Parties and Such

So I thought I'd write up a little post about the parties and that I've been checking out over here, to give a little insight into what it's like. Last thursday was our first big party night owing to a couple of the other volunteers being away last weekend and Stephie being sick still, so I was itching to have a big one. Every Thursday there's a big party in town, called 'Roadblock' which is held out the front of the Roadblock bar. Basically they set up some massive speakers on the side of the road, decks in front of the bar and then everyone raves until midnight, at which point the bar closes and everyone kicks onto 'Cristal,' the club up the road.  

We kicked the night off with Appleton Special and a bottle of Ginger Bigga, Bigga being Jamaica's premier soft drink (apart from the various incarnations of Ting). I was quite surprised to find out that none of the volunteers had ever had rum and ginger beer before, apparently they don't even have ginger beer in Germany according to Stephie. Tunes were supplied by the Heatwave (again, who no one knew about either), and after a few drinks we decided to head down to Roadblock.

Roadblock

The set up down there was pretty epic, with some massive speaker stacks on the side of the road and the DJs set up between them. It was a duo performing, although it seemed like one guy was in charge of mixing while the other guy took care of all of the 'dis one fi all ganjaman' and 'all the gyal dem sidung and wine' duties. The sound was pretty epic and there were some excellent daggering displays, including one woman who must have been approaching 40!! Towards the end of the party a whole bunch of guys got up on the mic and started battling which was also pretty awesome to see, unfortunately I didn't get any footage because, knowing myself, I had been reluctant to take out my camera while getting drunk and risk losing it so just stuck with my iPhone (this will also explain the slightly poorer quality photos in this post). Hopefully though I can get some in the future.

The DJs at Roadblock

After Roadblock wound up, we all traipsed down the road to the club 'Cristal.' It was here that I learned that Jamaican clubs do not only have dancers in them, they have topless pole dancers. Also, (and this one really surprised me) it is totally acceptable to play the Backstreet Boys, sometime a few tunes in a row!! Another excellent feature of Jamaican clubs is the ability to buy bottles of rum over the bar, $3000 Jamaican dollars ($30 Australian) will get you a bottle of Wray and Nephew (which, I have discovered, is where Mosca got the name for that tune), which is a 68% white rum. Suffice to say potential for messiness is extremely high here.

Friday morning was not very pleasant, although as those of you who have me on Facebook may know, it was a whole lot less pleasant for housekeeping. Nevertheless, I had the weekend off so party time on Saturday was on the cards. We had seen a few billboards advertising the 'Sex Appeal' party at a club up the road so we decided to head there, after finishing off Thursday night bottle of Appleton. We met up with a local girl and her boyfriend that Stephie knew, and then headed down to the beach, where everyone was having a pre party before heading to the club.

This turned out to be one of my 'purest' Jamaican experiences so far I think, everyone just chilling out, listening to music on a big soundsystem while a Jerk BBQ place nearby served up food for everybody. All these guys next to me in the line were suggesting what to order and the best proportions of sauce, yam, bread etc. In the end we decided just to stay on the beach since it was free and excellent, and the place up the road had a $500 cover charge, I think we ended up going home at 4am, and as I fell asleep there was still music drifting over from the beach....