Wednesday, February 5
It wasn’t easy, but I convinced Manina to hang out with me on Martinique. She was disappointed to miss our planned hike, as was I. But, based on the insider information I’d received the previous night, I doubted we would be able to make that happen.
So, she called our friends and told them not to wait around for us—we were going to do our own thing that day. About an hour later, we got a text from our friends saying that they couldn’t get either a cab or a rental car due to some gasoline strike on the island. They were going to take a ferry to a beach and just hang out.
Manina and I took our time getting off the ship. We had breakfast together, talked a lot, and then went out to explore Fort de France, the bustling capital city of Martinique.
We started walking through the city together, with no major agenda or goals for the day. It was kind of nice at first, but we quickly realized a couple things about Martinique:
- Everyone dressed very nicely
- No one spoke English
- No one accepted US dollars
This was very different to the other Caribbean islands we’ve visited. Martinique felt much more foreign and inaccessible.
We went into a couple shops, mostly looking for souvenirs and treats for the kids back home. We didn’t find anything. We walked through an open-air market and watched people barter in French over fruits and vegetables setup on the wooden tables. We went into a popular grocery store but didn’t buy anything.
We went into a little pastry shop attached to the store. The clerk was nice and tried to help us in English, but the language barrier was too much, nor had we converted our money into Euros, so we were stuck.
We walked back toward the city center and found a nice cafe which had a sign that had some English words on it. Hopeful, we entered and asked if they accepted US dollars. The owner was Italian, but had very good English. We ordered two Oranginas (one of Manina’s favorite foreign treats) and sat outside under a couple umbrellas and just people watched for a while.
Both Manina and I commented on how attractive all of the people were. It was strange. Even people obviously just running errands or shopping were all dressed to the nines.
We went to St. Louis Cathedral and sat down for a little while, enjoying the architecture and stained glass windows.
We hiked around the city, taking pictures, trying to find something to do. We found a geocache (GCD469), went into another pastry shop and dropped $10US on a bland sweetbread pastry and some gross fruit juices because the clerk couldn’t make change or understand our French (nor could we understand her English).
We headed back to the ship a little earlier than we’d originally planned, but we quickly wondered why we hadn’t come back even sooner. We ate a quick lunch, went back to our room for a quick nap, and then went up onto the top deck and sunbathed until the late afternoon.
The group got together for more sunset pictures, then went down to dinner.
None of the evening plans sounded super-exciting to us. Most of the group went to go see a musical impressionist show, but Mike and Penny invited us to come hang out on their balcony, so we opted to do that instead. We ended up spending the evening with the Bergerons: first on their balcony, then down to the hot tubs, and finally culminating in a midnight run to the cafe where we ordered a fruit plate and some nachos.
It was a fun evening. A great way to end what had been a pretty rough day in Martinique.
MightyJohnsons 
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