Monday, February 06, 2006

Jamaica!

This past weekend, we were in Montego Bay, Jamaica.  I must say that it was one of the best weekends ever.  We flew (obviously) out of Nashville on Friday morning at 6am (yuck!) and arrived in Montego Bay around lunch time.  The majority of Friday was spent just relaxing and enjoying some "island time."  We spent most of the time swimming outdoors (in February!), getting to know our wonderful hosts: Garfield and Troy, and learning some Jamaican idioms: "Ayrie, mon!" was my personal favorite (I'm sure I spelled it wrong though).

Saturday, we went around to quite a few SDA churches and sang in their services.  Though, I'm pretty sure one goal of the trip was to completely freak us out by the way Jamaicans drive.  Troy drives a bus in Montego Bay and he was our chauffeur.  I noticed that the majority of the streets don't have lines on them and I think it's because nobody would pay attention to them even if they were there!  They use every inch of that road whether it's on their side or not.  The main thing that was hard to get used to was the fact that they drive on the left side and the driver sits on the right side of the car.  We'd round a corner and I'd see a car barrelling down on us at like 35 MPH (or 732 KPH - I'm bad at converting to metric) on the "wrong" side of the road and I would grab on to the "OH NO!" handles in the van: White Knuckles the whole way.  But I digress.  These SDA churches were so sweet, they received us quite well.  I think one little girl who looked to be about 8 or 9 summed it up best: "Wow! White people!"

After lunch, we headed over to the convention center where we were to perform.  We did our sound check and met some of the other groups who were performing that night.  When I saw that we were the 10th (yes, tenth) group to perform, I was a little concerned that some people may leave before we even stepped on stage.  As it turned out, each group was so talented that nobody left - the crowd just grew throughout the night.  By the time the man before us finished, there were about 800 people in the building!  The next thing that happened, I will remember for the rest of my life.  As we were announced, the crowd absolutely exploded.  They went NUTS!  They couldn't get any louder.  Then when we sang the first "bah dah dah dop bop bop bop" of "We Shall Wear A Crown," the decibel level doubled.  It was incredible.  It would be nearly impossible to overstate the excitement of this crowd.  There were times, when I would look over at Brian and see that he was blowing the pitch-pipe as hard as he could, and none of us could hear it!  On most of the songs, the entire crowd was singing along and dancing and waving their hands.  They loved Gary's bass, and I have to say: he was dropping some nasty bass that night.  It was awesome.  They also really loved the vocal percussion.  On "I Wanna See Jesus In Your Life,"  Brian does the percussion after a trio opens the song and the crowd went bananas when he started in.  But I think they loved Nick's percussion solo even more.  I always loved watching people's reaction to that solo, and in Jamaica it was no different.  I'm running out of descriptions, but really the place went crazy.  After the concert ended (around midnight), we signed pictures, CDs, shirts, jackets, arms, a purse and two $100 bills (that'd be worth a little less than 2 American dollars each).  It was cool to see that there were so many groups who were doing a cappella music down there: they all wanted to show us what they could do (and they were amazing) and to get advice on how to improve.  It was an unforgettable night.

The next morning, we slept in until around 9 and had another wonderful Jamaican meal and then we went to the beach.  Cody, Nick and I all went swimming in one of the bays there, while the others strolled along the beach.  It actually started raining while we were out there - that was pretty neat.  After a rather large seagull came dangerously close to making me his lunch, I decided it was time to get out of the water.  We then went to the "touristy" shop and got T-shirts and keychains, etc.  Pretty soon, it was time to head on out to the airport.  We all made it back to the states Sunday night with a memory that we will never forget.

-Cory