Christmas Day

Christmas Day on Reunion Island was the best tropical Noel I've ever had. The strangest aspect was waking up alone in the morning and opening my presents...alone. But in the end, it's hard to be blue when the palm trees are swaying and you have Bing Crosby singing Mele Kalikimaka at a high decibel!

My day was spent with Radical Tom, Australian wonderboy. After a quiet morning playing with the toys Santa brought, I made my way to Tommy's where small children in tighty whities were running around the house deliriously happy with their new presents. The parents cattle ranged their wild things, put some clothes on the hot little bodies, and away we all went into the hills for Christmas lunch with family friends.
My recollection of what we ate is limited to something resembling bread and pastes of different varieties--meat, vegetable? No matter! The true highlight was when Marie-Christine, the matriarch, went into the family vault and pulled out two fine bottles of Rhum Arrange. This is a Reunion Island tradition of white rum distilled for months at a time with different fruits and spices. As we were to discover later in the day, it's powerful stuff. Radical and I, as the representative foreign legion, were the recipients of these beautiful bottles, a fine gift indeed.

After we heartily helped ourselves to dessert, Tom and I slipped out the back door and headed south. On a previous 'round-the-island tour, I had visited a place called Manapany-les-Bains, a large protected tide pool. It had been my hope to return for a swim, and what better time than on Christmas Day! We arrived there in the late afternoon along with 700 of our favorite aunts, uncles, and cousins. The place was crowded but festive. Radical got to work taking shots of the place, I immediately stepped on a sea urchin. It was unfortunate, but did not keep us from playing gladiator on the rocks or "who can stay under the water longer." The sun got a little lower in the sky, my urchin spikes started getting the best of me, and we ultimately decided to head homeward. On the drive back, our friend Thomas who was expecting his girlfriend from Dusseldorf, called to say that she had been stranded in a snowstorm there, and could we please come and eat the romantic Christmas dinner he had prepared? The answer was obviously yes. But first we had to swing by my place where Radical performed life saving urchin spike removal from my foot. The local cure for this is to lather the infected site with a cream laxative that supposedly relaxes the skin and encourages expulsion. hmmm... Unfortunately (!!?) all of the pharmacies were closed, so we did it the old fashioned needle and tweezer way.

Onwards and upwards! We hot footed it--ha--to Boucan Canot and the candle-lit dinner that awaited us there. Having made the best of a sad snowy Christmas situation in the northern hemisphere, Thomas did not let us down with his culinary skill. We might have been in the heart of Deutschland had it not been for the 100 degree heat in his apartment. I brought the after-dinner entertainment in the form of a gingerbread man kit that my parents had sent from the U.S. A little rhum arrange and too much sugar later, we were rocking around the Christmas tree!

Christmas Eve

The days leading up to Christmas were strangely tropical. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing cookies, cakes, and other little treats to give to friends, but it just wasn't the same listening to Christmas carols alongside the whir of my air conditioner. This is beach weather: the trees are heavy with pineapples, litchis, and mangos, and the closest thing to snow is the white sand lining the coasts.

Next to the weather, another challenge of the holiday season is that there isn't really one here. In the U.S. we start celebrating Christmas the day after Thanksgiving: going to parties, Advent masses, seeing friends, listening to our favorite carols. I have come to attribute this over the top festiveness to the fact that this season at home is otherwise very dark and cold-- we need something to celebrate and look forward to; Christmastime lifts our collective spirit. The weather here, on the other hand, is sunny and beautiful all of the time, there is always a party or gathering of friends--no matter what time of year--so Christmas is just one more fun thing to add to the mix.

Nonetheless, I decorated my apartment the best I could and threw myself into the festivities. For Christmas Eve I was invited to my friends and neighbors, the Devictor's. They are a wonderful older couple from Marseille who have lived on Reunion Island for the past ten years. Every Christmas, I was to discover, their large following of friends and admirers travel here to bask in their generosity and fun. I was lucky to be amongst the guests and was even placed at the head of the table where my only requirement was to lead the crowd in late night choirs of American Christmas carol classics.

Devictor Family Christmas Tree

The guests from Marseille came loaded with fois gras and we ate more of the stuff than anyone should in a lifetime. Putting vegetarianism aside, I did not hold myself back. Robert Devictor, head of Christmas Culinary Arts made an excellent Rougail de Saucisses, the old Creole standby, and by the time dessert rolled around, we were all rolling around ourselves. Since this was a crowd from Southern France, we enjoyed the 13 desserts, a classic regional Christmas tradition that I once enjoyed while living in Aix-en-Provence as a student.
It was a Christmas that combined traditions from around the globe. One of the Devictor children, having spent a lot of time in England, brought the traditional British Christmas Crackers. This is a silly ritual where each guest is given a "cracker" which is a harmless paper firecracker filled with a crown, a joke, and a small gift. You intertwine hands with your neighbor, explode each other's cracker, and then jaunt around with your goofy crown for the rest of the evening. Highlight of my night.

Another tradition that is very typical to Reunion Island are "Les Lanterns Magique." They are large paper lantern-balloons. You light the base on fire and soon the heat lifts the lantern into the air--going quite high, I might add!!! Is that a UFO? The Christmas Eve sky was dotted with these beautiful balls of fire gliding into outer space. Lantern launching was followed by the traditional Devictor family cheer, brought to you by one too many bottles of champagne...

There's certainly no place like home for Christmas, but I felt that I was in the homiest place I could be on a night so far from my own.

My honorary Christmas relatives!

Rouge Celedon

A good friend and neighbor of mine, Anne Devictor, manages a small home and fashion boutique on Reunion Island's west coast. It is called Rouge Celedon and it is the cat's meow. If you are familiar with the women's clothing store, Anthropologie, then you will have an idea of what this place is all about--except that it's the real thing.

The store is a small two room paradise filled with the most lovely kitch-chic things you'll find the world over. The owner, Mademoiselle Poisson, designs everything herself and gathers much of her inspiration from the small Indonesian island nation of Bali. Most of the goods are handmade there and shipped to La Reunion, currently the only place in the world where one can revel in the Rouge Celedon mark. The store is not "wired," and therefore all transactions are recorded in small spiral notebooks, receipts are handwritten, and you won't find any sku numbers or barcodes on the merchandise.

Anne needed some help leading up to Christmas and I agreed to sit in a small corner of her heavenly little store wrapping presents. I have worked in retail stores before and the most depressing aspect of large American corporations is the requirement to best sales from the year before. "Ok, we did $10,000 last year, let's make it $15,000 for this year!" the store manager would cry over a megaphone. Here the industry is an art form, the owner is intimately involved in the production and sales, and business transactions are friendly, not pressurized.

If you've ever seen the movie "Love Actually," there is a scene in a department store where Emma Thompson's husband (who's quasi having an affair) goes to a jewelry counter to buy his flame a necklace. He's rushed because he's afraid his wife will catch him, but the salesman takes his sweet time adding the most ridiculous flourishes to the gift wrapped package. This was essentially my job function: to add pompoms, ribbons, and garlands--all tasteful, of course!!--to the lovely little cadeaux customers had bought for their loved ones. I had to laugh when I was met with the occasional opposition, "No, please hold the pompom, I'm in a rush!"

I learned lots of new vocabulary, enjoyed the Christmas shopping season with an ocean view, and participated in the lazy lovely local business scene.

Field Trip!

At the beginning of December, I was asked to accompany a group of first year patisserie and bakery students on their annual class hike. A bus was scheduled to take me, three other teachers, and the group of 25 students to a trail head in the mountains above school. Thinking back on my own high school days, our field trips were to museums, historically reenacted villages, and theater performances. We were always restless, rarely attentive. I was eager to be an accomplice to a trip where students would be encouraged to run through the woods rather than tiptoe through austere galleries. Up until this time I had fancied myself a competent hiker. Hanging out with kids who had been trekking these hills for their entire lives, I learned a lesson or two. The biggest victory of the day is that I didn't bite the dust in front of everyone. There had been some rain the night before and the trails were extremely slippery. As I was making the ginger steps of someone with wooden legs, the youth of Reunion Island were racing each other down the steepest, muddiest inclines you've ever seen. I was impressed. "Madame, just do this!" They would yell to me, as one kid did a back flip off a rock and the other a cartwheel down a cliff. Clearly they had a better idea of what they were doing than I did, so I stopped monitoring acrobatic behavior.

We arrived at our beautiful summit destination in the late morning, just in time to see an astounding view of Mafate and the Riviere de Galets before the clouds started rolling in. Museums, theater, arts, and culture are so important, but after this field trip I have come to feel that the simplicity and beauty of a day in the woods needs a place at school as well.

Le Port

In addition to my work at the two high schools, I am also giving English lessons at a shipping company in Reunion Island's port. The business, C.O.R., handles much of the bulk imports that hit Reunion on a daily basis. Ships come from around the world delivering bulk grains, metals, and fuel. C.O.R. meets the vessels and is responsible for discharging the products.

I have two students, Nathalie and Thomas. Nathalie sits at the head of the organization and is responsible for most of the large managerial operations. Thomas is on the ground as the head docker and handles all of the unloading. I work with both of them, one-on-one, several times a week. The lessons are very intense but useful in their line of work as they are frequently required to speak English with crews from around the world.
Yesterday I was granted exclusive access with Thomas to board a coal ship from Russia and a grain ship from China. There is a lot of maritime language and vocabulary that I don't even know, so I am spending a lot of time doing research from my end. I spent the afternoon taking pictures and documenting all of the different types of equipment and machinery that the dockers use on a daily basis. I was even present for negotiations between one of the ship's captains and Thomas as they worked out a time line for unloading the carbon. What do you get when you combine a Creole and a Russian speaking English together? WKLJalkjskd,ndlkfja;ois;lmfnghs!

So I know that I have a lot of work to do.

Here is Thomas, my student!

Gite up and go!

Last week I went trekking in Mafate with a group of very ambitious hikers. Having fairly little woodswoman experience myself, I typically let others make itinerary decisions for me. My friend in charge of the trip e-mailed me the trail names and I did my standard reflection, "No idea what that means, but will find out soon enough." Later that night I stopped by a colleague's house for a visit and told her what we were planning to do. I will preface her response by saying that both she and her husband have done the Grand Raid multiple times. This is Reunion Island's response to the Iron Man where foolish people resembling a new breed of epically muscular humans race the length of the island through the center mountainous cirques, covering 9,000 km of elevation within two days. She looked at me with pity and said, "If you make it home alive, give me a call." I was depressed.

The good news in all of this is that someone in our group had made the brilliant decision to stay in a "gite" over our two day hike. I am not sure what the worldwide incidence of gites are, but they are a huge phenomenon on Reunion Island. Essentially gites are small hostels or guest houses located high in the mountains. They provide showers, clean beds, and dinner and breakfast to hikers. In Mafate they are only accessed by foot or helicopter. The joy of the gite, in short, is that you can hike for days at a time and not have to carry a tent, sleeping bag, or heavy food supplies with you. If you suddenly find that the group you are hiking with is planning to do a more difficult version of the Grand Raid, you happily take any advantage you can get.

The picture below is of one of the big crates helicopters haul supplies in, usually making daily deliveries or trash pick-ups.The fearful build-up was unfounded as the group leader had ultimately partied too hard several nights before and was no longer up for the Olympic trials. "What a shame! I guess we'll just have to do that trail next time," I patted and comforted him on the back. (Note to self: do not pick up this guy's calls ever again).

Once the pressure was off and the itinerary rewritten, I had a really great time. We hiked along the Canalization d'Organgiers which is a tranquil trail leading into the heart of Mafate. From Cayenne it was a short distance to Pavillon, where we stayed for the night. It is a beautiful sight, trekking through these very remote corners of the earth. This is a picture of Cayenne as you approach it from the Riviere des Galets.
Maybe it was my overall relief of being alive, or the fact that I knew I was going to live another day, but I was in a very celebratory mood when we arrived at the gite. We were shown to our bunk room which was a very pleasant little place with a Buzz Lightyear theme. You have to chuckle over the fact that at one time a helicopter carried an entire crateful of Toy Story quilts, sheets, and posters over the impressive untouched ravines of Mafate. Everyone settled in, took their showers and started meeting the other hikers at the gite.

After a while a gal from another group invited us to play some kind of French trivia game, which was followed by another piping in about how fun it would be to play girls against boys; before I knew it, I was sucked in. Unfortunately no one realized that I was going to be the weak link in the chain of French pop culture fun, ultimately causing the girl's group to lose by an immense margin of 50 points. Onwards and upwards!

You might think that being hated by every women in the gite would have brought me down, but it did not. I proudly sat with the men for dinner--after all, they were very thankful for my presence. We ate a delicious meal prepared by the owners, multiple courses, everything that you would hope for after a day of backpacking. By 8pm the sky was black but made florescent by the stars. In the hopes of improving gender relations amongst the camp, we played a spirited game of fussball late into the night. Everyone was friends again by the end.

Here is a picture of the gite in Pavillon the next morning as we took off for the second part of our hike: