The Top Ten Things I Learned In Jamaica

1. Margaritaville is even cheesier in Jamaica as it is in Myrtle Beach.

2. The University of Pittsburgh jazz ensemble thinks it's fun to delay a plane and re-enact band camp on a three-hour flight.

3. It's more than a little disconcerting to pass by ramshackle, leaning, partly constructed, corrugated-aluminum dwellings on your way to an all-inclusive palace. Makes you feel more than a little like a hoity-toity piece of shit. On a side note, there are many strange and shady ways to find transport from an airport to a resort.

4. Seven-Mile Beach may be among the most beautiful stretches of beach in the world, but it's not worth putting up with beggars and drug dealers every 10 feet to walk it. Also, fat Hispanic chicks don't understand tour-bus etiquette, but sometimes they get rained on, which is pretty awesome.

5. "The good smoke" means the same thing the world over.



6. Jamaicans are perhaps prouder that "Cool Runnings" and "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" were filmed there than they should be.

7. Topless isn't always good, especially when you're the only person going al fresco and you're leathery, floppy, droopy and late-middle-aged on a public, family beach. Proof that rednecks are everywhere, including Jamaica (especially when they're ordering "hawt dawgs" on the beach at an all-inclusive).

8. You can have as much liquor as you want at an all-inclusive resort, but toilet paper is rationed like it's made of gold. Which borders on irony since all-you-can drink alcohol and butt wipe are pretty closely related.

9. Don't order an Irish Coffee in Jamaica. There is simply no telling what you're going to get.

And … the No. 10 thing I learned in Jamaica …

10. Sometimes trophy wives nearly pass out on their 40th birthday in the fried rice of a Japanese restaurant manned by black chefs in Jamaica.