Every year on the first weekend of September, Brooklyn celebrates the West Indian Parade. It
takes place on Eastern Parkway starting on Utica Avenue and going all the way down to the Brooklyn Museum and Grand Army Plaza. A whole day long, people from the West Indies (Islands in the Caribbean, like Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the Virgin Islands,...) celebrate their background, dance on the street waving the flags of their islands and enjoy Caribbean food sold on the sidewalk.

This year (Sept. 3, 2001) I went to watch the parade for the first time since I came to New York. Claudia was visiting, so we both decided to go there. We got here rather late but could still see thousands of people enjoying the food and the music. We watched the parade, took pictures, tried to guess the countries, to which the flags we saw belonged and before going back home, we had a delicious meal: curry goat with rice and peas, a popular dish in the Caribbean.

What flags are these?

Green and black: Jamaica, yellow and blue: Barbados.

 


Some Jamaicans watch the parade from one of the
typical houses on Eastern Parkway


Claudia disappears behind the smoke of one of the places
selling delicious West Indian food.