Christmas in Barbados; Mini-Blurbs

Barbados is a West Indies island, specifically, one of the Lesser Antilles, which include St. Lucia and St. Vincent. It lies outside of the chain of Caribbean islands that frame the Gulf of Mexico; it's a full 100 miles east of its nearest neighbor. It's a small place, only 21-by-14 miles, and its population has maxed out at 275,000 people.

Those 275,000 people spend most of their time chilling out. I don't mean New York City chilling out, where you go to a friend's house and watch a Jackie Chan movie and consider yourself relaxed; I mean filling four or five hours with food, naps and dominoes and then heading out to dinner. I mean spending an entire day at the racetrack without betting on any horses. Understand? That's why I came here for Christmas.

I had some initial, humorous issues with American Airlines. Everyone told me: "Remember your ticket and passport. Everything else you can get when you arrive, but don't mess up your ticket or passport." I messed up my ticket and passport.

See, I don't have a passport. I haven't been out of the U.S. since 1995, so I lost track of mine, and I haven't had time to pick one up since Sept. 11. I opted to travel with a birth certificate, which is legal, if extremely annoying to everyone in ticketing, customs and law enforcement. Show a birth certificate to someone at an airport and they look at you like you're some kind of turtle.

Making matters worse, my birth certificate contains my birth name, which is somewhat different from "Ned." That meant I had to travel with a birth certificate and name change documentation?four pages of photocopied gibberish verifying that my first name changed from one minor thing to another in 1996.

The upshot of all this is that when I first tried to leave New York, on Dec. 23, I didn't have the right documents. I went home, saw Lord of the Rings (it should have been called Part 1: Elijah Wood's Eyes) and returned to the airport on Christmas Eve with proper papers. Three hours later, after being searched in a manner appropriate for a slightly dark young man with a hat and facial hair, I was on my way.

The first thing I noticed upon arrival in Barbados was the exchange rate, one of the nation's more pleasant qualities. It's 2-for-1. You arrive with $30; suddenly you have $60. The rational part of your mind knows you haven't doubled your money, but it sure feels bigger; when you find that the food prices are slightly less than doubled, you realize that you're getting ahead in the Bajan (adjectival form of Barbados) economy. Beer prices are even better?they are halved. You can get four times as much beer here as you can in New York.

An old and dear family friend put me up in Barbados; she met me at the (lone) airport and we drove for 40 minutes to her cousin's house, during which time I fell asleep. In the Bajan climate, hot and humid, light and breezy, it is exceedingly easy to fall asleep at any time of day. Given a fan or open car window, I was out.

Barbados was an English colony until 1966, so Bajans drive on the left. They also drive extremely fast in very small cars on narrow roads full of pedestrians who walk in the middle of the street and don't respond to honking. There aren't any red lights; there are only "roundabouts" like Columbus Circle, and these are difficult to navigate since no one uses turn signals, except as decoys to make you think they are turning one way when they're headed the other. None of this kept me from falling asleep.

I arrived at my old friend's cousin's house on the evening of Dec. 24. I soon acquainted myself with Bajan cable tv and Bajan food, which is extra-greasy and centered on ham, rolls, crackers and tea?the English tradition of drinking tea all the time persists here. I wanted to see some nightlife, naturally, but I was informed by my hosts that Christmastime in Barbados is for "family and religion" and that the main city of Bridgetown is entirely closed up both for Dec. 25 and for Boxing Day, Dec. 26.

No matter; it doesn't take a genius to see that there are two sides to Barbados?the self-contained resorts for white people, many of which depend on visiting ships that hit a different Caribbean island every night, and the true Bajan establishments. These tend to be tents or little tiki huts emblazoned with the Banks logo. (Banks is the Budweiser of Barbados, brewed here proudly and enjoyed by men age 11+, it seems. Women avoid it.) There are big dance halls such as Club Sky and the Sherbourne Conference Centre, but it's the small places like Stipplicon and Wiser's that best capture the attitude of continuous chill-ness that rules the island. Inside, you'll find Rastas with pro-hemp shirts, white men with missing arms and adolescents sporting Sean John or Roca Wear.

On Boxing Day, we headed out to the Garrison Savannah to see the after-Christmas horse races. Bajan men placed their bets with a smattering of English tourists and cheered intermittently, although between their horse lingo and natural accents I couldn't understand one thing they said. I found two tasty Bajan junk foods that come in ball form and should be brought to America immediately: chili balls, which are like Cheetos but spicy, and fish balls, which are fried-up fishy-tasting bread morsels.

Later I went to one of Barbados' always-close-by beaches, where my host showed me a little-known ocean attraction called the "Hot Pot." See, right near Bridgetown is a power plant that pipes exceedingly warm water straight into the sea. It's almost exactly the temperature of a hot tub, and Bajans swim in it happily?it's supposed to be good for old people, who give their leg muscles a workout fighting the effluvial flow. I got in for a few minutes but it smelled of sulfur, so I returned to the normal, cooler ocean water.

It's addictive here. That's the only word for it. The climate wraps you up like a baby (of which 11 were born in Barbados on Christmas Day) or a fish ball and tempts you to stay for good. It almost makes me want to get a passport.

...Mini-Blurbs from a Tuesday night in Chinatown: Before I discovered Barbados, I cared about things that happened in Manhattan, and so I headed over to the Point (71 Allen St. at Grand St., 925-0395) one night after hearing that Penthouse was having a party there. It turned out that the event wasn't sponsored by Penthouse, it was in a penthouse, or, rather, a top floor decked out with Internet porn. This was the reception for the "Fictive Net Porn" exhibition, so computer terminals were hooked up to unbelievable sites being investigated healthily by East Village men and Asian women.

The best attraction was a website in which you could type in any female measurements?36, 24, 86, say?and view a woman fitting your criteria. Enter the same numbers for men and you see a very irregularly shaped penis. This entertained the Asian women to no end. The exhibit is still on at the Point and on the Internet at www.fictive.net/porn. Happy New Year!