Thinking Travel

Hey. I’m at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Montego Bay — a quick trip for work to deliver the pre-departure orientation for Jamaican teachers coming to the US this year.

Flying time to MoBay is under 3 hours but the two times I’ve come here I’ve arrived exhausted. That’s probably because my flight left Raleigh at 6:50am, which meant getting up at 4am to catch at taxi at 5am.
Then there was the three hour lay-over in Miami that turned into 4 hours.
And then there was the announcement from the pilot, “Folks, we’ve started our decent into Montego Bay but they’ve closed the airport due to heavy thunderstorms. We’re going to circle for about 30 minutes. Then we’ll re-evaluate the situation.”
Good thing they added extra fuel to our flight before we left Miami!
I wasn’t much looking forward to landing during a thunderstorm so I was a tad on edge. But fortunately, the airport opened and the pilot flew us the long way ’round to avoid most of the storms. The landing was one of the smoothest I’ve had recently.
We visited a private school this morning in Montego Bay. Besides visiting grocery stores and coffee shops, my favorite travel activity is visiting schools and learning about education in other countries. This morning, my colleague and I thought we’d chat with the principal and observe a few classes but we were thrust into a grade six class of 30+ bright-eyed smiling kids as their teacher informed them that “our visitors are her to interact with you!”
If we had known they wished for us to interact with the kids we would have planned a cool activity but as it was we had to make something up on the spot. I taught the kids some German words (stand up, jump, turn around, sit down, very good) we asked them which Jamaican foods we should try. Nearly all of the kids had been to the US and many of them had summer travel plans to the US, Europe and beyond.
I took a few photos of the kids hamming it up and a video of them waving and saying hello from Jamaica. I’ll post them here soon, as well as other photos of the school (and photos of my Caracas trip from a week ago).

Until then, take a look at the photos of the Jamaican school I visited last year.