mayotte - Tales of Tyre-racing, Makis and M'zungus.

21 avril 2014

Strange food they have here.

These are banana flowers. They grow on the ends of big banana bunches like below. You have a hundred or so bananas spiralling downwards, and a big purple flower on the end. Lots of people eat yellow bananas. Here, green bananas are a vegetable like any...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:22 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: island, mayotte, banana, food, green, yellow, tree, flowers, plants, bunch, cooking, reunion, stew

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14 avril 2014

Majicavo

The village I live in is called Majicavo. Literally, it means "where there is no water". Like all Mahorese villages, it's a very poor place, but near enough to the capital (Mamoudzou) for people to want to be modern and Westernized. Also like all Mahorese...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:54 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, house, emily, shop, town, village, camera, kids, concrete, corrugated, iron, mosque, shack, douka, majicavo

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24 mars 2014

Two Classical Concerts Went To Market...

This week-end and last week-end, there were two concerts. Not the same one repeated but two different ones. The common denominator was the music school director's sister, Odile, who plays first flute in the Avignon orchestra and who sings too. She was...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:22 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mamoudzou, mayotte, flute, music, concert, sing, violin, church, classical, fatima, notre dame, cello, avignon, odile, romantic

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17 mars 2014

Hey to the Ferry.

P came over during my half-term holidays to spend a week in Mayotte with me. During that week, we played a lot of music and we ate out several times. It was on one of these times that something rather interesting happened. The restaurant we wanted to...

Posté par calligraphy à 03:25 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: dzaoudzi, mamoudzou, mayotte, holiday, emily, boat, philip, restaurant, ferry, salama djema, delay, engine

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24 février 2014

Put it on your head.

A series of rather interesting postcards has been released recently. They're all drawings of scenes in Mayotte. My favourite is the one above, as it's a mixture of two scenes I come across very regularly. Scooters here aren't just a quick way of getting...

Posté par calligraphy à 04:55 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, ladies, postcard, scooter, supermarket, shop, boueni, balance, street, head

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17 février 2014

Playing the violin on stage.

On the first day of February, the music school in Mamoudzou held its second classical concert. We'd managed to bring together quite the orchestra, with different - complementary - instruments, and different nationalities. One of the violinists was French,...

Posté par calligraphy à 04:19 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mamoudzou, mayotte, music, recorder, concert, violin, church, classical, organ, piano, cello, trumpet, viola

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10 février 2014

Dancing Nyota

There's been a folk-dancing workshop for the last few years here. It started the year I arrived in Mayotte, and was under the name of the Bretons de Mayotte association. Now, it's led by a man who has lived all over France, travelled all over Africa,...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:07 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: france, mayotte, accordion, bretons, guitar, music, recorder, traditional, dance, french, folk, violin, musician

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6 février 2014

The Box.

Sent: 06 January 2014. Received: 03 February 2014. Not too bad. Boxes and parcels always take about a month. Except that this particular one was coming from the UK, which the Mahorese customs weren't too sure about. They sent me a letter the week before...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:27 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, box, cat, post, send, letter, post office, england, customs, uk

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3 février 2014

Total Jumbo Strike

There are two big strikes going on at the moment. And being Mayotte, where nothing really ever goes as planned, they're both worth a mention. The first - and bigger - is the Total strike. Total is the one and only petrol provider in Mayotte, the group...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:14 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: france, mayotte, car, petrol, strike, supermarket, decree, job, jumbo, queue, reform, score, total, victorin lurel

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27 janvier 2014

Cyclone Alert

Last week, we had a cyclone exercise at school. Much more interesting than your average fire drill, where everyone just lines up under the big tree in the playground, and not as awkward as the earthquake simulation, where they all have to fit under the...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:33 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, school, teacher, quiet, lessons, test, kids, activity, alert, cyclone, exercise, instructions, vice-rectorate

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