‘Faut en profiter de la Réunion !’ – That I have done.

    Though over the last few weeks I’ve missed the English charm of the chilly Christmas season, I have been super-busy with various activities, so the idea of crimbo has pretty much passed me by. Except for the icicle-lights hanging from palm trees and other such seasonally-confused décor, it’s obvious that Christmas here isn’t quite so much of a hyper-ventilating oh-my-god-only-fifty-shopping-days-to-go fiasco. And I am DOWN with THAT. As long as one also avoids the bigass French supermarkets and their overload of Christmas visual-screaming, it’s pretty nice to not have the constant reminder there.
    Here’s the lowdown of my last couple of weeks of my first term in la Réunion.

Volca-yes!
     La Réunion is a volcanic island, a mere 3 million years old (oh-who’s-a-little-moochy-goochy!), and two weeks ago we climbed up to the original volcano which formed it, Piton des Neiges, which has long been extinct. However, the other Piton de la Fournaise happens to be one of the most active and  most accessible volcanoes in the world, and a shield volcano with effusive eruptions at that, so it doesn’t pose too much of a threat even when it does erupt. So we were of course eager to get climbing up that hot stuff to get a glimpse!
    To get to ol’ volcy, you have to first cross the Plaine des Sables, a desert-like plain of dusty orange sand. After the trek across the surreal half-Mars, half-mid-West-America landscape, the approach to the volcano was even more impressive. Black lava fields dotted with scraggly shrubs were overshadowed by the mighty Piton itself, a dominating silhouette on the early-morning horizon.
     The hike up to the crater was fascinating; you could still see the lava flows from the most recent eruption in December 2010. I had optimistically bought a big bag of marshmallows to toast on the volcano, but clearly I wasn’t sufficiently informed to know that there’s only a bit of smokin’ hot stuff soon after an eruption and also on the other side of the volcy. Hot damn!
    Alas, when we were about half an hour or so away from the crater, the Heavens opened, and it started raining like Hell. Dommage! The incessant precipitation mocked us as we thought we’d escaped it on our descent, and it just crept back up on us again. Is it because I lied when I was seventeen? I’d put it more down to relief rainfall, but sadly it made us miss the view at the top. Sauf ça, c’était carrément cool!

‘Le Grand Bleu avec rien dessous’ – Wow, wow and wow.      I really did dive in at the deep end this week when I went on a dolphin-watching trip with WWF representatives. The dude who made the documentary was carrying out some research for part of the of-the-minute project; recording dolphin sounds and trying to understand the correlation between sound and behaviour. Essentially trying to translate dolphin ‘language’.
      So we got on the little boat and went out to look for dolphins. After around half an hour, everyone was suddenly signalling to two snorkelers bobbing about in the water. I wondered what on Earth the fuss was about, it’s just two OH NO IT’S TWO BOTTLE-NOSED DOLPHINS SWIMMING TOWARDS THE BOAT WOW!  They apparently like the movement of small boats, so we picked up speed to get them to follow us. At one point there were around ten dolphins swimming right in front of the boat, playing in the waves we were making with our hands.
     But I didn’t just stay on the boat. As the main researcher went to make the recordings, we were allowed to follow him and see the dolphins from under the water. Now, as I am one to be a bit ill-prepared, it took me a bit longer to equip myself and get in the water. This resulted in me being about ten metres away from everyone else. Having seen a lot of David Attenborough’s documentaries, I know full-well that in the animal kingdom, if a predator is chasing after a herd, it will always single out the little weakling lagging behind. So when in shark-infested waters, you can imagine I was a bit ... completely terrified. BUT, don’t worry they said, sharks never come near boats nor near dolphins.

     Seeing the dolphins about fifteen metres away, hearing all their sounds and clicks under the water, that was special.
  

Flying home for Christmas ...       So in just two tiny days I’ll be coming back to ol’ Blighty. Mental. I left in the height of the British Summer, and will be coming back in the darkest depths of winter.

       And what a term it’s been. I was told by many friends and family before coming here to ‘make the most of it’, and even here everyone loves to say ‘il faut en profiter!’. Having the opportunity to come here makes me doubly glad that I chose to continue studying French, and it really reminds you of the joy of opening up new worlds which you could only access if you make the effort to speak the language. I’ve got a long way to go, and it certainly has been hindered by the overload of anglophone Erasmus students, but I’ve tried all I can to break out of the high-school bubble of Université de la Réunion.

    So that concludes term one. I greatly look forward to the next one!
Thanks for reading my blog to those dedicated enough to even still be reading it in its entirety by now. ‘Preciate it y’all!
 

In a bit,

Sophie.

'Oté La Rényon, la làba nousava’ – Explorations of the Secret Island

  Until the end of November we were all rather swamped with exams and assignments. In the typical vagueness of Université de La Réunion, it seems some teachers will give us our results ‘some time soon ... maybe ... not sure yet’. Basically, if I ever ran a university, it would probably end up being like this one. Vague, disorganised and laidback. 
  Anyway, here I go with another update of island shenanigans. It’s been another eventful month so far as the holidays began and everyone is eager to get exploring.
 

I-I-I-I-I-I like-a coconuts. And lychees.

    During the stressful process of working on our group project, we managed to find time to sneak out of the library to go and nick some bananas from outside one of the campus buildings. Now that lychee and mango season has arrived, hunter-gathering is pipsqueak-easy, and we’ve already had a fruitful month so far with a bit of harvesting on our trip to Cascade du Chaudron. A short bus ride and about an hour’s hike away from the university, this little gem isn’t something we expected to find given that the connotations of Le Chaudron are of a slightly threatening and potentially dangerous area of Saint Denis. And with the 75+ waterfalls on the island, it’d be quite a project to see them all.

The best things in life are free 
     Last week I helped out at the ticket office at the university’s theatre, just about managing to count the money correctly and hand out the tickets to the audience, most of which arrived about half an hour late (oh, dahling, that is like SO Réunion!). And now that I’ve done this rather easy voluntary work, I have a special badge for special people so I can see shows at the theatre for free whenever I like. I’ve used this privilege to watch a Maloya concert (by far my favourite genre from the island), and an avant-garde French theatre company performing a play which included a man dressed as a bear in a suit swinging around his giant willy and a wall with lots of small doors with a hand that popped out of them which threw Barbie dolls and teddies. Disturbing as it was, I enjoyed that. It's like, symbolic man, you know.

‘On l’appelle “Putain des Neiges” – tu verras pourquoi!’ 
    Last weekend we ventured up to the highest point in Indian Ocean – at 3071 metres above sea-level,  Piton des Neiges is the mighty extinct volcano which originally formed the island some 3 million years ago.
    Before the Big Climb, the six of us went to the town of Cilaos, our starting point, which coincidentally happened to have a Maloya concert happening on the Friday night. What’s that? More Maloya? Wi, bin, mi inm maloya! Such infectious rhythms and powerful vocals, I find it particularly cool that it’s not just a music genre that was a passing phase – this 200 year-old Réunion style is still just as popular today. This is the group which we saw at Cilaos, just as a taster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iULIiX0uQ4
    The next day saw a seemingly endless steep climb, trudging up rocky paths through lush humid forest. Pretty much every time we passed people coming down the mountain, they would say the usual jovial ‘Bonjour!’ followed by a smug smirk of ‘et euh ... bon courage!’. And courage was certainly what it took, but we made it to the other-wordly summit just in time for sunset. Camping on the summit itself was a shivery experience; not one of us slept more than a couple of hours, but waking up for the sunrise that illuminated the view of the whole island beneath us was something really special.
    
     After a few hours of revelling at the views, we set off on the descent back down to Earth. Half of the group went off on another route to continue the adventure, but my half of the group had stuff to get back to the next day, and so took the route of Cap Anglais.   Notoriously the most difficult ascent on the island, we weren’t quite prepared for the hours and hours of knee-wobbling descent through misty primary rainforest, conifer forest and endless zig-zag ‘paths’ consisting of many four-foot drops for which I resorted to just crawling. Cap Anglais? More like Crap Anglais. Never have I been more ashamed to be English. The pain and torture aside, we passed through some beautiful scenery and seeing the wildlife there was a treat; particularly my first sighting of the lovely oiseau vert. It was overall a sweet, sweet weekend.

‘Bienvenue au ciel de La Réunion’ 
    I went paragliding yesterday; that was cool. It wasn’t really anywhere near as scary as I had thought, but when we first arrived we saw the vehicle which was taking us up there that looked like the Mystery Van from Scooby Doo, and it took three men to push-start it to get up the mountain. So putting our lives in their hands seemed initially not the best idea, but in the comical ‘Oh dahling, that is SO Réunion’ way, it was easy to laugh off. It took a short run up and then up we went, circling around the hills with the iron-roofed villages below, and some cliché like ‘and everyone just looked like little ants from all the way up there!’.  Soaring over the coral reefs was cool; it gives you a better perspective of how extensive this beautiful ecosystem really is.

Coming soon ... 
     After a meeting with the documentary dude this week, I’ve been invited to go on a trip to see (hopefully) dolphins with other visiting WWF representatives next week. I’m saving my victory dance for after it’s happened. The process of doing the subtitles has been long and difficult; I had to firstly transcribe the whole documentary, then translate it, and now all that’s left is the process of condensing it into subtitle-length sentences. And as a New York Times journalist is apparently waiting to see the documentary in a few weeks’ time, the pressure is certainly on to do a good job!
   Oh yeah and I’m going to the volcano next week. That should be cool/hot. Well, with the island's 200 microclimates, it could be anything really.

In a mere two weeks I’ll be returning to ol’ angleterre; how on Earth did that happen?!

 

‘Pour une petite île, c’est énorme !’ – November shenanigans

   This week marks the third month of being here, and shimmy oh-jangjang has it been busy since I last blogged. Aching from an unexpectedly long hike in Cirque de Mafate, and with a week ahead of rushing around in tropical heat trying to yoink some good grades, here I go with les évènements of the month so far.

Feeling hot, hot, hot – but someone took it too far

            As you’d expect on a tropical island as we enter the warm season, it’s getting pretty darn toasty. About three weeks ago, whilst walking to a roller disco in Saint Denis in the evening, we could see not too far in the distance a bright orange glow – this was no light pollution glare, but in fact the forest fire in Maïdo that had already been burning for about a week. It’s been extinguished now, but all in all it raged for about two weeks, consuming around 1% of the area of the island. As I had heard that there had been a fire in the same place last year, I had assumed that it was sadly down to the climate and was a natural occurrence. But in fact, more tragically it was started deliberately by an arsonist, and suspected to be the same culprit as last year. I do believe they have arrested a suspect, but it’s a story which is still developing.

            The roller disco was fun anyway; I fell over just once, as I was trying to do some kind of fancy trick of course.  I always find the best way to come out of a fall is to punch the air and say ‘Yay!’ with all the ironic enthusiasm you have.

              I’m in France, Réunion, Southern Africa, India ...

         A few weeks ago the Dipavali (Diwali) festival held its main event in Saint André in the East. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, the last time I visited Saint André it was a fairly quiet place. But that weekend we saw it at its best; bright colourful processions with pineapple lined floats, lantern-lined lanes and an Indian market. Whilst sipping on a sliced coconut, we enjoyed other culinary delights such as the usual Samoussa Fromage – who would have thought that the French and Indian cuisine experts would have worked together to come up with such a genius idea? Cheese samosas!
       Anyway, it was great to be able to go to a festival which was clearly so popular but also completely open and welcoming to anyone. The following day included La Holi, the festival of colour, and included dancing, a procession of a sacred bull, and la pièce de la résistance: a giant paint fight in the square with kids and grown-ups alike basically just going mental and spreading as much colour on the other participants as possible. Someone I met on the bus told me this was basically a festival of sharing and to get everyone to mix together and essentially be good painty friends. It was certainly effective and was brilliant fun.

       Seriously ... where is Nemo?

        I’m not too upset that the now novelty clownfish isn’t to be found in these waters, as during the first two scuba dives I’ve already done I have already seen colourful fish aplenty. The very first time I had to complete a baptême, literally a ‘baptism’, for first-timers to prove they can use the required skills. I had had two training sessions in the pool already, but going in the water for the first time was nerve-wracking, and I was told I was stressing out too much under the water so had to sit on the boat for the rest of the session. Rubbish. However, for the second session I was determined to  succeed and indeed I did so. We went to a depth of about 12 metres, lay on the seabed and glided through the coral with its array of colours and awesomely tropical fish everywhere. Amazing. In my first session, the instructor pointed upwards towards the surface and I saw a huge shadow just above us – my heart leapt. Oh my goodness, I thought, I never knew turtles could be so enormo... oh. Oh it’s the boat. Maybe next time!

       Hmm ... let me sea ... DEAL

  So after teaching my lovely family last week I got a call from the Abyss association in Saint Denis. I’d sent my CV to them and a few other places to enquire about doing some voluntary work or work experience. Abyss are a voluntary organisation funded by the WWF who do a wide variety of conservation projects, ranging from hands-on work, to making documentaries, to giving talks and lectures. So the guy that called me up told me they’d made a documentary about the whales and dolphins off the Réunion coast and would I be interested in doing the English subtitles for it? Erm, YES. I’ve seen the documentary and had a meeting with the dude about it; he explained that they do have pretty professional filming equipment thanks to the funding, and it shows from the incredible footage they have of them there sea critters. This particular documentary will be shown in conservation-themed film festivals in southern Africa. So after exams have finished next week, I will get on it. SWEET.

    Quatre jours ridicules!

  This weekend I had four consecutive days of activities, pretty much non-stop. Thursday was a 5am wake-up for diving, Thursday evening was travelling to the south and sleeping over at the Grande Anse beach after a par-tay, Friday daytime many hours were spent travelling back then concocting a Créole dialogue for our exam next week, Saturday morning we hiked in Cirque de Mafate, traversing incredible mountains and melting in the muggy heat, ending up at Ilet à Bourse to a Kabar of maloya, séga and reggae music. After camping over, surrounded by the straight-up peaks of the surrounding gargantuan montagnes and pitons, we hiked for another ten hours or so I reckon. Not without the occasional ‘Oh hot DAMN’ from whiney-o’Riley here, but it was worth it to see the views. And now I can hardly move for achiness. Hadn’t realised as well that there were no roads in this cirque; I had remembered someone telling me their grandma lived somewhere remote in the mountains and got a plane or helicopter to take her to the towns. So we really were in the wilderness.

  Exams finish next week, then I can do n’importe quoi!

Best wishes to all,

Sophie

              

‘Mec, j’peux pas croire que ça fait deux mois qu’on est arrivé ici !’ – Two months on on the island

        Alors, donc, voilà – here I am two months after touchdown in Réunion. Certainly getting used to the ways of this lil’ place by now, though once exams are over in November I plan to be travelling around the island. So, whilst I tuck in to some unidentified exotic fruit which I just bought from the market (‘Mais non, Sophie! Ça, c’était le Fruit de Poison!’), I shall reel off the various activities of the last couple of weeks.

Food glorious food!

In celebration of the two-month anniversary, I took my first trip to Igloo, the gelateria in Saint Denis. Curiously, as the server went to get me a scoop of vanilla, a John Lennon climbed out of the tub yelling ‘We all live in a Yellow Ice Cer-ream!’  Once he’d cleaned himself off, there was a big genealogical puff of smoke and he turned into Katie Wilding and she ate a big ice-cream with me and got a mention in my blog.

This week I arranged for a local student I met to come and teach me and a few friends a traditional Créole recipe – Rougail Saucisse. I clearly paid little attention to the subtleties of French cuisine, as when I told him I couldn’t find any saucisse in the shop, and had bought saucisson instead, I was met with a look of horror.  The real reason I had bought that was actually because it was cheaper, but evidently I made a big culinary mistake. We made my little invention of Rougail Saucisson anyway; a sausage tomato-ey sauce with curcuma and good stuff, I’ll be bringing the spices home to make it on request.

‘Alors, ‘l’espérance de vie’, est-ce que quelqu’un peut expliquer ce que cela veut dire?’ – Academic joys !

                 A translation (of my most likely incorrect sentence) : ‘So, this ‘life expectancy’ lark, can somebody tell me what it means?’  Woah there. Cited from my Geography class. As well as this gem, I’ve heard ‘ the global average fertility rate is eight children per woman’, and ‘the reason why many large cities in southern Africa have large bidonvilles (shanty towns) is because their governments can’t afford to cope with the growing population’. The latter of which led me to immediately ask my French friend next to me ‘... how do you say ‘corrupt’ in French?’ My, my.  So I suppose in order to get good grades we just have to go with the flow and play them at their own game. And if that metaphorical game happens to be marbles, they may well have already lost.

Free things!

                Last week I had a meeting with the volunteers who help out at the theatre on campus; I’ve signed myself up to help with show promoting and selling tickets for a couple of shows. Yay independence! One of the people working there had some exclusive free tickets to a piano recital in town, and knowing that I  “play” piano asked me to join! It was a-mazing. The four encores didn’t even suffice for me, and he played some juicy ol’ Chopin too which m’a fait plaisir!

‘Go East, they are all closed up...’

                A couple of weekends ago the whole lack of independence thing did start to get to me a tad, so I thought, right, I’ll play ‘Independent Women’ by Destiny’s Child and go and explore the East coast! Coincidentally, I suppose, the West coast of the island is, well ... Westernised. The East is where you can find towns which apparently resemble Mumbai more than they do Cannes.

             Turns out everything is closed on a Saturday, as well as Sunday, in the East (I shall return during the week). Dommage!  At one point I thought I’d struck solo-adventure GOLD – I could hear some very loud music and a microphone projected voice which carried over about five streets in a quiet area by the sea. Brilliant, I thought, a festival! It sounded great, I followed some other people heading in that direction, turned round the corner ready to see the – oh.  Turns out Leader Price had a stall outside, blasting out Kool and The Gang, mixed with ‘et aujourd’hui vous pouvez acheter trois fromages pour un euro!’ Dommage! Situated right next to a beautifully bright Hindu temple and some little Créole bungalows, it was just one of so many examples you see here of France just coming and stamping its big neocolonial foot on any space that might be left. Two things to add on that point:

-          Speaking Créole was effectively banned by Francois Mitterand when in power, if I understood correctly then ear-chopping was often a punishment.  And even now it’s strongly discouraged in schools and projected as a ‘dirty’ language.

-          I read in Le Quotidien that 180,000 homes are to be built on the island by 2030. Which then brings the projected population quite correctly up to 1 million.

Even so I did see some attractive buildings and did some general atmosphere soaking-up; you don't have to be at some tourist attraction to appreciate what's around you.

‘Les endormis jouent cache-cache! Naturellement ...’

                This weekend we took a trip to Jardin d’Eden, apparently a chameleon hotspot. Although sadly to no avail in that department, I participated in my very first hitch-hike, and did get to go beachside afterwards to see a metre-long orange sea cucumber shimmy towards us. Awesome!

  Oh and a couple of weeks ago I went to an extreme sports film festival, which we watched from a cliff overlooking the beach and the white horses of the Indian Ocean.  Awesome!

  OH and this weekend was also Réunion’s Oktoberfest ... ja it’s true. La Dodo did indeed lé la, but I think drinking fruity island beer was cheating a bit. Ah well ... Awesome!

  OH and I went to visit the Cool Family to teach; now their daughter knows how to say ‘The crocodile is dancing in the kitchen’ and other such useful phrases. I should teach them ‘Dorr’. Awesome!

 OH and I wore a palm tree to a party. Awesome!

 

Phew! C’est tout!

Hope all is well up there!

Sophie

 

‘Et maintenant, on se repose’ – Calmer times on the island

  Except for climbing up to the top of La Roche Écrite last Sunday; a hike which most people split into two days but we beasted it from 8am until about 5pm. Naturally, it was awesome, and due to the ever changing meteorological conditions at this altitude, we experienced: gloriously sloppy mud on the ascent; long steep rocky slopes with beardy green shrubs under the heavy heat of the midday sun; watching clouds swirl in the convection currents as the surrounding scenery played peek-a-boo; descending clouds on the rocky slopes transforming the landscape into a Mordor-esque scene; and primary rainforest surrounded by les nuages creating a Heaven-like descent as we couldn’t see further than the edge of the path.
 

   So that was cool.

  ‘Good opportunities don’t come to you, you have to go and make them happen’ – I beg to differ!

  I went to the Théâtre Vladimir Canter on campus a couple of weeks ago to ask about using the piano there. A dude working in the office asked me if I was English-speaking (damn! Apparently he only just noticed a tiny hint of an accent – the illusion is a work in progress but I’ve fooled some people already!). He said his family had taken on another ERASMUS student last year who came to their house to teach English lessons, and asked if I would be interested in taking the job.  

  So of course I said YEAH and went to their house out in the countryside near Saint Denis on the Saturday morning. I was greeted by the family, the two parents (both originally from Madagascar but have lived in Métropole) and the two kids (age ten and seventeen, both at a specialist music school and the elder brother is annoyingly good at piano). I had a tour of their lovely house, dotted with some incredible paintings which the mother just ‘does in her spare time’; lemon trees and a pool in the back garden looking out over sugar cane fields; ‘ and this is our spare room, you can stay here whenever you like!’. I restricted English-speaking to the lesson time where I had conversational practice with the parents and a more basic lesson with the daughter, and Frenchified it the rest of the time. My French hasn’t improved as I would have liked so far, but that feeling when you know you’re getting it right and you’re being as French as you can possibly be without donning a beret, well that’s a pretty awesome feeling.

  So these dudes it seems will be seeing me every few weeks and have also offered to take me on their randonnées and trips, come to rollerblading nights with me and basically give me the world! So many people here are so incredibly generous, it seems that the slower pace of life has resulted in many people wanting to enjoy life by meeting and sharing with people, rather than stressing out about targets and deadlines. Ooh how d’ya like that generalisation right there? :D

  Et quoi d'autre?

   This weekend was fun, I went to Saint Gilles to watch an Extreme Sports Film Festival from the top of a cliff looking out over the white horses of the Indian Ocean. Cool.
   And this week I’ve started at the drama class, so less improvisation-let’s-all-pretend-to-be-chickens-high-on-broccoli, and more scripts and ‘Oh dahling, I’m an act-or, you know’. Cool.
  One of the local students who we went to Cilaos with cooked a huge Créole meal for a group of twenty or so of us, which was super kind and also super delicious. Consequently I spent my hangover the following day on my favourite beach, sipping pineapple juice and surveying the coral for its plethora of wildlife (without even leaving the shore!). Cool.

  I shall be asking around to get some voluntary work hopefully related to environmental-type things, I'm finding it to be important to grasp some sense of independence in this place where it can be tricky (especially for women, annoyingly) to go too far without a car/at night/without Erasmus gang. Finger's crossed I'll find something!

  Ciao ciao for now now,

Sophie (of course...)

‘Mais il FAUT faire des bisous!’ – various observations of the amateur anthropologist

Generalisation-mania

  In terms of the teaching here, I do find it worrying how often sweeping generalisations are used in  both my Geography and Ethnology classes.
  Ethnology particularly, when the teacher refers to various tribes or non-Western societies, she uses terms such as ‘primitive’, ‘exotic’ and ‘just downright bloody weird’. Spot the false one.  Also in describing cultural differences in terms of emotional reactions, here’s a little anecdote she gave us to explain her reasoning:
  ‘I have a European friend the same age as me, and when her husband died she hardly cried! I couldn’t believe this because here in Réunion, as in many other places in the world, we are a lot more emotional. And clearly in Europe, people are a lot less open, emotionally.’

  So here I go with a few generalisations of my own, clearly in-keeping with the spirit:

20^th Century Boy ... wait a minute

   As is commonly known with more isolated parts of the world, there does seem to be a fashion culture here of about twenty years ago – think matching tracksuits and ‘90s hip-hop bright colours, mixed with an overdose of bling and intricately shaved facial hair. As I’ve so far only seen the Westernised side of the island, it’s really rather obvious that Western lifestyles and trends have infiltrated areas where people would claim to be Créole through and through. 

  Though still maintaining different attitudes (for example towards marriage, anything after the age of eighteen is considered getting on a bit), there’s a definite vibe of the youth of the island being sucked in by Western pop culture.

 Georgie Peorgie pudding and pie, kissed the girls ... just the girls

     I don’t know how I’d forgotten about the whole double-kiss French greeting, but I think when you suddenly find yourself having to do it about thirty times a day you notice it. And it also didn’t take me long to realise that men are obliged to kiss the women, the women are obliged to kiss the women, but are the men obliged to kiss the men? No. I feel almost ignorant having not noticed this before – it’s not that I mind this traditional greeting but I’d much prefer it to be equal for everyone. I have therefore, arguably rather indignantly, taken it upon myself to try and challenge these sexist conventions in my own little way. With the young people, the students, I always go for the male greeting (consisting of a side-high-five then fist pump). To the bemused reactions of the greet-ees, I simply say (in French of course), ‘well if you can, why can’t I?’.  Saves a lot of time too, and risk of catching a facial infection.

  Bah c’est tout j’ai rien d’autre à dire maintenant, à la prochaine ! Bisous ... à tous !

'C'est mon paradis, c'est votre paradis' - One month on in Réunion

And what do I have to show for it?

Well...

The Lessons

Of course choosing the most riveting topic to begin with, experiencing the education here has actually been rather interesting. If there would have been a sign over the entrance saying ‘welcome to the University of Dictation’, I would have been more prepared for the mouth-agape shock of the first lecture. In a first year Geography course which I’m taking, a reasonably clueless-looking professor stumbled into the lecture theatre, sat himself at the front, opened a book and read a text word for word as students frantically scribbled down or tapped into their Macs. “What?! No notes? No PowerPoint slides?” I hear you fellow students cry. Nah, nada, zero. And during the intermediary blabberings of the teacher, his sticky uninspiring voice was drowned out by the infantile gossiping of the students.

  Strong adjectives there, I know! Purely for the purposes of recreating a vivid image of our reaction at the time. Apparently it can be like this as a lot of first year students aren’t too bothered about being there, and go just for the bursaries that are available. Though we are supposed to maintain an open mind about different approaches to learning, this method I find particularly difficult to accept as useful or enlightening. Maybe I shall become so habituated to this that the intensity of Sussex learning will be a shock in fourth year!

The Fun Stuff

Waterfalls and Mountains 

  Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen more of the island, one trip including whale-watching with an au pair we’ve met here, and then going to swim in the plunge pool of an enormous waterfall and climbing round the back of it.

  Last weekend a group of four of us went to Cirque de Cilaos, staying at a local student’s house on the Friday night after going to a little birthday gathering with him and his super-cool mum (one of the first things she said when we met her was that she loves to party ... all the time).  Saturday we set off on the coach journey through the mountains; unfathomably incredible. The photos don’t do them justice. The hike on the Sunday was great too, once the clouds had descended and we suddenly realised ‘Oh! There’s another mountain!’ And I saw a Reunion tec-tec as well, a jolly fellow was he!

Activities

  There’s a first time for everything, including scuba-diving (albeit practising in a swimming pool for now), Danse Malgache (sounds rude? It’s in fact just a traditional dance from Madagascar!) and Improvised Drama. The Improv class was in fact rather an impromptu thing; I was strolling back to campus and some dudes I’d met at the soirée the previous evening invited me to join them, so naturally I went weez zee flow, as one should on the Year Abroad. Turns out it consisted of two hours of running around and being a weirdo, which happens to be one of my favourite pastimes. Sweet.

Music

  When you think of a tropical island, you can’t help but hear some kind of reggae-derived style of music in your head. Then you’d probably think it was just an audio stereotype, just as you’d hear a softly-played accordion if you thought of Paris. But here, there really is NO escaping sega/maloya/reggae! It’s like the soundtrack of everywhere you go, and though it’s all rather samey it’s a jolly upbeat sound which pulses through the island and really reinforces the idea that ‘Yeah, you’re on a tropical island, baby!’

    I had thought that travelling six thousand miles away would mean I could finally escape Rihanna, but alas I was somewhat devastated and terrified to find that she is actually everywhere. Like Jesus.  Only not good. I shall make it my mission to find a Rihanna-less place in the world.

Other blah

- Teaching job for a professor's son here

- So thankful upon the slightly-too-late realisation that one way of saying something in French = ten ways of saying it in English. Easier for us then, technically!

- Dorr

      That’s all for now, it’s a mighty effort to write this blog malarky but I hope it suffices!

Hope you are all well and bracing yourselves for Autumn as I’ll be preparing for the sweat-fest that this summer is going to be (mmm, attractive!).

‘La Dodo lé là!’ – First experiences of me island in dee sun

   After a twenty-four hour journey with a pit stop in Paris to meet the lovely Alice Yoeurp, my fellow traveller Becky and I arrived bleary-eyed on the island.  Palm trees lining every road, the city creeping up into the humbling surrounding mountains, brilliantly bright blue skies; in my state of semi-delirium it all seemed rather surreal.
 

The People

  On the first evening a group of twenty or so ERASMUS students decided to go to the seafront of Saint Denis, the capital where the university is situated. Most of us vaguely knew before arriving that the area of Le Chaudron (‘The Cauldron’; doesn’t bode well I suppose) had high unemployment and that there had been tensions between locals and students in the past. What we hadn’t prepared for was walking as, an albeit rather conspicuous group of Western students, and having rocks and glass bottles hurled at us by groups of local men. Luckily, we escaped unscathed except for one who was struck, but not seriously, by a roughly thirty-centimetre diameter rock. We had quickly learned our lesson about the rules of the ‘hood, and the belittling feeling of being negatively treated as the ‘other’.

  With the negative anecdote aside, the majority of local people I have met so far have been very welcoming and kind, including a mother who walked me all the way to campus when I’d become ridiculously lost on the wrong bus route at night. People seem to be very contented with living on the island (‘pfft, naturally!’ you might add); they are very proud of their largely peaceful and unified society.
   Interesting to note that Réunion inhabitants often mix religions – rather than being solely Christian, Hindu, Buddhist etc. , people select different elements from different religions and have a sort of pick ‘n’ mix identity.

The City

   Saint Denis is officially the capital city, but on such a minute island it perhaps wasn’t so surprising to find that there really isn’t the hustle-and-bustle of the dirty great cities that we know.  ‘A slice of Paris in a tropical climate’? Pas du tout! Think more a mixture of wonderfully ramshackle Créole houses and grand colonial mansions, sandwiched between mountain and sea and working on my kind of timetable (what is this ‘time’ you speak of?).
 

The Animals

   I have been rather excited about the wildlife here as it has turned out to be not quite as boring as the guide books make out. The humpback whales (baleines à bosse) are currently on their migratory path so we have seen them breaching very close off the coast pretty much every time we’ve been to the sea! And the google-able birds such as the red fody, common mynah, Réunion bulbuls and village weavers are an ornithological delight!

  A group of went to visit a turtle sanctuary and conservation centre, of course very interesting and a worthy wildlife cause. How pleasantly surprising, I had thought, the French showing a compassion for animals! But of course, they had to include a section of the exhibition about all the useful things you can make from turtle shells, how they are farmed for meat and the deliciousness of turtle soup.  Cue condescending pat on their French heads.

The Challenges 

    As well as visiting the preposterously idyllic beaches to go and pose with the mainly bourgeois French tourists, a group of us ERASMUS girls conquered a miniature mountain in sweltering heat.  Tough but terrific. Named the ‘Chemin des Anglais’, it wouldn’t surprise me if the French thought it some joke to say to their rival colonial Englishmen ‘Ah, yes, eef you go zees way, you will find lots of gold!’ whilst sniggering under their big curly moustaches.

   I am certainly looking forward to getting into zee swing of eet all, lessons start this week. As part of the ‘Journée d’Acceuil’ we went to a vanillerie today. DID YOU KNOW THAT IT TAKES TWO YEARS TO PROCESS VANILLA? Neither did I. Respect your ice-cream, dudes.

  The real challenge will be the next few weeks – so far it’s been a really ERASMUS –based holiday, basically. But I’m really looking forward to flaunting whatever French I do know, and learning the linguistic skills I lack.  

   Onwards and upwards, and I relish the challenge!

Hope you are all well,

Sophie.

  

La Réunion - 'Oh right ... where's that then?'

So I'm heading off on my Year Abroad to, not ordinary France, but in fact a French island called La Réunion. I'm going to be keeping a blog, in a narcissistic and obnoxious 'gap-yah' type-way of course, so that you can hear about my adventures (and probably linguistic misadventures) from the other side of the world!


  Many a question hath been asked about the island, so I thought I'd slap down a few links to enlighten those with any more pressing queries. I'll be much better equipped to inform on my return on Christmas Eve!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9union - Of course!
http://www.reunion.fr/ - Photos and over-dramatic music included
http://www.reunionisland.net/ - Blunt, honest facts such as 'There’s nothing terribly unusual about the fauna of Reunion Island'
http://www.photosreunion.com/ - Photo-mania