Posted by: Owen James in Untagged on
May 26, 2010
Downtown Kingston
Legitimate business activity is threatened
by the tension which now exists in the Corporate Area (Kingston and St.
Andrew), as well as other
high-density crime areas such as Spanish
Town and sections
of Montego Bay. Normality is needed
quickly!
Posted by: Owen James in Untagged on
Jul 19, 2009
Faith's Pen may be one of Jamaica's best known roadside dining venues and the vendors are courteous but highly competitive. However some price-gouging vendors are threatening its existence. On Sunday July 19, 2009, on my way from St. Mary to Kingston, my wife and I stopped to get a tasty Jamaican dish. One vendor had the pick-up salt fish and roast yam she wanted. I got some jerk pork. I do not normally buy roadside-manufactured fruit drinks. However a young vendor brandished beetroot drink - one of my wife's favourites so I took a bottle of the home-made drink from the young man. To my utter amazement, when it was time to pay for the beetroot drink the young ear-ring decked vendor said: "eight hundred dollars!" At the current exchange rate that's nine U.S. dollars.
I was dumb-struck! I eventually negotiated with the young man and paid him six hundred and fifty Jamaican dollars (U.S. $7.30). 
U.S. $9 drink!
It was not my first negative experience at Faith's Pen as in June a vendor tried to sell me a small piece of roast yam for $900. The Faith's Pen vendors arcade is a good venue for hungry travellers and the vendors are largely honest, hard-working people. However a minority by their business practice may well be "killing the goose that laid the golden egg." The majority should tell them to stop! Faith's Pen, about a seventy-minute drive west of Kingston, is strategically located on the main road which snakes through beautiful scenery towards the resort town of Ocho Rios. About thirty vendors normally sell well-prepared Jamaican home-style cooked jerk chicken, jerk port, fried and roast fish, the national dish ackee and saltfish, fried and roast breadfruit and the reputed aphrodisiac ‘mannish water' - a heady soup made from cow's testicles and various ground provisions.
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