The spanking new Warner Park stadium in St. Kitts, viewed from the Media Centre

Just in from the opening ceremony for St. Kitts’s impressive new Warner Park cricket stadium, and see that Ryan Naraine has linked to both Nikipedia‘s and my “coverage” of the situation in Montserrat, and wonders whether it will affect the One Day International scheduled to happen here on Tuesday (and which, as I mentioned earlier, will be St. Kitts’s first international cricket match).

It was stated during one of the speeches that BWIA could not land in Antigua today because of the Montserrat situation (one would assume because of volcanic ash in the air), and, as a result, several WICB officials could not make it to St. Kitts in time for the ceremony. A few Kittitians I spoke to after the ceremony also mentioned that they had noticed an unusual amount of ash in their homes lately. There was no mention of any disruption to Tuesday’s match, however, though this was of course an official ceremony marking a joyous occasion, with politicians, diplomats and other officials in attendance. Plus the match is still two days away. . . . We’ll see.

In other ceremony news, the Taiwanese ambassador (The Republic of China (Taiwan) funded the building of the new stadium — not the People’s Republic of China, as ICC Venue Development Director Don Lockerbie bloopered in his speech. Bad mistake to make, Don) announced that Taiwan will be donating a further US$2.5 million to St. Kitts for the development of an athletics facility. The cheque (which was a small paper one, as far as I remember, not one of those symbolic giant-sized ones) was handed over to Prime Minister Denzil Douglas right there on the podium.

At the ceremony, I also had the pleasure, would you believe, of meeting a Kittitian CFR listener: “Are you Georgia from Caribbean Free Radio?” she asked (seems I’m actually recognisable from my Flickr photos). This was Amicia Mussenden, who maintains the Discover St. Kitts and Nevis Beaches web site and The St. Kitts Nevis Blog. What a delight.

On a semi-related note, I listened to the end of the second One Day International standing outside the car on a point overlooking Basseterre (just in front of the Ocean Terrace Inn, where we’re staying). The situation in Montserrat aside, a nail-biting finish with the West Indies beating India to draw the series against a Caribbean almost-sunset: there are worse places to live than this.