Flag Day

Happy long weekend to most of you readers! Haiti also has a long weekend, though we had Friday off instead of Monday. Yesterday was Flag Day! Not independence day, flag day. I went out sightseeing with my colleagues, inadvertently learning about flag day and coming upon a parade. I'll start at the beginning:

I went out with Juan and Ben with the goal of taking photos of some gingerbread houses. Haiti has these really cool houses built during the 20s-40s that look very tropical villa-esque, brightly painted with a neat old time feel. We went down into the old district and found a few that we could take photos of from the outside, and one where the caretaker let us in to wander around. The rooms were empty but even their atmosphere is enough to take you back to the time they were built, you could picture the southern ladies and gentleman having cocktails in the salon. They had wraparound porches and patios off bedroom/offices on the upper floors, providing a great view of Port-au-Prince and the bay. Sadly, many were damaged in the earthquake, but they can be retrofitted, and it would be SO neat to retrofit and restore then and open a hotel/bar/restaurant.

While we were downtown we also happened by the Haitian Cultural Museum, and it being flag day we decided to go in. The museum itself it quite small but they have a few artifacts, including the anchor from the Santa Maria (Christopher Colombus' boat), some swords/spears/personal effects of the Haitian "rebel" (aka native) army that got independence for Haiti from France in 1804, etc. They had just opened an exhibition on Haiti's flag, which has quite the long and colourful past. There have been about a dozen versions since the Haitian "rebels" fought France for independence in the late 18th century, and it seems like every new dictator in the 20thC was happy to declare Haiti a new flag. The current one was Haiti's flag from 1820-1843 when the north and the south parts of the country unified, then was tossed out by a dictator, changed again by another dictator in the 1960s, and brought back in 1986 after the Duvalier regime fell. Good times.

We went uptown for lunch, and then embarked upon a search to find Ben a backpack. The Jansport backpack is ubiquitous here, but there are tons of knockoffs (called Joysports!). It was fun getting out and walking through the markets though, it was like a bazaar in Afghanistan where there are just piles of stuff on display, suitcases and cell phones and clothes and bed frames, you name it and I probably saw it. I did however thoroughly enjoy this souvenir (see photo) obviously targeted at MINUSTAH, the peacekeeping for here. They have the Brazilian, Argentine and Chilean soldiers all lined up in fatigues with guns, and there is the Canadian in his policeman's uniform and nothing but a sidearm. How very typically Canadian!

We got a last dose of culture on the drive back, when we came across a flag day parade! I have learned that everyone gets flag day off but school kids, who are forced to march in celebration of their flag. This parade had it all: marching bands, coordinated dance routines, songs, outfits, flag waving, and vocal onlookers. In Kabul we would have had to avoid such a demonstration, but here we were able to pull over and enjoy it. There's nothing like a good parade to cap off your flag day! Well, actually I capped off my day with a quadri-lingual scrabble game (English, French, Spanish, Creole), and those of you who know my love for scrabble can imagine how much I enjoyed that!