African Liberation Day at Hope Gardens
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 05/Jun/2010 20:44, 34 days ago
Another great day in Jamaica. Today we walked. We walked a lot. And we made lots of new discoveries.We set out mid-morning to take our black and white striped bag in for repairs to this shoe repair shop on Barbican Road which is near where we live. The repair person is going to add leather to reinforce the almost snapped off canvas straps. I think it's going to look very, very nice. I love that bag and want it preserved. We use it for our laundry as well as a beach and travel bag.Jamaica continues to be an amazing land of contrasts because across the street from the shoe repair is a pretty plaza off the beaten track where we stopped for a latte and I found a beautiful shop called House of Bags - I'll be buying one soon. One can never have enough bags it seems. Also in this shopping plaza is a restaurant described to us by Anna as the best food anywhere called The Guilt Trip. We'd seen it before and were tempted with the breakfasts. Our next visitor will be taken there for Jamaican breakfast for sure.We then continued our walk towards Hope Gardens because George had read in the Gleaner that there would be free jerk chicken. Hope Gardens continues to impress us despite the neglected looking entrance gate.This time, however, it wasn't raining and there were lots of families, entertainers and craftspeople celebrating African Liberation Day. Now that's an interesting day which intrigued George because he'd never heard of it and he grew up in Africa. Obviously the colonials weren't celebrating ALD. Oooops! We discovered African Liberation Day was created in 1958 and has been celebrated by Africans ever since.We made lots of other discoveries at Hope Gardens such as the beautiful restaurant above which has a gold fish pond running right through the middle, hence the bridge to get to the other side.And the delightful zoo. It was lovely and much nicer than we were expecting.Pretty flowers growing over the trellis at the lilly pond.There was a pen with Indian Mongoose. George had seen one at his office at Camp Road a few weeks ago so we know there are mongooses roaming naturally in Jamaica. It was nice to see local animals in a zoo rather than only exotics. There were no lions or tigers although we did see a sign pointing to monkeys which we never saw or heard.This poor lamb needs a bath and possibly a haircut in this heat! But I suppose there's little market for wool in Jamaica.The iguanas were interesting. These are found naturally in the Hellshire Hills just west of Kingston and the two we saw were different colours. The grey one was next to a cement block the same colour as the iguana and the orange one was next to a rock coincidentally the same orange colour so we weren't sure if they were camouflaging themselves like chameleons or just attracted to same coloured environments as their skin.We never did find the free jerk chicken but we bought some very tasty homemade soup from a vendor outside the zoo from a pot which included whole corn cobs, large hunks of yam and chicken's feet of course. One of the vendors had a large plastic container with the soup which had an entire crab the size of a jumbo lobster dunked in it. That was an option we passed up even though it did look exotic. We asked for just broth! The soup was very peppery and delicious - a big bowl with two plastic spoons served us both for $200 Jamacian ($2 Canadian).