Submitted by Allison Abbene on the 2018 winter session program in Barbados sponsored by the Department of Geography…
This past Wednesday, my program and I landed in Bridgetown, Barbados. We are staying at a resort north of the city in Holetown, a small town with a lot of culture to offer. Although it has only been a few days, we have already been exposed to some of the many differences that Barbados shows in comparison to being back in the US. While exploring the main city of the island, we used a few different modes of transportation. Generally, there are three different types of buses, some privately owned while others public under the rule of the government. During our field trip, we used the public government bus, which was bigger and very clean. Later in the night, however, a few of us took a privately owned yellow striped bus into town. What I didn’t expect was to witness the large difference between the two types. This smaller bus that we took was run by locals, and these locals frequently stopped on the side of the road to talk to friends while passengers were on the bus as if we had been in a friend’s car. The music was very loud and the inside of the bus was painted by some of the locals, as a way of personalizing their business.
This surprised me as I had never experienced public transportation like the way I had experienced it in Barbados. Never did a bus driver pull over to see friends or let them hang out in the front while passengers were on. The yellow striped buses clearly were much more casual for locals in comparison to the more formalized blue bus. Nevertheless, I still look forward to using both of these buses in the coming weeks, as they each give me a chance to understand how the locals live.