Days 1 and 2 on a boat!

This one's a long one (I'm too tired to edit it). Feel free to skip to the video where I give a small tour of the boat.
TLDR: I moved to the boat. It's very nice. I went to some bars and met some people. Today's taxi driver wore all yellow and calls himself "Yellow Man," but not in a racist way.

So many things have happened since I last wrote. For one, I changed locations. In covid times, this is a big event. Yesterday morning, I was told that my covid test results would come in between 4 and 6 pm on that day. After my seven-hour-late covid test the day before, I somewhat scoffed at that idea and packed at an extremely leisurely pace. At 4:30, I was told that my results were negative and I could leave. I proceeded to pack much quicker. At 5:30, my taxi arrived at the Port Louis Marina, just north of the hotel. Folks, I gotta tell ya, the Port Louis Marina is beautiful. A tropical maze of boats in all shapes and sizes, but none of them shorter than 30 feet. Apparently, during high season, there's a row of superyachts. Jem's catamaran (a double-hulled boat), Heaven's Door, is in the middle of a nicely meandering set of docks next to a small hut-like building painted robin egg blue that looks like a wonderfully conveniently close set of bathroom/showers, but is in fact just electricity-maintenance-related.

After I got a tour of the boat and dumped my various bags in my cabin, I went to take a shower at the marina facilities before joining Jem at the marina bar. (There are only three covid cases on the island, so bar-frequenting is pretty safe.) (I also forgot to mention that Jem is a very nice person and we get along quite well.) Folks, I gotta tell ya, the Port Louis Marina showers are beautiful. Holy smokes. After a day of sweating in 30-degree heat plus humidity, you step into a beautifully air-conditioned room with a large countertop with a nice sink, a toilet, and a large shower area with both handheld and waterfall-style shower heads. The water is either hot or cold (it was solidly lukewarm in the hotel, no matter how hot or cold you put it). I took my shower today before writing this, and even if I sweated again (it's the Caribbean, there is no pausing the perspiration), I am still reveling in the feeling of cleanliness. 

After my absolutely beautiful shower, I joined Jem at the local bar and ate a veggie burger. This was both my first set of vegetables that was not iceberg lettuce or mediocre cucumber, and my first protein that was not ham, in a week. The band was a ragtag trio of a guitarist and singer, a person on a djembe drum, and a person who alternated between playing regular and electric saxophones. Musical highlights of the night include a set of Pink Floyd songs, which Jem particularly enjoyed, and "Twist and Shout" played to the melody of "La Bamba." You could say that they put their own ~twist~ to the song. I met a friend of Jem's there. Her name is Max; she was excited to see a fellow Chinese person here. She promised to visit us the next day, and bring Chinese food. I do believe that it was a successful night.

 

This video was taken just after I woke up. A boat is a beautiful place to wake up, as you can see the sky directly above you from the hatch. Some sailing terminology before viewing:

• Boat: big moving floaty thing
• Deck: top exterior part of the boat where you walk around
• Hatch: door on the deck that allows you to go downstairs. (There's also a set of stairs, but this is easier in a pinch.)
• Mast: vertical pole where the sail goes when sailing
• Boom: horizontal pole connected to the mast on which the sail rests while not sailing. Jem's boom is covered by a green sail cover.
• Flaking: folding the sail
• Trampoline: net-like structure at the front of the boat. Used for relaxing.
• Nav: short for navigation. The nav system on Heaven's Door includes a GPS system and an autopilot (very cool).

Some quirks about the boat that I've learned over the past two days are that there are at least four types of vanilla (from four different countries) onboard, you can control the volume of each set of speakers in each part of the boat from a central control panel (very cool), and the mirror in the main bathroom is in fact a door that leads to a hidden bedroom that can also be accessed through an exterior hatch. Jem uses it as storage space. It's also the perfect place to hide a body. Normally I'd be concerned, but in this climate, a corpse would start to smell quite quickly and people would get suspicious, so I don't think that it would be practical. Also, when you're at sea, it would be much easier to chuck the body overboard, so no point in worrying about the room.

As promised, Max showed up today for lunch, and brought a beautiful Chinese-Thai-fusion curry that I ate very quickly because I was very hungry and it was very good. She then proposed to Jem and I to come with some friends to the aquarium. I didn't know that Grenada had an aquarium, and was excited to see some fish. Turns out, The Aquarium is a restaurant and bar. I was somewhat disappointed, as I had wanted to see some cool fish and also we had just eaten and were now at a restaurant. The mood was uplifted, however, because I finally got to meet Flora! Flora was very nice and had some great friends from all over; there were people from seven different countries sitting at that table. One of them was an Irish-Australian person, and invited me to visit his boat later, as it was built in the 80's and has an uncommonly-shaped hull. His name was Carl. I think I'll introduce him to Llamas with Hats, which is a series of YouTube videos following a llama called Carl. I'm also slowly introducing Jem to memes; so far, the reception to classical literature memes and historical memes has been positive.

The taxi to and from The Aquarium is a story in and of itself. Normally, when I think of a taxi, I think of a sedan, maybe a minivan if the whole family is traveling. Regular taxis in Grenada are full-size vans. Ironically, the roads here are smaller. It makes for an interesting drive. This taxi however, was a 15-person van. It was more of a bus than a taxi. The van was yellow, and the man driving the van wore yellow shoes, a yellow shirt (with geometrically-cut holes in it, presumably to make it more breathable), a yellow mask, and inside the car had a yellow ribbon and a yellow bandana. His name was Martin Lawrence, but they called him The Yellow Man. He was a true icon of the island. He told us that wherever he went, the people would wave, saying, "Yellow! Yellow!" This works because Yellow Man is a native Grenadian. If he was Asian, this would be a different conversation. But Yellow Man was great. He talked to us about his home and his avocado shortage, he would switch narratives between being a bachelor and having a wife, he told us about how he used to wear a huge yellow hat. It was the most interesting taxi ride ever.

Tomorrow we take the small motorized dinghy for a ride around the Marina. At the present, there is a mosquito trapped in my room and I can't find it. The future seems brighter than the present.