day

  Seen from Mayotte, the moon looks like a smile.                      This is the first moon of Ramadan this year. Ramadan, or a period of roughly one month when Muslims do not eat or drink between sunrise and sunset, but gorge themselves on fried food and sugary treats at nightfall, comes a fortnight earlier each year, so you can predict its arrival to within a day or three. However, as with all important Muslim calendar days, the actual beginning of Ramadan depends on... [Lire la suite]

              Yesterday was UNICEF Heroes Day: a worldwide, running-applications-and-various-other-gadgets-connected run whose goal was to raise money to vaccinate children. The idea was to get everybody to run 10 kilometres and connect via various running or fitness-based apps, GPS watches or whatever to the UNICEF Heroes website, thereby tracking all their practice and the run itself. There was no specific time for the run to start: you could do it at any time on that given day, even in... [Lire la suite]

      On my last day in Lille, H had to work all day, so I dropped him off at his school, planning to go back down to Lille and across to Roubaix, where I'd heard there was an interesting exhibition about Camille Claudel as well as 500 or so wool soldiers that local artists had made. The enormous traffic jams going into Lille made me change my mind, so I drove up to Dunkirk instead. Please bear in mind that it was 8 or 9 a.m., not fully light yet, and -1°C. Drove through Dunkirk, making a royal mess of the traffic... [Lire la suite]

                  The original plan was to spend New Year's Eve in Brussels with a friend of H's. However, they hadn't managed to contact each other in time, and she was working that day, so we went up on New Year's Day, a public holiday, without warning the friend beforehand. Brussels is about an hour's drive from Lille, very easily done. H called his friend when we arrived in the city, she got herself ready, we parked in front of her flat and the three of us went off to discover... [Lire la suite]

              Sunday 27th April is Slavery Abolition Day in Mayotte. This is usually commemorated by a carnival, comprising various dances, an exhibition of some sort at the Tourist Office and possibly another event. On Saturday, something was planned to start at half past three. Nothing was said about what was to happen, just that there would be something in the Republic Square of Mamoudzou. I invited a friend along and showed up in time to see a wonderful Mahorese corrida. In a Spanish... [Lire la suite]