Your bags are packed, you’ve confirmed your ticket and now you just wait until the day arrives when you finally come to the Caribbean. What next?  Practice the local lingo, mon!

• When immigration asks “purpose of visit?” say “We be limin’ mon!” (i.e. here to relax and party)
  
  
• When someone inquires as to how you are doing, say “We be jammin’ mon.” (i.e. relaxin’ & partyin’)
  
  
• If you must excuse yourself to go somewhere say “I go to come back.” (this means you will return in 10 minutes or several hours or a few days or several months so it is good for any time frame)
  
  
• Never pronounce the “H” in words.  So if you need 3 beers, you say “Good morning, tree beers please.”
  
  
• If you order orange juice, be sure to pronounce “or-range” with two syllables.  If you want the fresh veggies instead of the rice with your meal, be sure that you pronoucne two G’s and two T’s in “veg-get-ta-bles.”
  
  
• If your thong breaks and is no longer covering your thing, then you say, “My t’ong mashup and show my t’ing, I t’ink I need a new t’ong, let me see if I can get t’rough.”
  
  
• If you are shopping and don’t want the clerk to bother you, say “I gittin’ t’rough” (pronounced true) which means you are “getting through,” as in you see what you want.
  
  
• If you are shopping for flip-flops, ask for slippers.
  If you are shopping for loafers, ask for slippers.
  If you are shopping for sandals, ask for slippers.
  
  
• The proper way to walk is to loudly shuffle your feet without picking them up.  If you can manage to sway as much from side to side as well as forward, then you are truly walking the local way.
  
  
• If you skin your knee on a rock, remember that anything between your toe and hip is referred to as “da foot,” rocks are always stone-rock, and anything that hurts or is broken is mash or mash-up. So you “mash da foot on da stone-rock.”
  
  
• If you are suffering from a powerful hangover, say “My head ain’t good.”
  
  
• If you want an automatic in your rental car, ask for a “mash’n’go.”
  
  
• If you crash your rental car, call them up and confess you “mash da car.”
  
  
• If you crash your bareboat on a reef, call and confess “I mashup da boat.”
  
  
• When the bareboat company asks you to pay for the damages, say “I go to come back.” (and leave island)
  
  
• In the BVIs, if you go south, you “go down island.”  If you go north, you “go off island.”  If no one knows where you go, then you “go to come back.”
  
  
• If someone upsets you and you want them to know that although you may have been born at night, it was not LAST night, then you suck in your teeth loudly.  This is used only in extreme cases and is treated as similar to muttering obscenities under your breath.
  
  
• A polite way to let someone know they have upset you is to exclaim loudly “cheese & bread!”
  
  
• If the power goes off (and it does) you may inquire “When da current coming back?”  Be sure to “plug out” anything you want to protect from surges.
  
  
• For superb service, greet locals with a cheery “Good Morning or Good Afternoon or Good Night!” Good night means hello not good bye. 

We never say good bye cause we “go to come back.”

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The End