I can't get over how quickly time is passing now. Ok, I have to admit, at the beginning time seemed to pass pretty slowly, and isn't it just the darndest thing that once things start getting better and you feel happier, time passes way too fast!! I only have four more months of beach bliss to enjoy...Today I was at the beach, swimming in 70 degree water and counting my blessings, yes today, December 17, and my dad tells me that at home it won't be above freezing for the next five days. Bless your poor souls in Pittsburgh, and anywhere else where it isn't 85 and sunny everyday. This afternoon, it was so gorgeous at the beach, the water was so perfectly calm, and the view of the mountains off to the east while the sun was setting was so serene, and the temperature was so perfect, that I had to really count my lucky stars that I am here. It is paradise, except for the daily annoyances with people. I belong in a place like this. I can't imagine what winter is going to be like for me when I come home. And winter was already pretty bad for me before. I swam to the the islet of Gosier beach, pictured below, which is a little tiny island with a lighthouse and a little cafe and some chickens and that's about it. It is so tranquil, sometimes you can go and find yourself completely alone. It reminds me a lot of those little islands that you see in the movies that people get trapped on. It's a really great swim, not too long and not too short, and now I know the way to go in order to avoid the jellyfish. I've had quite a few stings and they're bad but they go away in like 10 min usually. But that's really the worse thing you can come into contact with here....other than the infamous barracuda. Around 5 people have been attacked so far in Guadeloupe, and there is a prize for the person who catches this one barracuda. But there's no sharks, which is reassuring.
I also went to the Gosier Friday night market, which has become one of my favorite things to do and a weekly routine (Gosier is the nearest beach town to me, where I go most often). There are people selling all the typical fruits and vegetables here for very good prices and very good quality. You can find salad, tomatoes (which are super expensive in grcoery stores and most of the time either rotten or green), giraumond (one of my favorite things to eat here, a type of squash), manioc, bananas (many varities including sweet little tiny bananas they call apple or fig bananas as well as plantains), passion fruit, pineapples among many other things including prepared traditional dishes and this delicious bread in different flavors like coconut honey and sweet potatoe and papaya which I buy every week from two really nice guys.
Islet de Gosier, the island
Yummm....I realized recently that I haven't really talked about one topic in this blog which is of the utmost importance to me: food. So I will try to change that from here on out. In Guadeloupe, there is this really interesting mix between Creole dishes and traditional French food. There are boulangeries and patisseries (bakeries and pastry stores) just like in mainland France, and you can always see people toting around their freshly bought baguette around noon, or their pain au chocolat in the morning, same as in France. All they need is a beret and a poodle and the stereotype would be complete. And their also lots of trucks selling creole dishes like bokits, which are kind of a cross between a hamburger and a pita, angoulous, which are weird sandwich things too. Accras are these little fried yummy things that you can find in different flavors like fish or conch and are also really good. That's all I have time for now, will try to post again soon. Love to all at home, and keep warm!! Miss you all terribly--
A lot has happened since my last post in November, but I’ll try to highlight the most important stuff. First on my priority list: I’m still in the midst of trying to validate my visa, making it legal for me to stay here past December. Much easier said than done. As you may or may not know, French bureaucracy is a real pain in the ***. The OFII (French immigration office) sent me a notice in October that they had scheduled me a chest X-Ray appointment, which I dutifully went to. On this same notice was a brief and very vague sentence stating that after the x ray I would need to go to an alleged “Clinique St Genevieve” for a general check-up (I guess to make sure I’m not bringing the Ebola virus into Guadeloupe?). At the x ray appt, I asked the secretary about this check-up, and from what I understood (she had a really strong accent and mumbled even when I asked her to speak up), the OFII would send me another notice about it in the mail. So December rolled around and I still haven’t heard anything, so I asked my employer here and also the program liaison back in the US, and they both told me to contact the OFII directly. So someday soon I need to muster up the courage to go stand in line around 5am with other hopeful immigrants to talk to someone about a general check-up I still haven’t had. Oh and that x ray appointment was no day in the park either. I spent 4 hours at a clinic waiting in line with about 35 people in a room a little bigger than the size of my bedroom at home. No air conditioning, the secretary was mean and I couldn’t understand her, and the procedure itself took less than 5 minutes.
In other better news, I have health insurance!! Exciting, since it’s been a year since I haven’t had any in the US…I went to an ear doctor here and it costed 33 euros ($43), and I should be fully reimbursed. And I haven’t paid a penny for it yet….other than the money that’s taken out of my monthly pay for social security. Wow. After many months of attempting to get affordable health insurance back home, this has been so strangely easy.
In November, there were 2 weeks of the “Route du Rhum”, a catamaran race that only happens every 4 years! It was actually pretty neat, there were tents set up in Pointe à Pitre with food, jewelry, and clothing vendors, and in the evenings there were dance performances and concerts. One night I got to see a bunch of little kids dancing a traditional dance. I’ve never seen an eight year old with hips that could move like that before. Another night featured karaoke, and unfortunately a couple of people slaughtered the songs, “Beat It” and “Imagine”.. (By the way, MJ is a huuuge deal here. One of my students told me one day that he had made up a dance à la The Jackson 5 to the “Hello” song I had taught them, and that he wanted to perform it for the class—really wish I’d had a video camera for this moment. It was quite possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, and the dance was not bad either. ) Anyway, the skippers of these giant catamarans start out in the northeastern French town of Saint Malo and race to Guadeloupe across the Atlantic Ocean, by themselves. I was lucky enough to see the first Guadeloupean arrive at the finish line because a friend of ours here invited me and Marina out in their speedboat to see him arrive. It was pretty special; there were tons of other boats out there all waiting to watch this guy complete his long journey.
Pointe a Pitre during La Route du Rhum
one of the catamarans
In other news, I am now teaching at an English school on Wednesdays—it’s a school where kids come for the morning from 8:30-12:30 and have an English lesson and then do some sort of craft and have a snack. It’s sort of part teaching, part baby-sitting. It’s a lot of fun, but definitely challenging, mostly because I am in charge of 10 5 and 6 yr olds for these 4 hours. And I’m not so good with this age group—granted, they’re adorable, and a lot of them learn really fast and are very bright, but I have a hard time getting them to cooperate and not just run around all over the place or pick at each other or play with their Pokémon cards or sleep. But I’m learning, sort of. They also can’t read or write yet, so all of what we do is oral work. They really are cute though and they make me laugh, even if I leave every Wednesday completely exhausted and thinking I hope they learned at least something that day. The owner of the school is insistent that the teachers at the school be native speakers, so she contacted me when she saw my announcement I had put up on a website about giving private English lessons. When I told her that I didn’t have experience with this age group and that I wasn’t completely sure how to approach the lessons, she insisted that I would be fine, and that the most important thing was for them to learn from a native English speaker. I guess they’re hard to come across in Guadeloupe. So anyway, I’m doing my best, and even though I’ve never been the artsy craftsy kind of person, I try to make it work. Today one of the little boys named Yanis, who is 5, told me that he had a girlfriend in his class, in fact he called her his “amoureuse” which is more like a lover. And one of the little girls who is 6 told me that I wasn’t pronouncing truck correctly. “It’s not truck, it’s ‘truck’” (pronounced with a French accent). I’ve gotten pretty used to my accent being corrected, that is, my French accent, but that one came as a surprise.
In my regular job, teaching is going pretty well. I learned a couple of games and songs from the Irish lady who I replaced at the English school, and there are a lot of resources (exercises and books) there that I can use for my classes so that has helped me out. I gave a basic evaluation last week, testing the kids on a few easy questions that we had gone over, and seeing how their oral comprehension was. There was a huge variety in the scores; a lot of kids did really well, a lot did really badly, with very few in the middle. I realized that maybe the written part was a little too hard for them, but considering I had no idea how to give this evaluation and had no format to base it off of, I can’t really blame myself. I only found out I needed to give an exam from one of my teachers, anyway. So this week I guess I’ll try to teach them an easy Christmas song, of course one that doesn’t mention the birth of Jesus in any way, even though that’s what Christmas is about after all. The French are all about separation between church and state.
I almost forgot, my roommate Marina and I bought a car in November, and after dealing with paying for insurance and then having to fix the brakes and get a mechanic check it so we could legally own it, it’s really great to be able to move around, especially on the weekends. It’s a 12 year old Fiat Bravo, Diesel, umm that’s basically all I know about it other than that it functions. But it’s great. Now on Sundays, we can take the whole day if we want to and go to the other side of the island, and during the week we go to the beach for a swim after work. It’s really nice. And I took it out for a spin for the first last Sunday, and am still alive to tell the tale. (It’s a stick shift). Hopefully after a few more lessons, I’ll be feeling more comfortable, but for now it’s still pretty nerve-wracking, even after having learned the basics from my dad before leaving home. Will try to post again soon, miss everyone a lot, and hope eveything is going well at home. Gros bisous
For the Toussaints vacation in November, (All Saints Day—we got 2 weeks off) I went to Marie-Galante, a tiny island just south of Guadeloupe, which is still considered part of the "archipelago of Guadeloupe". I took the 45 minute boat ride over on the WORST possible day to travel by boat, meaning the day after a hurricane had just passed through the region. I honestly don't know how I didn't vomit. I closed my eyes the whole trip and tried not to hear the other people on the boat vomiting. Anyway, I got there safely and stayed with another language assistant, Libe, who has the same contact person as me. She is actually living and teaching on Marie-Galante--I admire her so much for it! I don't know if I could do it, but she has a great attitude, and it is definitely very tranquil and calm there, and the beaches are gorgeous, with hardly anyone ever there. Marie-Galante moves even more slowly than Guadeloupe, and as Libe put it,"you learn how to be patient by living in Marie-Galante". Libe has a friend who has a car there, so we took a tour of the whole island in an afternoon, and saw some really gorgeous seaside cliffs and completely barren countryside. We drove on some roads that seemed like no one had driven on for fifty years, and we had to weave our way through a herd of cattle that was blocking the road at one point. It rained on and off and was cloudy most of the day, so I'm sure it is even more beautiful with the sun shining on the water. With bright turquoise water crashing against the white sandy cliffs, we saw some of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen. Another day, we hitchiked to a nearby beach, and got a ride from some real rastafarians--quite an experience. I stayed for 3 days--3 very serene days, in which we laughed a lot, and had great conversation, and Libe cooked delicious food like paella and Spanish omelettes. yum :) I also got my first really bad sunburn here because I was an idiot and fell asleep at the beach. Yikes, what a rookie mistake. Oh, and I saw someone wearing a Pirates hat in Marie-Galante!! I really really wanted to take a picture with the guy wearing it, but I didn't want to bring anymore attention to myself. We were literally the ONLY white people in this big crowd of people at the time.
