When you live abroad, your relatives will ask you to carry all kinds of stuff whenever you come home for a visit, and, once relatives know you’re traveling, they’ll burden you with various packages for “so and so”. West Indians have an overweight luggage problem, and it’s mainly due to the items they’ve promised to drag home!
I was once seated below a leaking luggage compartment during a flight to Barbados. The flight attendant advised me to retrieve the bag, but I informed her that mine was in another compartment because the one above me had been full. She asked all the passengers seated near-by, and they all denied ownership of the bag. When the flight attendant reached up and took the bag from the compartment, my seat-mate finally admitted that the bag was hers. She was made to remove the offending liquid, which turned out to be a bottle of Windex. The flight attendant was incredulous, who carried Windex in carry-on luggage to the Caribbean!? The passenger pushed up her mouth, and said if she knew the price of Windex in Barbados she would walk with some too! I had to laugh because she was right, but was glad when the leaking Windex was poured down the sink and the rest of my journey was dry and chemical-free.
I have been asked to take or send all sorts of things; teapots, coffee beans, karaoke machines, machine parts, dance shoes, strobe lights, gummy bears and clothes. Most recently I was asked to send an egg incubator, which evidently sits proudly in my mother’s office hatching batches of chicks every 21 days!
Sharks though, sharks take the cake.
Yes, Nik asked me to bring sharks all the way from Canada to Bequia. He was going through what I dubbed his empty nest phase, which manifested as holes he dug and then filled with water and fish. One of these ponds, built in the front yard around a mango tree, was already occupied by several koi, but Nik wanted fresh water sharks as well!
I dutifully went to a pet store the day before my flight and bought three little sharks. The salesperson said I would need a tank with a straw with which to provide oxygen and, because the sharks would be in such a small container for an extended period of time, they would need to be sedated. Hah! That’s how I found myself on an Air Canada flight to Barbados blowing bubbles into a tank every half hour, adding sedative drops to keep the sharks happy. Nowadays you can’t even take a bottle of shampoo on a plane, much less live animals in liquid! I don’t remember much of the trip other than blowing bubbles, but I did a good enough job because 2 of the wee sharks survived the travel trauma and were promptly added to Nik’s fish pond.
I always take a few gifts back to Canada, including small bottles of Sunset over-proofed rum hidden in my luggage. On my last trip I carried a frozen lobster pizza, shrimp and callaloo soup, guava jam, a bottle of whale oil plus some whale meat packed in oil. I usually lied on the customs form because the Sunset rum would be confiscated, but this time I wrote everything down, just in case I was randomly searched. I was promptly pulled out of line so that my luggage could be searched. This confused me; I had declared what I had in my luggage, wasn’t the truth enough? The customs man made me unwind the layers of bubble wrap around the jar of whale, and afterwards admitted he had just been curious to see what whale meat looked like! The following night I had friends over and we feasted as if we were on Bequia, and I would do it all over again given the chance! Having the taste of home is almost worth missing your airbus for, but you can rest assured that I’m not telling anyone when I’m going back home. I am NOT carrying any more sharks!
