There’s nothing here. I read a review in the local paper about how great an event it was to have two dudes playing guitars at a wine night. Go to Kind on a Tuesday night, then tell me how great it is. There’s no naturally grown goods here. The best produce is wool and goose meat. I tried goose meat. It sucked. It was a bit like beef only really bland. Granted, it was in a pâté but that’s spreadable meat. It’s in the same league as jam. When you’re up against jam, you’d better have flavour. It didn’t. However, the locally fished trout was the shit. There was lots of it and it was seared. I don’t know what “seared” is but it’s good. Try it.
I ate you.
The main point of this post is that Stanley (the capital of the Falkland Islands) is a weird mix of cultures in a very small place that, somehow, creates nothing.
This is a typical house in the town. It looks wooden but it’s actually metal. Nearly all the buildings are made of metal. I saw only a handful made of brick or wood. Apparently metal is stronger than wood or brick. I’d go along with that. The winds out here are pretty crazy, so the houses have to be strong. The trees are all bent in one direction because they’ve been blown that way. The use of metal for housing means there’s an abundance of colour about the place: yellow houses, blue houses, white houses with green roofs and brown houses with red doors. The next time I go into the town, I’ll try and take a picture from up on a hill to show it.
Each street looks like an American suburb mixed in with UK road signs and a sense of isolation often found in seaside towns. This sense of isolation is heightened by the fact that you’re only a few hundred miles from the Antarctic. I took this photo at sunset (around 4pm) on a Friday. Kids were coming home from school. Their final year is year 10 and, obviously, the curriculum isn’t comparable to back home. If they want to go further, they have to fly to the UK. However, it’s conceivable that most of these kids already have their lives set out for them. They’ll work the farm or the docks or take up after their parents business. It’s a closed off life that, from the outside, looks comfortable. They’ll never have to worry about what to do when they finish their degree and have to go into the real world because their world is so small. Outside of British Forces personnel, there are two thousand people on these islands. Take a look at your Facebook friends list. For those of you who have around 500 (or more) friends, that would be a quarter of the entire population of this country. Are you beginning to understand yet?
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Peace,
Ash xx
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