Madame, la pluie, elle tombe!

Talk about keeping things for a rainy day. There are so many rainy days here – and so much rain – that I don’t know what to do with most of them. Some do, though. There’s construction work outside at the moment – just underneath our flat, actually – where two workers in bright blue trousers are crépi-ing the car park boundary walls.

Taking shelter for lunch :)

Crépi, for the un-initiated, is possibly one of the worst substances known to man, or at any rate to the French. It’s basically a mixture of cement, sand, water and colouring which is spattered with a compressor onto any available surface, including the workers themselves, who are currently dark brown with yellow polka-dots. Sexy. Crépi gets everywhere, crépi is full of little hard bits and consequently, crépi quickly becomes rather painful if you go too near it. Nanny and Papi are experts on crépi.  This particular crépi is a creamy yellow colour, and despite its texture, is definitely an improvement on the breeze-block walls we had yesterday.

Meanwhile, we’ve been arranging the flat. The Mr Bricolage catalogue arrived yesterday in the post, and for once, we were bored enough from not being able to go anywhere to actually look through it. We subsequently acquired a table, six chairs, five screws, four curtains, three curtain rails, two curtain-rail knobs, one tablecloth, a partridge and a pear tree. The flat is actually starting to look like a flat people live in.

We’ve been feeling cut off from the rest of the world recently, so we’ve been looking into buying a TV to be able to watch the news, at least. Friends of ours then told us about a wonderful – and cheap – invention: a USB tuner which connects to the TV socket in the wall and allows you to watch television on your computer. This sent P hunting round all the possible shops for the elusive tuner, which he brought back four shops later for the sum of 30€. He added a cable, hooked it all up and can now watch the news to his heart’s content. Honestly, he’s as bad as Papi. The next step is buying a coffee table, so as to put the computer on said coffee table and eat dinner in front of the TV. Couch potato land, here we come. However, being in Mayotte, there are a couple of problems with said TV. First of all, the number of channels is half of that in metropolitan France, eight in total. Which should be fine, except that half of them are news channels. The other problem is the timing of the programmes. It’s French TV – as we are officially in France, although it doesn’t always feel like it – so they’re French programmes, at French times. Two hours before Mayotte times. Therefore, an 8 p.m. news broadcast in France becomes a 10 p.m. news broadcast in Mayotte… where we have to get up at 5.30 a.m. the next day. Never mind the 9-p.m.-turned-11-p.m. film.

All the pictures of rain in this article were taken just outside the flat: this is not a stream, nor a river, this is our street which was full of water!