I had fun. Lots and lots of fun. The Howie-Brockington Jaunt of 2006 was still my Best Week Ever, but by tenure in Jamaica definitely accounts for the rest of the top ten list. The people need to know about the goodness. I have a paper due in 6 hours, so I won’t be writing anything today, but I’ll just pick snippets to write about here and there until I get tired of talking about it. We’ll have a vote. What should I tell first?

-The Ballad of the Constable (A Trilogy)
-How I Almost Got Kidnapped Again
-”Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Bembe!”
The Harlem AllStar
-Assorted Hollerations
-BDWC Theory – An International Perspective
-The YMCA - The Boys
-The TMCA - The Kids
-The City Bus
-The Mini Bus
-How to Survive Sumfest with Explosive Diarrhea
-”Big chune, dis!”

Vote or something. I’m just going to pick what I most feel like thinking about and typing out at the moment anyway, but at least you’ll feel like you have a say.

99% of the people who know me know that right now, I’m in Kingston, Jamaica on study abroad with the International Partnership for Service Learning and Leardership. If you are of the 1%, the mystery is solved. I thought about having a whole updated website deal documenting my adventures, but then I opted not to bring my lovely TiBook with me. At the urging of my mother though, I’ve decided to at least try to use the little bit of consistent internet time I have to document at least a few of my adventures. And if I can do anything, it’s have an adventure.

I’ve been here for three weeks now, so a lot has happened already, but I’ll start from today and we’ll fill in here and there as we go along. Sounds fair? Good. And I will try to post pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. For now I have a bunch on the Facebook, which anyone can take a gander at here. But the wide open web is much more egalitarian and accessible, so I’ll try to post them here in the future. But we’ll see. Facebook is easier than ftp’ing.

Disclaimer I obviously don’t have time to be all detailed and thoughtful about this, so my journals, for the next five weeks, will more than likely be quite gramatically incorrect, mispelled and improperly coded. Don’t fault me for it. Just enjoy. I am learning to deal with imperfection in all its beauty.

So my shameful secret is exposed: I am 21 years old and I don’t have a driver’s license. This apparently isn’t an oddity in my family; one of my cousins is 20 and just got hers last month or so. My 45-year-old aunt Angie still doesn’t have hers. My mom didn’t get hers until she was 21. My aunt Wanda didn’t get hers until she was 25 or so. I’m not saying I deliberately look at any of those situations as an excuse, I’m just saying… it works out that way.

It started off innocently. I took driver’s ed like everyone else I knew back in the 11th grade. I barely passed the written test and even more barely passed the road test and this is why: the NC DMV test is hard as hell. None of it is practical information that the common man needs to know on the road. Instead of road signs and when to use your brights, the test largely consists of knowing how many points various infractions are worth and the proper times to use snow tires. In other words, crap a law-abiding citizen of Charlotte, North Carolina does not need to know. Because I had the honesty of spirit to tell my mom that I accelerated instead of braking when a car sped toward me through an intersection (thank God for that passenger-side emergency brake) and because of her inherent feelings of self-preservation, I hardly ever had the opportunity to practice. You know that pass that’s good for 90 days that you have signed by the school secretary? I had it renewed like 4 or 5 times. Finally I graduated high school and decided to just skip it and get a South Carolina permit. That’s where I was spending the summers anyway, and my Grandaddy was more than willing to take me practice driving on the mean streets of Florence.

So I passed that written test with flying colors and I could drive whenever and wherever I wanted… as long as there was a licensed driver over 21 in the passenger seat. Getting a license was always pushed to the back burner during the school year when I didn’t have a car anyway, and became paramount during the summer. The problem was that I began spending more and more of my summers in Charlotte or Maryland rather than Florence and passing the road test became more and more of a distant possibility. I actually drove quite well whenever I was with my granddad or Third. One jaunt with my uncle Greg in Maryland ended in utter misery. Driving with my mom always ended in an argument or was contingent on my doing something I was never realistically going to accomplish, like cleaning my room. I just kept getting my permit renewed every year and eventually I gave up. It just wasn’t going to happen.

Since I’ve started at UNCC though, my mom has been a lot more willing to let me drive, and I have gotten a lot more comfortable. I don’t doubt that it has a lot to do with my discussing this whole debacle at length with my therapist, and her equating my self-sabotage and fear of driving to my subconscious fear of controlling my own life. I told her the next time she saw me, I was going to have made a major step toward getting my license (which in my mind really meant having it in my hand). Then I stopped seeing her. I’ve been wanting to go back but I would feel like a real loser if I still hadn’t accomplished this after a year, so I called the Arrowood DMV and made an appointment. For today. And so it began.

I was wary as hell when my dear friend Miss H. suggested that we take the Chinatown bus rather than the train from DC to New York. My Amtrak ticket would have been $45 bucks, but her round trip ticket would have been $90. Since she and her friends have partaken of this particular mode of transportation in the past, I was a little more comfortable, but still not very.

We traveled on the Today bus line since that was the one that LaShaya had taken before. There are plenty more choices: the Fung Wah, Dragon Coach, Apex. We took the 9:30 that was supposed to arrive in Manhattan at 2:30. There’s no proper “bus station,” we just saw a bus parked in an alley parking lot between two buildings and spotted the “Today Bus” sign above a stoop and went from there. Rather than purchase advance tickets, we just paid our way once we boarded the bus. My fare should have been $17, but the guy didn’t give me back change out of my $20… I was still a little scared of the whole situation, so I didn’t say anything. LaShaya used exact change for her tickets so I didn’t have a comparison.

The bus was a comfortable and clean charter bus with a bathroom in the back and television screens to watch DVDs and tapes of the driver’s choosing. The passengers were a hodgepodge of ages and races, the same as you would find on any other mode of transportation, but there were plenty of young people. We both each had a bag for underbus storage and one to carry on. I’m not sure if there is a luggage limit but we had more than enough space under the seats an in overhead racks for our carryons. Some girl brought a tiny dog wrapped up in a blanket and I’m not sure if she hid it or not; I would reccomend checking their pet policy before trying that out. We left promptly at 9:30 and stopped once more to pick up more passengers in Baltimore; until then my friend and I each had a seat to ourselves. The bus was never overly crowded. There was one 15-minute stop at a rest area midway through the trip for food and bathroom breaks, and we arrived in Manhattan well before the posted time; the driver gave us the option to disembark in front of Madison Square Garden instead Chinatown, which we took since we had to make our way to Grand Central Station.

I didn’t catch the bus on the return trip, but according to LaShaya is was just as prompt and convenient. I was dropped off at the airport before she made it to the bus stop and she made it to DC before my flight made it to Charlotte. She had a little problem finding the bus and I think that it was a little more crowded on that trip, but her return was on a Sunday night as opposed to our initial trip on a Monday morning.

All in all, I give the Today Bus 5 out of 5 stars. I traveled comfortably from DC to New York City in standard driving time for about the same price as it cost me to get from New Rochelle to Manhattan and back just once. The Chinatown Bus officially = the new heat.