Requiem

Spc. Nathaniel Aguirre, age 21

If you are a praying person, please say a prayer for my high school classmate Nathan Aguirre and his family and friends.

And also please say a prayer that someday all relations between people of different countries, religions, and races will be like the experiences i'm having here instead of what Nathan and too many others experience in Baghdad, and everywhere else in the world where hatred and misunderstanding have been allowed to triumph.

And whether you pray or not, please do anything you can to make that a reality.

Love y'all (i mean that)

send me stuff!

I have an address!

IYER Monica
30 Lot. Vayaboury
Rue de la Cayenne
97410 St. Pierre
Reunion, France


In other news, this weekend was mildly insane. Friday we had a bunch of other assistants come down from St. Denis and St. Giles. We all watched the St. Pierre Divali parade - lots of drums and girls dancing garba raas and fireworks. Then we invaded Vanessa's and my favourite Thai resto, and finally went out dancing til almost 5am.

Then the next day Vanessa and JJ and i headed out on one of our famous night hikes, into Mafate, where a local music festival was happening. JJ rented a car and we had to drive across the island, from St. Pierre to St. Benoit (see map below), which was really lovely, and then parked near the pass into Mafate. We started hiking at 8pm, got to the festival at 10, and the music stopped at 2am. For the rest of the night we sat with a collection of random people around a drum circle, half making friends, half trying to avoid people who we didn't want to be friends with. When the sun rose we started back out to the car, and ended up hiking with two French guys to whom we gave a ride. The hike back was really rainy so we were all wet and freezing most of the way down, especially since we kept having to use the air conditioner to keep the car windows from fogging up.

We were exhausted, and i don't think we really recovered until today, (Wednesday) as Vanessa and i both fell asleep at 10 o'clock last night and didn't wake up til 9.

I'll try to put up more pictures soon - keep those e-mails coming, and now you can send me snail mail too!

love y'all

a rainbow over St. Leu

more pictures to come!

The waterfalls at Langevin

...with bridget and JJ after our plunges from the cliff ;-)

worth a thousand words...

views from the airport in St. Denis

un peu de la geographie

I realize that a lot of my posts would make more sense if you had some idea of the geographie of the island, so i have provided you, out of the kindness of my heart, with a map, along with some notes on key places:

St. Denis: The capital, where i flew in and stayed for the first week.

St. Leu, on the west coast: Where i work, and also the surfing and paragliding center of the island. The first day i went to school i was driven around the city by three different people, two of whom felt the need to point out "the wave" of St. Leu. The world surfing championship was held there two or three years ago.

St. Louis: or rather, just above St. Louis in La Riviere is where i live now. It's an old sugar cane center that has a reputation for being kinda sleepy and kinda poor.

St. Pierre: "The capital of the South" is the only city with real nightlife on the island, and it's where, today, vanessa and i decided to rent rooms for the next nine months in a house near the center of town with 4 french boys. YAY!!!!!!!

Les Cirques: Cilaos, Salazie, and Mafate are the large rings of mountains that make up the center of the island. Cilaos is where we went hiking last week; Mafate is where we might be (potentially foolishly) doing a night-hike tonight.

Piton de la Fournaise: THE VOLCANO!! :-D.

so now you can have a better idea of what the hell i'm talking about - Enjoy!

love y'all.

hikes!

So it's only been a few days since i last updated, but they've been pretty amazing, thanks to my current roommates who are much more energetic and in much better shape than me, and thus push me to new heights. :)

On Wednesday we went for a long hike in the mountains, down one side of a "cirque" (a circle of mountains) and up the other...when i say long i mean long by my standards - a couple of hours - which is apparently nothing to a "real" hiker. Also, in British and Australian English, hikes are referred to as "walks" and going hiking is called "doing a walk." I find these terms mildly deceptive, as walking is something i like to do around cities with something calorific in my hands. But yeah. It was BEAUTIFUL and i felt great. We waded through a stream at the top of a waterfall, and saw a cute little red bird, and were presented with many stunning mountain vistas. The "walk" ended in Cilaos, a lovely mountain town where JJ teaches, and where they are right now in the middle of a lentil festival - basically your standard street fair except with half the stalls selling locally grown lentils and local wine.

We had just gotten home from our walk and were all pretty much exhausted and ready to fall into bed when JJ's phone rang and it was Cesar calling to say "pack your things, i'm picking you up and bringing you to my place to spend the night so that tomorrow we can get up at 5 in the morning to go see the volcano." And even though we were all ridiculously tired - we were going to see the volcano!

So at five o'clock the next morning we drove an hour and a half up into the mountains, and then walked for another hour and a half or more across a barren field of lava, above the clouds, climbed up the peak of the volcano and were presented with the view of a tiny new eruption happening right before our eyes. It was pretty amazing. I can't believe the number of things i've done and seen in just the past two weeks. It feels like years since I left Dallas.

I miss you all.

love y'all

longest week ever.

Good lord i can't believe it's only been a week since i updated. And i don't have a whole hell of a lot of time, so i'll make this quick.

Last Tuesday: Visited my schools for the first time. Found out i have 3 schools instead of just one. Even though everyone was super-nice to me, ended up feeling very lost and alone. Sent out an e-mail to other assistants begging for company and got invited to spend the night at a house with 6 other assistants, which turned out to be a mixed blessing, because they we're so settled and happy that it only served to accentuate my state of flux.

Wednesday: MUCH MUCH MUCH better. Meeting of all the language assistants on the island. I found a place to stay while i look for a permanent place, lots of potential roommates, got to spend all day talking to people...it was such a relief.

Thursday: School. Just observed classes.

Friday: Moved into little tourist bungalow in St. Louis (in the south of the island, much much closer to school than where i had been staying), with JJ (John-James) from Oxford, and Vanessa from Tasmania who i will probably live with all year. That evening had dinner at the apartment of a Reunionais English teacher, Cesar, who took us to a Jazz club in St. Pierre.

Saturday: Cesar took JJ, one of the other American girls, Bridget, and I up to the mountains to swim in waterfalls...it was incredible. We jumped about 45 feet into a lagoon and were really really impressed with ourselves. That evening we went back to the jazz club.

Sunday: Went with JJ, Vanessa, and Cesar to watch Reunion play Madagascar and France play Italy in beach soccer, then came back to St. Louis to have apertifs with our landlords, Phillipe and Rachel, who are super nice.

Yesterday: My first real day of teaching. Nerve-wracking as hell, as at one of my schools i'm basically introducing a bunch of six year olds to the english language, all by myself. It was so scary.

But overall, things are good. A two-week vacation starts tomorrow, so we have lots of time to prepare for classes and find a permanent place to live. And life in the bungalow is quite cozy...we have fun conversations about our lives and politics and culture and teaching and the differences between American and British and Australian language and culture. So yeah...will try to update sooner and more coherently next time.

Love y'all.

the adventure continues

First things first: i have a telephone and it doesn't count against my minutes when i receive international calls. So, if you have a decent international calling plan, or just think i might be worth splurging some time, CALL ME!!: 011.262.692.09.03.68.

All right...now, my promised impressions of the island:

1) It's beautiful. Like, beautiful. You stand on a street corner here in St. Denis and in two directions you see green mountains rising above you and in two directions you see the road sloping down to a sparkling ocean. There are flowers everywhere...bouganvilla and hibiscus and oleander and dozens that i can't name. So yeah, it's kinda amazing...pictures to come once i've found a way to connect to the internet with my own computer.

2) Globalization happens. The central shopping area in St. Denis is kinda like if the central shopping areas in Bangalore and Paris had a tropical love child. Apparently, 6 years ago the Western stores weren't here, but they've moved in with a vengeance. St. Denis has Lacoste, L'Occitane, Mango (an upscale Spanish clothing chain...kinda like Europe's edgier answer to the Banana Republic), and even a branch of Fauchon (Parisien gourmet supermarket). And, to my great chagrin, there are 6, count them, SIX McDonalds on the island. Sigh.

3) People are ridiculously nice. When i met with some of the other assistants, almost everyone had a story like mine about un reunionais who had helped them in a similar way. Maybe it's the fact that there isn't a huge amount of tourism, so dumb tourists are a novelty rather than a regular annoyance, but i've never heard of a place where the populace in general was so willing to be kind and helpful to lost american idiots.

So yeah, those have been the most striking things so far. What have i done?

Well, friday i met some of the other assistants here in St. Denis...everyone seems quite nice and i'm looking forward to getting to know them better.

Saturday i took the bus down to the south of the island (two hours each way) for a picnic with a bunch of English teachers and assistants in the South, and that's where I met my potential new roommate...her name's Vanessa Lea, she's from Tasmania, she's a vegetarian, and she seems very nice. Now if we could just find a place to live...

Sunday i took a walk in the morning, and bought a fruit salad (chopped pineapple and something i thought was avocado that wasn't, with salt and chilis) from a vendor and an orange brioche from a boulangerie and ate breakfast by the seaside, and then i had planned to go home and spend the day reading...and a little while after i got home was surprised with a new French roommate, Marjorie, from Lille, who doesn't speak any English and so provides a very good opportunity to practice my french (or make a complete fool of myself, but let's look on the bright side).

Today i discovered that there's nowhere on the island where one can exchange american travelers checks, then discovered that pretty much every two bedroom apartment in the city where we want to live was rented in between Thursday, when the classified ads came out, and today, when i called them. But there are two four bedrooms that sound nice, and there are two other girls, bridget and kyra, who might rent with us, so let's hope it all works out...

love/miss y'all