Look at the parade!

We're back with an update again, this time telling about our experience as celebrating like Yardies! Jamaica’s national day is 6th of August, because that is the date they got independence from Great Britain in 1962 (a global world, 2017). We had the best day ever celebrating the day with the Yardies, and we wore dresses in the colours of the Jamaican Flag, just as the Yardies. We were dancing around in the streets, watching the parades and enjoying the reggae music jamming through the streets! Solveig and May Renate got a bit exhausted of the heat, and went to a cute little café, whilst Anette and I kept the Yardie party going!

We thought that Independence Day was the biggest event of the year in Jamaica, as it is marked as a national holiday and we put a lot of effort into celebrating our Constitution Day, but the Yardies put more effort into celebrating national hero’s day in October! A little bummer for us, but hey - we had great fun today!

Jamaica was a British colony since 1654 to 1962, after the Brits conquered Jamaica from Spain. Britain wanted the island due to it being a producer of sugar. The Jamaican English was borned during the British slave trade to Jamaica, where people from different places in Africa had to use pidgin English to communicate with each other. (Pidgin is a simplified language for people who have no common language). We thought it was really interesting to learn about this history, even though it is sad that slaves were brought to the island to harvest sugar, and the local Jamaican people were thrown away. (Cappelen Damm, 2017) Jamaican English is a really cool dialect, and we have already learned a couple of words. They got their independence in 1962, and Jamaica is a Commonwealth realm, so Queen Elizabeth II is head of state. (Wikipedia, 2017)

xxx, Hedda and the other Yardie Gyals