The real parade

This float here was titled the Olympic dream and it was probably the most appropriate float in the parade given Jamaica's performance in the 100m sprints thus far, 2 golds, 2 silvers and lots of records broken/created. I don't need to get much further into this matter as I see pretty much every other Jamaican in the blog sphere has covered it already. We have nothing on China or Phelps winnings but as a small nation we have done pretty well for our self.

Enough olympics chit chat, it was now 2pm on Independence day and I was heading down to Halfway tree to see if I could catch the parade with real people in there.

This was quite the opposite of what I saw earlier in the morning, I thought the promoters where fluffing the numbers when they said 2000+ people would participate in the parade and they did not fail to deliver. It was baking out in the midday heat and yet still there were thousands of people lining the side of the road watching the parade.

They also mentioned a classic and sport car section of the parade. I am not quite sure what this has to do with Jamaica's independence but the people love them some classic cars. Can someone please explain how so many VW bugs made it to the parade? They may be classic but not classy enough to be parade worthy. There was also an unmodified 3000GT in the line up, really now.. maybe I could have entered my civic Vi-RS into the parade as well since they taking every Tom Dick and Harry. At the end of the parade there was also around 30+ bikers on sports bikes just revving their engines. I was at a lost as to their significance in this parade. I guess the promoters where trying to ensure they captured every ones attention. Bikers always seem like a trip to the ER waiting to happen to me.

I think the people in costume depicting various aspects of Jamaican history was the best part of the parade. Those man/donkey people took the cake. Do you see the guy with the Hasselblad camera roaming the streets? maybe not, the picture is too small, but he is the camera guy right behind the red gold and green flag man, if you took a peep over at their website their low budget camera starts at $18,000.. lets just leave it at that.

Then there was the passa passa float that you might have seen from my last post and in true passa passa road side pool party style they had the blow up pool and girls in it. Passa passa seems to have really taken off internationally, to di werl' in true Jamaican style, so I guess it does have some place in the parade. Thanks TG.

The parade had passed, I was sweaty, my memory card was full so I was just following the crowd trying to make my way back to where I parked when I saw a bunch of people looking up and taking pictures. It was Bruce(PM) and his team perched up in a building across from the clock tower. Nice parade Bruce and Olivia, I would have toned it down a bit and spent the countries money on infrastructure improvement though. *clicks tongue*