How Living In The Caribbean Weirdly Bent My Mind
It made me forget basic life survival skills, such as making instant coffee
On my old travel blog, I used to write fun little stories about how living in Jamaica broke my ability to think rationally.
Obvious things I took for granted back in Canada were no longer obvious to me.
Take ice cube trays for example. In Jamaica, most people don’t use them. Instead, they just freeze a mixing bowl or a small bucket of water and when they need ice they chip away at the frozen block with an ice pic.
This is even true at small community bars. It amazed me that bartenders never impaled themselves in the process of serving drinks.
To this day I still shake my head over one of the funniest, most ridiculous ways that island broke my brain.
What would normally be an everyday Canadian occurrence never once entered my thought process while trying to make a cup of coffee one morning in Jamaica.
The house where I lived on the island was a shared situation. It was a huge, 9-bedroom estate house I shared with my landlord and a few other Jamaicans. I rented one large room and shared the rest of the house with them.
Not everything was set up how I would have had it if I’d lived alone.
When I wake up each morning, of course, the first thing on my mind is a cup of coffee. Since we had no coffee maker in the house, I drank instant.
One morning I went down to the kitchen to do what should’ve been a simple thing…..plug in the kettle and boil some water. Except on this particular morning, it seemed the kettle had finally kicked the bucket. After fiddling with it for a good twenty minutes I realized it was just dead, which thoroughly annoyed me.
My next thought was to kick it old school and boil some water in a pot on the gas stove. Everyone can boil water. It’s no big deal…..until I realized that since I had quit smoking a few months earlier, I no longer had a lighter on me at all times.
However, this was a Jamaican kitchen. Finding a lighter near a gas stove should be no problem, right?
Wrong.
I searched the house high, low and everywhere in between for a damn lighter or matches, but do you think I could find one? Nope. And trust me, there were a hundred drawers in that monstrosity of a kitchen but not one had a lighter in it.
In a kitchen that size, with a bunch of Jamaicans living there, how on earth could there be no way to create fire? I wondered, “How on earth do these people cook all the food I eat every day?”
After about an hour of trying to make the kettle work and find a way to light the stove, there I stood — perplexed over how in the hell I was going to have a simple cup of instant coffee.
I muttered to myself, cursing out loud about how stupid this was, and getting more agitated because I just wanted my damn coffee!
What happened next was one of the most epic face-palm moments where you could just smack yourself for how complex you’ve made the simplest situation.
What would I do if I were in Canada and wanted a cup of instant coffee? Duh….I’d put a friggin cup of water in the microwave.
Using the microwave never even crossed my mind. Why? Because in Jamaica I never, ever used a microwave.
Half the time I lived there I didn’t even own a microwave so I grew accustomed to just boiling water the manual way…because manual labor is the only way for most everything on the island.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it took me an hour to think of using a microwave to make a cup of coffee.
Needless to say, I finished my coffee and went to the store to buy a new kettle.
I know at least two people reading this will understand how much of a mind-bender it can be living abroad. Just ask
. Every week she writes about the weird challenges of living in Costa Rica. And who recently wrote about the simplest things she goes without while living on an island.What about you?
Have you ever lived somewhere away from ‘home’ and lost your mind while finding your Wildhood?
Not knowing how to make coffee wasn’t the only hilarious thing that went on in that monstrous house. You may have missed this post a while ago:
And just in case you thought a drive-thru couldn’t be weird at all, trust me…in Jamaica, EVERYTHING can always get weirder:
OMGosh, I laughed a bit harder at this than some others might. Because I would have done the exact same thing!
So funny, Kristi! My Substack essay for this month is about the challenge of ordering a "simple cup of coffee" in Singapore the Singaporean way and how it came to embody everything I hoped to gain from my expat experience. Synchronicity!