A Strange Morning

This morning started out like most mornings of my holiday break - waking up at 7 AM.  For some reason, I can't seem to sleep past this point in time.  Granted, while school is in session, I'm getting up every day between 5:00-5:30, so I guess in some respect, it is sleeping in.  But that is not the point of this story.

I had made plans with my friend Aaron to go find a new doubles stand that a colleague of ours claims are the best doubles in the country.  (Doubles are an incredible breakfast that are served only by street vendors and are rampant all over this country.  You usually can only get them in the morning hours and they are usually sold out by 9:30 or so.)  Anyway, Aaron had said that he would call when he got up and we would head out.  Knowing that he probably wasn't going to be up at 7 AM, I read a bit and actually fell back asleep a for a bit.

I woke again around around 8:00-ish and as I was laying in bed, I heard this really big truck drive by my apartment.  I live nearby a fairly main thoroughfare, so it's not uncommon to be awoken or to hear the traffic driving by.  But this was an usually loud truck.  

Then came this weird rumbling and my apartment started shaking a bit.  I thought there may have been an accident, but there weren't any noises of the truck hitting anything.  I ran to the windows and didn't see anything that looked like an accident.  So I thought, maybe there was an explosion.  I have no idea how the oil derricks in the ocean dig for oil and I'm very near the coast, so maybe that was it.  Or it could have been this building that is going up not too far from here (developers are taking out part of a mountain to put up these condos, so maybe they were doing some demo).  But I didn't hear any after effects or noises of the earth rolling down the mountain.

So after all this, I came to the conclusion that there was a small earthquake.  Now there was one in Indianapolis before I moved and thinking back to that, I think that's what this was.  I had no idea that earthquakes occurred down here (or in Indy for that matter), but apparently they do.  I got a call from Aaron and when he showed up, he confirmed that he felt it too (it sounded like a large truck to him also) and that they said something about it on the radio on his way over.  Now that we got that cleared up, we shrugged our shoulders in the manner of "Oh, I guess there's another thing about T&T that we didn't know about."

Ok, learning that there was no need to dwell, we moved on to our short trek to get some doubles.  The directions, which are quite common in Trinidad were as such:

"Go to Valsaynes (a town east of here) and turn left at the light by the drive in theater.  When you take a left, you're going to go up the road a bit and about 2 blocks before the stoplight, there will be a little lady with a doubles stand.  That's the one you want.  Now don't get confused with the orange pedestrian crossing lights, you want the actual stop and go lights."

Directions are given strictly by landmarks and visual clues and never by street names.  This is probably because only half the streets are labeled with street signs.  For a while, this was very confusing, because I didn't know where anything was, but now that I have a number of places committed to memory, I'm getting better at following the directions.  And surprisingly, we found this lady quite easily.

As for her doubles, I wasn't that impressed.  Aaron and I decided to do a taste test and got one doubles (always stated in the plural because you get two pieces of barra or the baked dough/bread that they put the channa or chick peas on) from the lady we were seeking out and one from a nearby competitor.  We both decided we liked the competitor a little better, but the jury is out because Aaron got the bags mixed up when we purchased them, so we aren't really sure which was which.  Either way, I still think I had better doubles at other stands, but these were still pretty good.

Now we were on our way back home - this stand we went to was about 30 minutes away.  And as we were driving down the highway (Aaron driving and me as the passenger) he blurts out "Pig".  I thought there was a cop, but the police in Trinidad don't really do much.  As I looked around, there was a huge pot-belly pig walking down the side of the highway.  Stray dogs are a frequent sight.  You might even catch some roosters and chickens here and there.  But pigs are a rarity.  Especially strays just wandering down the highway.

I can say that the rest of the day was relatively normal and lazy.  But it's not everyday that you have an earthquake, drive an hour round trip for street vendor food, and see farm animals wandering along a highway.  But that's Trinidad for you...once you think you've got it figured out, they throw something like this at you.