Easter Weekend

I never really wondered about the Easter Bunny and why he brings little children eggs, or how he might go about obtaining eggs in the first place. But this Easter weekend, I again found myself at the dinner table, answering questions about random stuff that Americans believe. 

When you stop to think about it, this tradition is kind of terrifying.

According to my research, eggs and hares are a symbol of fertility, adding to the theme of Spring, blooming flowers, and new life. Also, in ancient times, hares were thought to be hermaphrodites, meaning they could reproduce without a loss of virginity and were therefore associated with the Virgin Mary. The whole thing about the bunny bringing candy to good children originated in Germany because apparently they needed something halfway through the year to keep their children in line.

"That's so weird and not very logical!" Say my French people.

What is logical to French people? 

Bells with wings that fly through the night.

For a few days before Easter, Church bells in France are silent to mourn Jesus. This was not an exciting enough reason for the bells to be silent, so someone fabricated a story about the bells leaving their steeples to go to Rome (explaining their silence) (also an excellent choice for a quick weekend getaway) and then they return on Easter, bringing chocolates and colored eggs.

Saturday night mass at the church in Le Tampon where Richard's mom sings in the choir.

Easter weekend with my Catholic in-laws includes spending 3 hours in mass Saturday night, (with a Pastor from Madagascar whose accent I did not understand) then eating fois gras and home-made mango chutney for dinner. On Sunday, they spent the entire morning cooking a feast for lunch (grilled lobster and cari chicken) while we headed out to the only two things open on Easter Sunday: the SPCA to see the puppies, and the Brocante, which is the town's monthly garage sale/market.

As a dog person, I need a dog in my life to survive. Since my dog is on the other side of the world, and us getting a new puppy is a stupid idea in an apartment, I have to get my puppy fix by making Richard take me to the SPCA as often as possible. Reunion has a major problem with stray cats and dogs (It seems to me that no one cared about the strays around the island for a LONG time... until the population of ugly, diseased cats and dogs started to become ridiculous...)

A very common scene at restaurant patios...poor puppy

However, cuddling with insane amounts of sad, cute puppies still could not fill the Charlie-shaped hole in my heart!!

To get to the SPCA, you have to go down "prostitute lane," which is just a road in the middle of tall sugar cane fields where tons of girls hang out all day on fold-out chairs waiting for customers. We passed a cop car on the way back though, so I think for those girls it turned out to be a pretty crappy day at work. 

In Reunion, if you have a bunch of old stuff to sell, you don't have a garage sale, because odds are you don't have a garage. Instead, on the last Sunday of the month, everybody who has stuff to sell goes into a giant parking lot and displays their items neatly on blankets. Or creepily in the backs of their beaten-down white vans.

I went with high hopes of finding some unique art, cool frames, or other deco stuff for the apartment but instead we walked out with some 5-for-1euro DVDs and books. Oh well.

After that we came home for the feast and spent the next few hours around the table eating, drinking and talking about life. 

We didn't see Richard's sister and her family because they were doing stuff with the kids all day...so we were slightly surprised when she called us up at 8pm after we were already back in St. Gilles. Her and her husband and a couple of their friends were itching to go out, so she was dropping off the kids and they would be at our apartment in an hour. This is something that they never do, so as you might imagine, we all drank a few too many whisky and cokes in the apartment and then decided to go across the street to the nightclubs. We danced for hours, drank lots of rum and a little tequila, ran around on the beach and stole beautiful smelling flowers from trees. I think it was an appropriate way to end the celebrations of Zombie Jesus Day. 

Adaptation.

Things that are starting to grow on me:

Wasps for dinner

Sparkling water

Incessant Cleaning

French meal times

"House Shoes"

The idea of getting my own car & driving

Reunion Island fashion

Espresso a billion times per day

Pineapple
Emmental cheese (it's on EVERYTHING)
Blood sausage

Speaking Creole (not me of course, but I am starting to at least understand when other people are speaking it...)

No dishwashers
Making meals from scratch

Hang drying clothes

Things I will never get used to:

Mosquitoes that love me too much

Grub worms for dinner

French parties because they last entirely too long

Getting violently ill like never before in my life. 

 (will my body EVER get used to things here?!)

Things seem to be moving in slow motion because were are in the middle of making several giant decisions that will all take place by the end of the year. That means we do a lot of talking/researching/worrying/reassuring each other in our free time now, which doesn't make for interesting letters home. (sorry) 

Luckily, I was invited to go to a fitting for a fashion show for a well-known brand here called L'effet Pei, which was great because it gave me a nice break from being insanely sick and/or stressing out about the future. (L'effet Pei is apparently is the number one competitor of Pardon, So I decided not to mention any of this to M. Pardon during our next English lesson...) They already had enough models for the show, but still wanted to meet me, so I excitedly hopped on a bus and spent three lovely hours with wonderful girls and skilled photographers. 

Also, I realized during this session that I speak/understand French like 60x better than the first time I did this sort of thing...and that made me pretty darn happy.

photos by Romain Piveteau

I met Chana during the fashion show for Mango last year, and ever since, she has been passing my name around to photographers and designers here...I am so grateful to her! 

Twenty Nine.

On birthdays, like on New Years Eves, I find myself trying to sort out life.

I guess we like to think of these occasions as an opportunity to turn the page. But in order to do that, you have to know some stuff first, like where you are, how you got there and if you want to stay, or where you want to go.

You know what my biggest unanswerable question is these days? I've tried to articulate it before, but I've never solved the riddle...it's still hanging there in a gray cloud, spattered with question marks. 

When is it right to fight for a relationship, and when is it better to just let it go and move on?

Brothers, best friends of 16 years, boyfriends, wives, fiances, parents, crazy Great Aunts...whatever...no one is perfect. And important people in your life are probably going to hurt you sooner or later. So what do you do after? I'll tell you what I usually do...I run. I quit the relationship and then I change cities. I change states. Sometimes I change countries. I change my phone number and email address. And then I start my life all over again and leave it in the past. Maybe I'm getting kind of old for that.

What would happen one day if I didn't run? If I accepted responsibility for my piece and tried to understand and forgive the piece that wasn't mine? Would the relationship rebuild, become something new and strong? Or would the cracks always be there, just cleverly painted over?

I once read that the purpose of relationships are so that you can be and decide who you really are. In other words, the relationships that you have with different people, places, and events are your platforms for being alive, in the way you choose to be.

I'd like to be someone who loves every person in my life unconditionally for who they are. Free from fear of abandonment, judgement or embarrassment, and instead, at peace. And if someone wants to work with me to rebuild something broken into something solid...well that's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Maybe that's what I'll try this year.

I hope it works.

GRAND UNVEILING...The Apartment.

At long last, here are the before and after pictures of the apartment. Sadly, the before pictures don't show you how incredibly disgusting the apartment was. French moving out/in standards are definitely not the same. I don't think anyone has ever cleaned the windows or door frames in this apartment since the building was built 50 years ago. And that was just the start of the icky-ness. I have never taken more than a weekend to move into a new place in the states. This took me and three other people (Richard's family drove the 45 min up here pretty much every day) two weeks just to get it clean enough to start WORKING on the apartment. Then a week after changing out old fixtures, etc etc we moved the furniture in...

This is what those little "cupboards" under the sink really are. Doors that open up to the floor. 

Richard's Dad installed actual cupboards for us.

He also got rid of the old crusted tiles, put in a new counter-top, and built a little table!

And we are already stocked up! 

The toilet---they couldn't even be bothered to just paint over this crap.

Then when we asked them to buy a new toilet seat they went with the cheapest option and broke it from screwing it on too tight.

Yay I built this little furniture thing!!! 

Hallway :-)

The bathroom was 100x more disgusting than this picture really shows.

Guest Bedroom (no air conditioning)

Our bedroom

Yay...there were already closets in both rooms...

but they looked like this....so Richard's mom and I spent two days repainting the closets and lining them with adhesive paper...

lol this is when i was building that thing for over the toilet.

I built the desk and bookshelf! woohoo

yay clean closets!

This is our rental agent, M. Bernard. He is a very animated character...he replaced the air conditioning in the living/dining room area. 

Our tiny picnic table for the in-between stage...the dining room table was just being delivered and still had to be stained/treated.

So last but not least was our battle with these stupid pigeons who live in the hole next to our balcony. During the day, they hang out at our place and crap EVERYWHERE. Then around 6pm they go back into their stupid nest and watch us. For weeks we contemplated the best way to kill them. Richard immidately wanted a gun, but since they are illegal in France, we started thinking more along the lines of poison, chemical sprays and beheading. 

In the end, we went with giant cacti and pointy bamboo. It works! Now they stay on their side. I guess it's ok because they're kind of a cute couple, they snuggle and hang out all day.

Our Street---Tourist land. All the best night clubs and souvenir shops. We get teased for living here but I love it...it's the closest thing to living in the US---things are open past 6pm and everyone leaves me alone when I walk by myself in my weird foreigner clothes! 

This is our building, we live in the second balcony up from the Nespresso on the left there.

So in the end, the apartment had almost ALL of our "Required Qualities." It is a 5 min walk to the ocean, in walking distance from practically everything, it has two bedrooms, a parking space, and now after one month of work, it's awesome. The rent is on the cheap end, at 800 euro, but Richard probably spent a couple thousand redoing/painting/buying new furniture for it. It was worth it though, because we are kind of in love with our little space. 

So now, everyone come visit us!! 

Hurricane Season

Each year, from January until about April, the Indian Ocean is host to a handful of hurricanes. None of them came too close while I was here last year, but this year Reunion was already hit dead on in the first few days of January by Hurricane Dumile, which cut off power and water for a week and destroyed some roads and bridges. (I missed that one.) Last week, Hurricane Felleng headed our way.

The big island you see on the left is Madagascar. We are to the right, the tiny little yellow X, about to get hit with the outer circle of Felleng.

Waiting for a hurricane reminded me a lot of waiting for a snowstorm or a tornado growing up in Michigan. Everyone keeps checking the weather online to see if the hurricane is coming closer. At night, kids are praying for an orange alert which means schools are closed...and adults are praying for a red alert which means everyone stays inside their house. Days before it gets to that point though, everyone stocks up on water, food, batteries, flashlights and candles.

On Wednesday, the waves hitting the island were so large, they were coming up over the barriers and onto the main road that goes around the island, smacking cars and knocking stuff over. They announced the road would be closed by 2:00pm, so at noon, Richard and I (and everyone else) made our getaway out of St. Denis and back to our friend's house in La Possession  where we would stay for the next three hurricane days.

Yet another reason I'm terrified to drive here...what are you supposed to do if a giant wave hits you!?

So then for the rest of the week, it alternated between wind and rain so hard I thought the house was going to come down, and nothing. The eye never got too close to us, so we just dealt with the outer hurricane levels, which apparently is child's play to island people. So schools continued, work continued...but with the road still closed, Richard and Cristian (our gracious host) got to work from home a little bit. Cristian is dating my friend Julie, and she was stranded with us too, so we had a cool little hurricane party. We had cute family dinners, drank some wine, and stayed out of the weather's way. 

Today it's back to sunny and HOT. I almost miss Felleng!!