Articles populaires – Tales of Tyre-racing, Makis and M'zungus.

22 octobre 2012

Turtling

We've had friends from France over this week. This is the first time people have come into my flat to stay, but everything went well. After taking them to a beach near our flat for starters, we went to N'Gouja beach to go turtle-hunting. N'Gouja is about...

Posté par calligraphy à 05:58 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, green, black, barrier, coral, beach, sea, friend, swim, turtle, hawksbill, moya, ngouja, seagrass

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30 janvier 2012

All Golfed Out

Last Sunday, P and I were invited to a "Grand Golf Initiation" organized by my new friends the Bretons of Mayotte. As P likes golf, and as I don't, we were asked to bring our instruments and at least play those. We ended up playing both golf and music....

Posté par calligraphy à 13:17 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, emily, accordion, bretons, guitar, music, recorder, sun, combani, golf, initiation, instruments, philip, ylang

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6 avril 2015

Stop Hitting the Teachers.

Recently, things have been heating up at school. We've always had stories of kids threatening teachers: a common threat here is something along the lines of "I'll kill you and your family", and that happens pretty often, especially when a kid has received...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:20 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: kawéni, school, teacher, students, violence, sport, backpack, attack, authority, confrontation, insult, retaliate, retort, threat

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5 janvier 2015

Bangas

Another fairly recent series of photos by a local magazine called 101 District. Mayotte is France's 101st department, so that number comes around quite a bit. Above are the boys' lodgings. At age 17 or so, the Mahorese tradition wants boys to build a...

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

Tags: mayotte, house, girl, boy, banga, friend, traditional, mahorese, corrugated, iron, cabin, tradition, wattle and daub, 101

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22 septembre 2014

Here we go again...

This time, it all started with a football match. Majicavo and Kawéni, two neighbouring villages, were playing against each other. Majicavo was winning 3 - 0 when the referee gave a player a yellow card instead of the red card he should have given him....

Posté par calligraphy à 17:12 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: water, kawéni, car, riot, barrier, boat, violin, violence, football, smash, window, block, burn, gang

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10 mars 2014

The rain in Mamoudzou falls down, soaks the road and makes big potholes.

We're slowly getting towards the end of the rainy season. It's been raining pretty much every day, but not all day though, just an hour or two at a time. The rain has - as usual - dug gaping holes in the roads, it's a right mess. Some of the roads I take...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:17 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mamoudzou, water, school, rain, sleep, rainy season, kids, language, chiconi, couch, excuse note, late note, umbrella, water water everywhere

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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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31 décembre 2012

Scenes in Mayotte

Two Mahorese ladies, decorator and decoratee during a Tourism Committee festival. They draw geometrical figures and flowery shapes on their faces for all sorts of ceremonies, from weddings to end-of-year school parties, generally with a white paste. Sometimes,...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:08 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, box, fruit, vegetable, zebu, fish, boat, market, ylang, water buffalo, face paint, distillery, fishing, letter

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26 août 2013

A Week In England

Apparently, when in Cornwall, one of the main things to visit is the Eden Project. So visit the Eden Project we did. It's the very interesting story of a clay pit which has been transformed into a living and growing area covered with various plants representing...

Posté par calligraphy à 03:45 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: green, mum, flowers, nanny, england, compton acres, cornwall, eden project, newquay, papi, poole, channel, surf, surfing

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7 janvier 2013

Out of Place

Mayotte is a strange place to live in. On one hand, the country is a French department and has belonged to France for over a hundred years. You can find La Poste and the Conseil Général, every village has a Mairie (town hall) and often a boulangerie (baker's)....

Posté par calligraphy à 03:29 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, car, shop, television, amazon, bakery, customer, land, mainland, post office, product, salespeople, technology

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8 juillet 2013

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Rules for the Tyre Race. Wear the official Tyre Race t-shirt while racing. Collect one number sign per team the week before the race. This number sign will be necessary to collect the remaining number signs for each team. Without the first number sign,...

Posté par calligraphy à 03:58 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, tyres, bretons, friend, race, run, tyre racing, soap, 30, cavani, edition, practise, stadium, stick

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11 mars 2013

High tide and low fish

The other day, a friend of mine - Mireille, the one I went to the circus with - and I went to the beach. It wasn't a particularly fine day, and the tide was high, but we tried to go to the drop-off anyway and see what we could find. We didn't find very...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:21 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: water, light, coral, fish, mask, beach, flippers, swim, breath, cloud, metres, overcast, sakouli, sky

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23 juillet 2012

Ben and Toirfia

We went to our Very First Grand Wedding on Friday. Just part of it. Grand Weddings in Mayotte generally take place in the austral winter months, read from June to September. Weddings here are very ritualised occasions. For months before the wedding, the...

Posté par calligraphy à 03:47 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: food, ceremony, salouva, women, henna, wedding, m'biwi, kofia, make-up, marriage, men, money, parade

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7 mai 2012

Music in Mayotte

We've been to a few concerts recently, to find out what the local music is like. First of all came Rossy, whose poster attracted P because of the accordion. Arrived at the concert a quarter of an hour before it was supposed to start, which seemed reasonable...

Posté par calligraphy à 05:56 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, music, mahorais, friend, instruments, concert, cordes avides, del, diho, jazz, maalesh, rossy, traditional

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10 janvier 2012

Happy New Year to all

P and I spent Christmas and New Year with my favourite people this year. When I got back, I was invited to a friend’s birthday party, where I was informed that I must be crazy to voluntarily spend any length of time in such a cold place when I live in...

Posté par calligraphy à 00:01 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: humidity, mayotte, cat, electricity, strike, boat, music, christmas, 2012, concentration, family, mould, new year, tree

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29 septembre 2011

He runs... he strikes !

It was the school cross-country race today. All teachers and staff had to be present, even those on their day off, which happened to be my case. We were sent into the undergrowth to cheer the students on and to give out water and sugar where necessary....

Posté par calligraphy à 02:12 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, food, girl, mzungu, school, teacher, boy, colour, country, cross, expensive, petrol, price, salary

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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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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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15 juin 2015

Tsoundzou

These are some typical roadside scenes in Mayotte. The above photos were taken in the village of Tsoundzou. There's a bridge over a pretty river, where various outrigger canoes were parked. The bridge is actually fairly new. It was started about ten years...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:20 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mamoudzou, mayotte, fruit, car, market, village, football, onion, container, kwalé, palm tree, river, tsoundzou

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25 août 2014

Alefa Madagascar! Part 1 of 2.

I enjoyed hiking in Reunion Island and liked the country very much, it has an interesting history and it's extremely beautiful. However, I don't think I'll be back, unless I can manage to get a transfer to live and work there. Madagascar, though, was...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:03 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: holiday, emily, motorbike, road, family, driving, package, trip, musician, madagascar, 250, kawasaki, malagasy

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10 novembre 2014

Raindrops aren't falling. Period.

The only existing postcard of Mayotte during the rainy season. The rainy season has just started. Just. As in two days ago. This is worrying the meteorologists. You see, Mayotte usually gets two lots of rain. A small spell, which usually comes some time...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:37 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: water, postcard, newspaper, mango, rain, november, rainy season, dry, sky, october, hollande, january, president

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3 novembre 2014

N'Gouja at sunset.

The place goes crazy about once a year, fighting over things such as salaries, football matches and the price of chicken wings, but Mayotte can also be a very beautiful place when it sets its mind to it. These photos were taken last week at the most touristic...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:34 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, mzungu, white, beautiful, beach, photo, sun, turtle, ngouja, sunset, afternoon, wednesday, weekend

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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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13 mai 2013

When in Spain...

I went to Madrid during the half-term holidays to visit P, who was transferred there for his job last December. I'd never been to the capital city before, so that was a very interesting experience. On top of trying to speak Spanish, I learnt a few things...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:43 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: food, holiday, teacher, emily, philip, learn, trip, madrid, spain, palace, shoes, spanish, week

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29 octobre 2012

Glass-bottomed boats make the world go round

There are several companies which offer boat trips in and around the lagoon, generally to see whales and dolphins. We'd heard of one which had a boat with a glass bottom, so we put our names down and took our friends out in that for the day. We went over...

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

Tags: island, mayotte, water, whale, white, coral, reef, beach, boat, sand, aquarium, dolphin, glass

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