flavor. The flavor of the fruit itself is like a mild pear, mango, pineapple combination. I don't know if they are imported to the US, but there might be soursap juice available in the states... I'll have to look into that.
It had grown dark and I needed to eat, and sleep, so we headed down the street discussing dinner options. We love the island flavors, but I was feeling overly tired and just needed to eat something unrisky for a night, so we found ourselves at a pizza place - ironically directly across the street from the bad Italian place we'd been to a couple nights back. This pizza place was hopping busy, and it had just begun to sprinkle rain, and they delivered... so we ordered a couple pies for delivery and took a quick cab back to the room. About 45 minutes later dinner arrived - super thin crust pizza with a great blend of Italian herbs. Total redemption from the place across the street.
I am working on uploading videos - unfortunately the upload time is super long, and the long video we have showing the view from the high platform just doesn't want to make it up (it's telling me 3 hours, and keeps locking up and quitting before it makes it to the end) thus... the long video may wait until we get home... but I'm getting some shorter ones up as I can & will link to them when they're up.
For now... it's beach time.
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