West Indian comments

1. Sentence sructure: In the Jamaican take-aways, you are offered curry chicken, unlike in Indian restaurants, where it's chicken curry. It seems that in Jamaican cuisine, curry acts as a property of the chicken, hence it acts as an adjective.

2. Of all the ethnicities of London, West-Indian people seem to be the loudest. It appears many of them have not adjusted to the English way of murmuring your way about. Even the guys on the corner muttering SKUNK as you pass do it a bit too loud for pushers. And people shout to each other all the time, across the street or from moving cars: hey MAN! come here! RASTAMAN! to me they sound pissed off, but when they catch up with each other it's usually smiles and hugs.

In a way it makes me feel at home. A Swedish guy travelleing in Asia had once told me how sitting next to a table of Israelis, he would always think 'these guys are going to beat each other up any minute, they don't stop shouting at each other'. After a while he figured this was the Israeli way of amiable conversation.