Two years went by that were filled with Factory work. In that time, I have traveled a few times, but always for work or at least related to work. Also this trip, by now almost a year ago, was a trip with the Factory, presented to the team I am working with as a bonus, leading to the Atlantis resort at Paradise Island, next to New Providence, at the Bahamas.
Good beaches, great water, secluded islands sprinkled over the shallow waters, lots of tourists, a bunch of banks with well-known names to safe-guard off-shore richness, a common poorness with a dash of hope, a post-colonial upper class of diminishing grandeur and ample wealth living in colonial residences, an art scene that partly still refers to the tragedy of Columbus’s landfall, a traffic that is caught between old and new powers, driving on the British left with steering wheels on the American left (it exists!) since all the islanders’ cars are imported from there, houses that have an open chimney as if built in Britain to keep the place warm and cozy during the occasional hurricane, while each and every place has American air conditioning to keep the place cool during the summer’s heat, a bunch of fortifications from the times of legendary Pirates who anchored in the Nassau harbor, nowadays filled with towering tourist carriers to unload their hordes, running up and down the beach but never reaching beyond the ridge separating the beach from the hinterland where the facades made for tourists fall off the scaffolding, showing a face that has struggled without despairing too much, giving rise to lazy ambition, leading to a life that would be aimless if not for the yearly Junkanoo parade, a heritage of enslavement days, when Junkanoo was allowed to channel the energies of the enslaved, who stubbornly kept dancing after the chains were long broken.
In this resort, everything beyond the beaches is a self-simluation of the assumed expectations of the tourist. The splendidness is fake, the casino is real, and the shopping malls are ready to rescue those in search for a memory to take home. In any case, it was great to relax.
