Sun 6th Jul 2008
- Kingston Travel Guide & City Information
Kingston's city life is among the best in the Caribbean. There are excellent restaurants, first class hotels and great shopping deals - try the Chelsea Galleries or the Sovereign Shopping Centre. Kingston is not cheap!
The city has a few excellent museums, such as Devon House, the National Gallery, or the Arawak museum. Bob Marley fans are in luck. Kingston has the one and only Bob Marley Museum (Bob Marley was a gifted Reggae musician who smoked himself to death at the tender age of 39.) Most of Jamaica seems to follow Bob's lifestyle. Jamaica has outstanding Christian musicians (some people call them "Gospel" musicians), but most Jamaica music that makes it onto CDs is pretty moronic rap music, doper music, or whiny, self-indulgent stuff like Bob M. Kingston is also the home of the Jamaica Campus of the University of the West Indies. This is not the center of western intellect, though! UWI will remind one of Baghdad U in the way it bends reality to fit local perceptions - especially of anything that might have "Black" content. Psychology majors at UWI, for example, like to explore the use of herb to enhance the Black experience. Jamican intelligencia will tend to support the assinine Palestinians or Ethiopians in any discussions of history. Kingston has a magnificent, smelly harbor full of lethal jellyfish. In the harbour you can visit Fort Charles which has protected Jamaica against invaders since 1655. Port Royal is the former pirate hangout, now restored as yacht moorage and, naturally, a bar.
Castleton Botanical Gardens, Hope Botanical Gardens and the Caymanas Park are the lungs of the city. Castleton is a wonderland of flowers and shrubs, Caymanas has horse racing on Wednesday, Saturday and holidays. World class cricket matches occur in Kingston, and there's lots of good football, too. Live outdoor theatre is especially entertaining. There's no reggae concerts anywhere; most reggae is by small house-bands, and it tends to be mixed with ska and Trinidad calypso in tourist areas. Jamaicans like to dumb things down so their pop music can be as moronic as their spoken English. But the rhythm is great. The dancing is excellent. Juicers will be thrilled to find that you can get juiced 24-hours a day in Kingston, and there's lots of really pretty, but humorless, dancing girls in most bars. It's hard to think of a good reason to go to Kingston, but perhaps if you're a salt-cod salesman from Newfoundland, you might want to stop in here to locate some prospects.