My First Two Days in Willemstad, Curacao

An interesting past couple days. I flew the day before yesterday from the Caribbean island of Aruba to the neighboring island of Curacao. What a huge change, even though they're both part of the Dutch Caribbean/Kingdom of the Netherlands. Aruba is very Americanized and kind of sterile, though it has beautiful beaches, some interesting local neighborhoods and rugged desert landscapes in the interior.

Arriving on Curacao was like, BOOM, I'm now really in the Caribbean, culturally speaking. It's a crazy mix of indigenous Caribbean, African, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch. It has a pretty rough feeling to it, but the main town of Willemstad is also a lot more interesting and vibrant than Oranjestad, the main town on Aruba.

I took the bus from the airport into Willemstad and found some breakfast at a restaurant with outside seating overlooking a pleasant waterway. I decided to start shooting a video of the town. I recorded a couple clips while waiting for breakfast, and then tried to watch them back and discovered there was no audio. I hadn't changed any settings and that's never happened before, so it was a total mystery. I reformatted the memory card and reset the settings on my GoPro and sure enough, that did the trick. I recorded another clip and the audio was back. But then I tried to take out the mini SD card, and it wouldn't come out. Completely stuck. That's never happened before either.

I had breakfast, then walked over to my hostel, checked in and then tried to get the SD card out of my camera. Fiddling with it with my pocketknife, I got it to come out and then it worked fine after that.

I went out for a walk with no plans to film after the camera issues. But it was such fascinating exploring that I decided to go for it and do a walk through of the town giving a general taste of things.

At one point I passed a young local guy who was just coming out of a building, I think getting off work, and I had a nice conversation with him. He was born and raised here, had been to Aruba just once in his life, to Bonaire as well as to the Netherlands and Colombia. Other than that he'd spent his whole life of twenty years on this small island.

I walked and filmed for another fifteen minutes or so, and was about to turn the camera off when a small group of young guys at a bus station shouted at me. I decided to walk over and talk with them. They didn't speak much English. One of the guys was kind of intense and was saying something to me in the local language of Papiamento. I was still filming at that point and tried to have a little discussion with them, including attempting to speak in Spanish (Spanish is also spoken by many here). But it wasn't really happening, so I said goodbye and kept walking.

The next day I asked someone at my hostel who understood Papiamento if they could tell me what the guy was saying. It wasn't good. Straight up harsh insults to my face, while I was trying to be nice to them. I bit of a wake-up call. Things are different here. I can't blame them. They were invaded and their invaders never left. In their eyes I'm just another one of the invaders. Not that everyone has been like that by any means, most have been quite friendly. But still the racial tension here is palpable.

This morning I was shocked. Literally. By my laptop. I'd plugged it into a socket and had been using it for fifteen minutes or so, when suddenly I was shocked while touching it. I pulled my hand away, then tried to quickly touch the computer, but the thing was electrified. I tried to unplug it and got shocked by the cord as well. I eventually managed to get it unplugged and then plugged it into another socket and it was fine. Some issue with that socket apparently. First time that's happened. A strange couple days of technology going haywire on me, and then fixing itself fortunately.

So that's my introduction to Curacao. In another three days I fly to the next island east of Bonaire. I'll be there for four days and then fly to my 64th country (not another island in the Caribbean). Hint: A man, a plan, a...

Here's the video of Willemstad. At 15:06 in the video you can hear some guys yell. That was the three punks yelling at me, before I went over and talked with them up close. I edited the incident out of the video.