Chilling in Curacao

It’s late February, the year’s low point. Everything in New York looks greyscale, my coat pockets are full of Kleenex, I’m sick of my sweaters, and I’ve had no need for sunglasses in weeks.

The boys were out of school last week for winter break, and so many of their classmates decamped for warm places – for Floridian time shares and West Indian sandbars and Mexican all-inclusives. Not long ago we did a similar thing, taking a family trip to Curacao with my mom, my brother Matt, and his wife and kids. 

Curacao is among the southernmost Caribbean countries – it’s 40 miles north of Venezuela – and it’s beautiful in the way all Caribbean countries are beautiful. The water is turquoise and the sky is cerulean and the sand is fine and studded with seashells and bits of coral that my kids delighted in collecting. We stayed in a rental apartment that was conveniently beach, pool, and playground-adjacent, and spent most of the week cycling between the three, gorging on ice cream, snorkeling in the sea, and getting deeply tanned by the week’s end. It was, as you’d expect, lovely.

But, eternally angsty teen that I am, I of course found weird things to fixate on. Curacao was once a center of the global slave trade – virtually all of its native inhabitants were ‘exported’ as slaves in the early 1500s – but that history feels so unexamined here. Unlike other destinations that publicly and thoughtfully grapple with their history, turning dark pasts into a chance to learn and grow, Curacao’s feels papered over. Perhaps that’s in part because Curacao remains, essentially, a colony, a subordinate country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Dutch have so thoroughly muscled their way in that local cuisine has been largely supplanted by frites and bitterballen (aka meatballs) and the country – or at least the tourist-heavy corner of it we spent most of our time in – feels overrun with tall, strapping, blond people. As a tall, strapping, not-blond-but-most-of-my-family-is person, I felt conspicuously like a colonizer.

That said, I did get my requisite ‘go explore the ‘real’ country’ day. I had my 39th birthday on the island, and my Mom, sister-in-law, and I used it as a chance to leave our rental compound and spend time in Willemstad. We visited the colorful downtown, walked around Punda and Pietermaii, wandered Kura Hulanda Village, and ate incredible seafood at De Visserij. I got some sense of the country as something other than a playground for the Dutch, and went home a little happier than I might have otherwise.