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!