afternoon excursion

Today I decided I needed to take a walk somewhere and read a book under a tree. That's something not a lot of people do around here. Being that I'm not in a very pretty area, I wondered a bit where I could go. The beach by the airport is pretty enough, but an awful long walk in this sun. The parks of town are equally far. Then I remembered the new cruise ship docks in Crown Bay!

It was nice to sit on a bench and read under the shade of a palm tree by the water. Every time I looked up from my book, this is what I saw:

The hill in the second picture is where the CBS station used to be before it was blown away in Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Now the only local station besides PBS is the cruddy ABC station out of St. Croix, whose quality is so poor that I have to tell myself that the people who don't think this is the Third World must certainly never turn on channel 8.

But that is very negative thinking. Incidentally, the book was The Magic Orange Tree, a book of Haitian folktales. I've also been reading The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. You know, I see why I have a predilection for the surreal and the bizarrely cluttered: it's all in those two books.

Anyway, when I got up to leave, I beheld an old iguana sunning itself on the walk.

On the way over, I had regarded the DMV with some curiosity. It's hard to believe that all the motor vehicle related governmental procedures take place in that small building. On the way back, I remembered that it wasn't always such an appealing yellow. So I decided to take a picture.