My name is Eric Julien and I met my Bajan wife on the Internet.
I lived in La Brea all my life, up until when I moved to Barbados in 2012. I had a good reason for moving: getting married to a Bajan in 2010! It was a bit tricky in the beginning, all the hurdles, which I’m still jumping through. But I like the place and am trying to make it work.
I’m a Seventh Day Adventist. I think I’m both religious and spiritual. I accept Seventh Day doctrine. I take what I believe on faith.
I met Kim online. I saw her profile [on Carib Singles Web site] and, by her statements, she seemed to be a no-nonsense kind of person. I had to come up with a witty opening. So I said, “Greetings, Positive Person.” She went for that, big time.
Going to meet Kim in Barbados was a big first for me because it was the first time EVER on an aircraft in my 41 years of living! Which I achieved thanks to the US embassy in Port-of-Spain. They refused my application for a visa: I was divorced, didn’t own a house or car. They felt, if they let me in, I would be hiding in Brooklyn all now. People might think that half of Trinidad is in Brooklyn but half my own siblings are really there. I’m the third of four and the two eldest have lived in America for the last 26 years.
It wasn’t frightening to go on a plane for the first time as a grown man. It was more of a childlike excitement. When the plane started taxiing and turned to takeoff, it was, and still is, for me, one of the most exciting moments in life. The night before I leave on a flight, it’s hard to sleep, I’m looking forward to it so much!
Kim came to Grantley Adams airport to pick me up. Walking out there and seeing her for the first time is something I will never forget. I knew, from that moment, “Yeah… This is THE ONE.” She took me to Miami Beach, one of the prettiest beaches I’ve ever seen, to take in the sunset. The whole thing of being in the presence of this person in that setting.
We had our first quarrel the day I was to leave, after about six days. It was over a phone call I took, trying to show restraint with the person on the other end of the line, [she] felt I was being secretive. But it was really somebody wanting to get up in my business that I didn’t want to put on the wadjang behaviour.
We got married in 2010 in Barbados at a hotel that’s now closed down. But I don’t think of that as a bad omen, just an economic fact of life on an island where the whole tourism product fluctuates.
One of the things that made me fall for Barbados was a Sunday trip we took to Speightstown. From the time I drove through there, I saw, in my mind, a movie happening. It just had that look. And that is something that has been in me since: I must do something visually with that. I will make a movie out of that, somehow.
I miss my friends from Trinidad. Maybe it’s because of the community I grew up in but all those guys are like my parents’ other children. Everybody call my parents “Mom” and “Dad.” A lot of them belong to the same religion as myself.
You don’t look over your shoulder all the time in Barbados. But I never felt any fear in moving around Trinidad. I don’t drive so there were a lot of times I will have to travel at nighttime with my big bag of videography equipment. From Maraval to Port-of-Spain to La Brea. When people in Barbados say somewhere is “too far,” I just laugh.
The best part of meeting my wife online was the whole idea of being able to connect with somebody who I never-ever met in life and in a whole other country to the one I grew up in. Prior to that, the furthest off of Trinidad I had been was Tobago; and that was by boat.
A Trini is a friendly, laidback person who just enjoys life.
I am still largely connected to T&T. It will always be a part of me, because the larger portion of my life was spent there.
Read a longer version of this feature at www.BCRaw.com