Travel hat,,

When we were last in Barbados, and I admit, that was quite a few years ago now, we had a lengthy conversation with a charming woman we met one afternoon and one of the things we discussed with her was just what you cited - the politeness of most islanders towards visitors.

She explained to us Barbados at one time grew to be very resentful towards tourists from all countries and often times treated them with derision and deep-seated resentment and this attitude started to take a major toll on the island's tourism popularity. They realized one of their economic mainstays was their popularity as a tourist destination and these negative attitudes had to change. And where better to begin than with the youth?!

Supposedly, according to this woman, they created an educational curriculum that focused not only on the 'Three R's" but on the importance of tourism/tourists to their economy and started teaching this seriously from earliest grade school right through to graduation.

This woman was a teacher on the island and she stressed to us how good behavior and manners were an important part of the daily curriculum of schools and she felt it was one of the major reasons for the turn-around in the island's attitude towards visitors.

I don't know how factual this was but it made a lot of sense to me and personally speaking, we found the Bajan people to be delightful at every opportunity we had to interact with them.

And as a personal opinion, I've often felt it too bad the Virgin Islands didn't take this same approach to tourism. Perhaps they have good cause but we really didn't experience many warm fuzzies there like we did in Barbados and as we almost always do in SXM.

The food in Barbados? Well, it was good and some of it very expensive, just like in some of the better dining experiences around St. Martin, but in neither case did we feel it came close to what we routinely experience in SXM. Perhaps we just didn't find the best places?