Day 6

Thursday January 14, 2010

"Here a chick, there a chick....."

Woke up this morning docked in St Thomas Virgin Islands! The weather was partly cloudy and 79 degrees at 0800, so we ate breakfast and headed out for the day. Our excursion today was to visit a butterfly farm and to tour the "mountains" of St Thomas.

Once we got off of the ship it was clear that St Thomas is truly a shopping mecca in the Eastern Caribbean. There were TONS of jewelry and watch stores all around the pier, and promise of more to come once we were downtown.

We only waited a short time for our tour to begin, we rode a "jitney", which is an open tram car attached to a 2 ton pickup truck. This type of automobile is also used as a taxi and mass transit here in St Thomas. It is really apparent that St Thomas is US owned from the very beginnning. There are outlet malls, shopping malls and strip malls for shopping and of course the regular array of US fast food chains, ie.. KFC, Wendys, Burger King, Subway and Dominoes pizza. I did not see one single Mc Donalds but I am sure they were there.

The Island has several "mountains" and since they drive on the left side of the road (with the steering wheel of the car on the left just like in the US) it gives the impression of running head on into the oncoming traffic. The intersections are very weird.

Another thing we noticed is that there are chickens everywhere!! The chase cars, they are sitting on the lawns of the public buildings, in the parking lots of the restaurants, just everywhere! And right in the middle of the day you hear the roosters crowing like it is daybreak.

It started raining a little before noon and poured rain for a long time, so any thoughts we had of sitting on the beach were drowned out, we spent some time downtown but got tired of trying to find any store that wasnt a jewelry store so we came back to the ship about an hour before we sailed.

St Thomas is a beautiful place, not nearly as run down as St Maarten but not as touristy either. Tomorrow we are off to Turks and Caicos, hopefully the sun will shine!