‘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...)