Three interesting encounters

This weekend was one of interesting encounters:

1. Salsa man
Salsa seems to be the most popular kind of dance here – although strangely, line-dancing is also very popular, though usually done to rather un-line-dancey music – and there are regular salsa nights at several bars in town. Sadly, I can't dance salsa, and, to be honest, it doesn't really interest me. No, what I really want – and miss, despite only doing it during my final year of uni – is some swing dance. Despite this, on Thursday I went with a few other assistants down to the now-famous Café de la Gare (famous amongst the language assistants as we used it as a meeting point constantly for the first week or so as everyone gradually arrived in Saint Pierre. Bizarrely, it is nowhere near the gare: the bus station is a fairly brisk 20 minute walk uphill) for one of their bi-weekly salsa nights. My thought was just to go and see, soak up the music and enjoy watching people dance well, but when rock and roll type tunes came on I found myself keeping a beady eye out for people who look like they might know how to swing dance. I took the opportunity of the more upbeat music to surreptitiously do a bit of tandem Charleston with my housemates in the corner of the dancefloor, just in case any unknown fellow swing dancers could see me. There was only one couple who looked like they knew how to dance to the music, so I later asked the man if he could swing dance. Disappointingly, he informed me that he had been dancing "rock-jive". Never mind. But then the music changed again. Did I know bachata? asked the gentleman. Well...having spent five weeks in the Dominican Republic I really should, but I shamefully could not remember a thing from the dance class we had (the first of my five weeks in the Dominican Republic with International Student Volunteers consisted of staying with a  local family, Spanish lessons, and cultural activities such as cooking, dancing and museum visits. I've noticed a lot of similarities between the two islands, despite one being in the Caribbean and the other the Indian Ocean, such as a love for rum, especially when it's soaked with other ingredients for a couple of months: wine, honey, tree bark and herbs for Dominican Mama Juana; various fruit combinations for Réunionese Rhum Arrangé). No problem! He whisked me onto the dancefloor and set about re-teaching me the basic steps for bachata. This was soon followed by salsa, which I also didn't know, and for which he also proceeded to teach me the basic steps. Not content with that, when the next song came on, he added another move. As soon as I thought I'd got it, he added another move. Several songs in, and oh! What's this? Another move?? Okay...
This continued for quite some time, song after song, adding move after move...in short, I had a spontaneous, private, salsa masterclass! It was fun, and I had a great teacher, but I'll still take swing any day.

2. Unstable lady
On Friday morning on my way into town, I witnessed a teenage girl and a middle-aged lady in the middle of a shouting match. The lady seemed pretty distressed, and after screaming at a teenage boy standing nearby to listen to what this girl was saying to her, she had some sort of fit, fell over and hit her head on the pavement. The girl ran away, the boy sprang into action with a bottle of water and a mobile phone, and I watched helplessly as more and more people gathered round until the paramedics came. I asked the lady standing next to me what the number for the emergency services was, realising that I didn't know it and that it could prove pretty useful someday. She hesitated, made a couple of guesses, then admitted she didn't know either. Well it's a good job that boy was there. Later, when I passed by the tourist information office, I discovered that there are in fact three emergency numbers: 15 for SAMU (which, despite appearances, refers to the ambulance service, not a trained killer whale), 17 for the police and 18 for sapeurs pompiers (firemen, but probably used more often here for rescuing people from flash-flooded mountains and ravines or foggy volcanoes).

3. Tricksy grocer
In the afternoon, deciding that we really needed to get out of the town for a bit, my flatmate Alice and I had a fairly spontaneous afternoon trip to Entre Deux. Not as interesting for me as for her, as I teach there every Monday, but it's still a pretty village up in the mountains and I had to admit I hadn't yet explored it. Unfortunately, after about forty minutes of wandering about and taking pictures, it started to rain. We were saved first by a grocer's then by the boulangerie (bakery). The grocer was a friendly man. The two of us being obvious foreigners (Alice is blonde, and our accents give us away in any case), he gave us both a passion fruit to try. When I then asked him what was in the little jars on the counter, he convinced me that it was delicious and I should try a bit. Not being one to turn down free stuff, I held out my hand and he dabbed a splodge of the oily mixture onto my thumb, reiterating that it was delicious and telling me to lick it up. Turns out it was a home-made pâte piment (chilli paste), and the grocer was in absolute fits of laughter at my reaction (I have never much liked spicy food). However, he was a nice man, and gave me a banana and cut us up some pineapple for my pains. As it was still raining and the boulangerie was right next to the bus stop, we rounded off the day with some amazing sweet pastries – possibly one of the best consequences of French colonisation!

Picnics and saltwater

I spoke too soon: last Monday a girl in 6ème (year 7) tapped me on the arm in the corridor and asked me if I was a pupil or a teacher. However the most memorable moment at work this week for me was the lesson where I did tongue twisters to work on pronunciation. Try getting any French native speaker to say:

"I ship cheap chips in cheap chip ships"

and you'll see why I found it amusing! There were "sheep" all over the place...

This week there have been a few events going on. One of them was a braderie or foire commerciale, a temporary market along the main street of Saint Pierre* which lasted for ten days. Apparently these happen twice a year, and all the shops dig into the stock cupboards for everything they've been unable to sell and put it on stalls just outside the front of their shops at reduced prices. Many of the shops just mark a few things down and put them outside anyway, but the bazars don't even change the prices! You can usually find at least two or three bazars on each street in the centre of Saint Pierre, and they're not hard to miss. A lot of people I've met don't like them and it's easy to understand why: they are the ultimate destination for cheap and tacky imported household objects. Still, they're pretty useful if you need to furnish a completely empty flat with things that need to remain functional for a maximum of seven months.

Another week-long event was the Réunion Film Festival which took place in the west of the island at the touristic hotspot of Saint-Gilles-les-Bains. Some of the film showings took place on a giant screen on the beach and we caught the last one on Friday evening. There was a great atmosphere: rows of deckchairs had been put out in front of the screen, but many more people had come in big family groups and had brought rugs and camping chairs and proceeded to unload drinks and picnics for the film. (NB The Réunionese family is a champion picnicker: Sunday is picnic day, and you will see any beach full of picnicking families and their friends...but a family picnic here is not sandwiches and crisps with some interesting dips...it lasts all day and it's full meals and huge cool boxes full of drinks and music and preferably a generator!).  Being slightly less prepared we copied the family in front of us and heaped up loads of sand as a back/head rest to settle in for the film. We then realised that, of course, the film would be in French with no subtitles...but what did it matter if we only understood half of the plot when we got to watch it for free, under the stars and ten metres away from the sea?

Film Festival screening at Saint-Gilles

And to round off today's rather delayed blog entry, a little anecdote on a more regular activity I've taken up here. I've joined the local canoe and kayak club and have been going twice a week. It's a sport I've wanted to do for years, but have never really got round to starting. On Saturday I went out to sea in a kayak for the first time. As I'm a beginner, the instructor gave me a different, presumably more stable kayak than the others. I'd like to think it was also designed to be more easily carried away by wind and waves, but some would say that's me trying to come up with an excuse. Anyway, it's true that Saturday was a pretty windy day and the sea seemed rather choppy, but we headed out from the port nevertheless. As soon as I hit open sea, my kayak (not me, obviously) started veering to the right. Naturally, I paddled hard on the right hand side of the kayak. I kept drifting right. The instructor, Guillaume, started yelling at me to turn left and come away from the bigger waves, and all I could say was "I'M TRYING!!!" and continued to paddle frantically on the right to no avail. In the end, Guillaume scooted across (he made it look so easy!!) and clipped a rope from the back of his kayak to the front of mine. How shameful. I had a wonderful time out at sea - it was beautiful! - but hopefully next time I'll be able to steer by myself, although I confess I truly appreciated the rope when my arms got tired and I had a sneaky little rest while Guillaume towed me...
When we got back in, we practised a little esquimautage (Eskimo roll), and in the afternoon I went to étang-salé with my housemates again to play in the waves (but this time wearing trainers!). Result? I thought I was getting a nosebleed, but it turned out I had an awful lot of saltwater stuck in my nose and face somewhere - I had to stand with my head tipped upside-down for a good five minutes to drain it all out!

Possibly my favourite sunset so far, viewed from our balcony
(just so that there's another picture...the post was looking a bit bare)

*Don't trust Google Maps in Réunion! Saint Pierre is DEFINITELY not built out into the sea...

"Qu'est-ce que tu prends commme elixir de jeunesse?"

Today I was mistaken for a fourteen-year-old by the secretary at the conservatoire (music school). I brought some papers along so I could sign up for the Jazz lessons, and she was very surprised to learn that I was employed by the national ministry of education as an English assistant, and proceeded to take me into the office to quiz her colleague, with much delight, on my age. That said, I haven't had as many "oh sorry, I thought you were one of the pupils" moments at work as the last time I was an assistant, though this may be due to the fact that I was introduced to more members of staff on my first day in each school than in Annecy. I'm working in two schools here, with pupils aged 11-15, and in general, all is going well. I'm keeping up a pretense of being unable to speak or understand French to try and give the pupils a real reason to communicate in English, and a lot of them seem genuinely fascinated that this English girl with no French has come to a place like Réunion! I haven't yet had to do a lot of independent lesson planning, which is kind of nice, but I usually bring a few little extra activities and stuff just in case. The family photo came in useful the other day when there were ten minutes left in a lesson on physical descriptions: "What can you see?" "Your brozer 'as got 'air of Justin Bieber!"


As the proud tenants of a large, conveniently-situated flat in Saint Pierre, my housemates and I are duty-bound to host the majority of assistants' parties, so Hallowe'en was on us. What we lacked in furniture and decorations we made up for in fancy dress, snacks and floorspace (I think 12 people slept over afterwards!). I was a murderous shark constructed largely out of cardboard, and my flatmate was a surfer who I'd mauled; the other two were a zombie and half a palm tree - bear in mind that Americans think that fancy dress at Hallowe'en should be completely unrelated to scary things, as I first found out when my flatmate in Annecy announced that she was going to dress as an 80's dance teacher. The night continued at a club on the seafront, where one of our friends was refused entry because he was wearing shorts...despite the fact that the rest of him was covered in toilet roll trying to pass as mummy bandages, and the rest of us were in equally ridiculous, unclub-like clothing. Fortunately, none of my shark attire was confiscated, and the head provided much amusement all night.

The four of us in our costumes

Apple-bobbing!

The next day, "La Toussaint" or All Saints' Day, was a bank holiday...on a Thursday. We made the most of it by going to étang-salé in the afternoon, where there is an amazing black sand beach and open sea instead of a lagoon bordered by coral reefs. One section of the coast there is dedicated to surfing but further down there are no rocks and it's perfect for playing in the incredible waves, but getting there is more of an ordeal than you'd think! Obviously, we were going to the beach so we were all wearing flip-flops. Big mistake. There was no cloud cover, and the sun had been shining down on the beach all morning, so getting down to the sea from the sparse "forest" by the road involved a careful walk (intended to avoid sinking your flip-flops into the sand) followed by a mad, painful dash across the burning sand. It's worth it, for the huge, beautiful waves, but I will definitely wear trainers next time!

No longer homeless

Writing a blog retrospectively, I have discovered, is kind of hard work…so here’s a more up-to-date post about what I’ve been doing in the last week or so:

1. Signed for a flat (FINALLY!)

After visiting many agencies and viewing several different flats, and having our hopes raised then inevitably dashed the next day when we were informed we lacked certain documents or had to sign a six year contract, a man we had tried to contact about a week earlier got back to us about his flat. It’s big, central, but came completely empty: a toilet, shower, kitchen sink and two lightbulbs were provided, but the rest we are having to find ourselves! Fitting out the flat with furniture and the other necessaries (without spending a ridiculous amount of money) has been our major preoccupation over the last few days. Several people waiting for buses were amused on Monday by four “English” girls (I say “English”, because two are American) walking past carrying a bed frame, a bucket and some bamboo canes which they had just discovered - with much delight - in a pile at the end of someone’s drive, waiting to be thrown out. This was repeated several times, although usually with cardboard boxes of varying size. Our new flat is amazing! Even though the first day all four of us were actually there there was no running water. For about 24 hours. Not because this is some underdeveloped country in the middle of nowhere where locals live in mud huts...but because the day the water was stopped because the former tenant cancelled his contract, I went to sign up for it under our names, only to be told that we wouldn’t get water until tomorrow. When I asked for more details, I was told “before 4pm”. Great. Cue a visit to the local supermarket for bottled water…

First dinner in our new flat

2. Spent a weekend in Cilaos with other Language Assistants.

Cilaos is a small town up in a “cirque” – some geographical formation with either glacial or volcanic origins (I’m afraid I don’t really know any more than that). It takes an hour and a half of narrow, winding roads uphill in a bus from the nearest main town to get there, as well as a couple of frighteningly narrow tunnels. The landscape is absolutely stunning and well worth the journey!  The town sits in the bottom of a sort of bowl, whose sides are made of steep, jagged, rocky mountains. When we arrived, it was raining lightly and slightly chilly. The assistant I was sat next to on the bus immediately pulled out her raincoat. Raincoat?? I hadn’t even brought one…there are a large number of regional microclimates here, so while in the West and South there’s been a three month drought, it rains almost every day in the East, which is where she works.  The Saturday was pretty relaxed, and we all got to get to know some of the other assistants better and had a good laugh with some excellent guitar playing (and some not so excellent singing) around a fire. On Sunday, those of us from Saint Pierre got up bright and early and set out to do the “La Chapelle” hike. Our destination was a sort of cave in a cliff face which is said to resemble a chapel. On arrival, we realised it was actually a narrow gorge with a waterfall inside! We had great fun scrambling around on the rocks and daring to get under the waterfall…I didn’t make it right up to the waterfall – it became very difficult to breathe very suddenly when you got close.

The main view as we hiked to La Chapelle

Our destination

This is how close to the bus the tunnel walls were!

3. Ate cake made from root vegetables

In my first week here I got to try some “gateau patates”, a dense cake made from sweet potatoes which is odd at first, but really quite tasty. Apparently it’s a very popular creole cake, but there are many other types made from different vegetables: yesterday I went to the “Florilèges” festival at a town very close to Saint Pierre called Le Tampon (yes, I know…) and one of the food stalls in the midst of the very many plant and flower stalls was selling all sorts of cakes made from root vegetables. I don’t even know what the English names for these vegetables are…the most interesting one was probably “gateau cambar”: bright purple, and that’s without any kind of added colouring!! Doesn’t taste half as good as gateau patates, though. 

Creole cakes and sweets

Why

So I'm finally getting round to writing the blog I've been vaguely referring to for several weeks, and I don't know where to start. Hopefully, my blogs will improve with time, and you'll actually be able to enjoy reading them without feeling obliged to do so in order to keep up with what I'm doing!

For those of you who don't know (or can't remember), I'm spending seven months in the French overseas département of La Réunion, a small-ish volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, about halfway between Madagascar and Mauritius (go on, do a search on Google Maps..!). Why? I decided to re-apply to be an English Language Assistant in France (NB - I did this job 2010-2011 for the year abroad of my degree) as a "back-up" graduate plan, but the back-up somehow became my first choice when I was allocated the job in Réunion. Why wouldn't you spend 12 hours a week earning 1400€ a month on a tropical island with mountains, waterfalls, beaches and an active volcano?!

So after flying from Newcastle to Paris to Mauritius to Saint Denis almost two weeks ago, here I am. First impressions were that my nearest main town, Saint Pierre - reputed party capital of the island - was not all it's cracked up to be. Admittedly, I haven't been out to a bar or club, but the place seemed a little tatty, incredibly windy, and everyone seems to vanish at about half past six once it's dark. But it's growing on me: there's a beach and a fantastic lagoon which is great for swimming and snorkelling, and on Saturday mornings  the sea front is taken over by a huge, colourful market selling everything from live poultry to sugar cane juice to French cheese. One of my favourite things about being here, though, has got to be the fact that almost wherever you go, you get either a sea or a mountain view.

I visited both of the schools I'll be working in during my first week here, and have been staying with one of the teachers. My hosts have been really lovely, but unfortunately they live a little out of the way, so I am looking to share a flat somewhere in the centre of Saint Pierre with a few other assistants so that I'll be able to get the bus easily to both of my schools. Fingers crossed we'll find one soon...!