Sint Maarten: Night 2

After some blogging and general computerology on my part, and lecture preparation on my father’s part, we decided to try and get some dinner. Though there are hundreds of restaurants on the island, this turned out to be a somewhat arduous task. Our first choice, a Chinese restaurant that is popular with the locals, turned out to be full (and we could not quite understand the pricing as main dishes seemed to be from $2.50 while fried rice was $13.00). We ended up driving around a little before trying a batch of restaurants located just down the street from the university.

It must be noted that these restaurants were originally overlooked mainly because of building in which they are housed, which is primarily a casino. After checking our a few of the menus for the pricier restaurants we eventually settled on a pretty run of the mill North American restaurant. Strangely, the burgers and sandwiches were quite reasonably priced while the fish and steaks at prices comparable to those found in much nicer restaurants on the island (such as the somewhat classy French restaurant we had visited the night previously).

With our meals we each had a beer. I had a Carib (a popular Caribbean beer) while my father had a Leffe Blond. Strangely, I ordered the restaurant’s last Carib, while they apparently were well stocked with the imports. Another strange thing about the beer selection was that many of the European and American imports, such as the Leffe, were in the cheap section along with Carib, while other imports of similar quality were more expensive.

At this restaurant we also learned that most of the fish available on Sint Marteen is frozen rather than fresh. This information is fundamentally in accordance with other information we had learned about the habit of the island to import basically everything (rather than produce anything locally).

The notable exception to this trend seems to be the university. Not only did we see someone making tables on the campus (presumably for the university) but it also appears that the desks and dressers in our bedrooms are hand made.