Soccer

Today was the first time in a couple months that I have played soccer. I am VERY proud to report that I am as good as ever (read: I suck.) Luckily my skills were overlooked due to the fact that both teams were playing against a common enemy-- the ocean, whose waves would creep up to our playing area and steal the ball from our feet. And I keep thinking my shins are sunburned because when I touch them they hurt, but then I realize that it's not sunburn pain that I feel, rather it's a bruise from smashing shins in an effort to get the ball. But still it's nice to have something to look forward to early on Sunday mornings. Plus, it's the longest workout I get all week.

Oh, and this is where we play.

Only

To make my phone calls down here, I have a cell phone, the same one I bought over a year ago. I bought it from this company called Only. Only is the “cheap” brand of cell phone service. The phone cost me 30 euros and is really just a basic, barebones phone. I can make calls and send texts, and take some grainy pictures, but that’s pretty much it. And the reception is less than stellar. Still, it serves its function.

However, over the last few days, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: None of the small grocery stores where I used to buy my credits seem to have the phone cards. I went to at least 6 different stores, both downtown and near me, all of whom said they were out. One only had cards worth 3 euros, which I bought a few days ago and quickly ran out. Today, after going to 4 of those 6 stores, I finally found another card worth 20 euros. I had to make a quick decision: keep looking and only buying as I needed (thus risking not being able to find replacements) or spending too much money for minutes I might never use. I quickly decided that it was better to be safe than sorry, and I can now make phone calls. Hallelujah.

No weird food today. Check back tomorrow.

Unplanned

Today did not go as expected. What was supposed to be a quick trip to the market got prolonged by a couple hours, after I ran into Jorge, who insisted on spending time together. The fact that it was was raining cats and dogs made it all the more necessary to stay with him in dry places. From there I went home to put away the veggies and fruits I'd bought at the market and headed to a friend's house, the same family I spent my final evening with on the last trip. I expected to only spend a couple hours there, and I ended up spending the whole day there, catching up, talking about all sorts of things, meeting a friend and possible subject.

Then I ran home because I was starving and they clearly were not making dinner for themselves. So I went home and had shark. Again, delicious. Although I think there might have been a piece of scuba gear in it. I don't really know.

Yum

Rather than recounting my day, I'm just going to talk about my dinner because quite frankly, it was the highlight of the whole day.

I took a ride down to the fish market this morning to buy two pounds of fish for about 7 bucks. One pound of fish was carangue, seen alive in this photo. Carangue is my favorite fish down here, and maybe my favorite fish anywhere. It's got the meatiness of swordfish with the thickness of whitefish. Excellent. The other was a pound of shark meat, which I haven't had in a while and am looking forward to trying.



Anyhow, I needed to figure out what to make for dinner with next to nothing in the house. So, I chopped up some onions, green beans, and cabbage, then sauteed them for a bit. I poured in some red wine and added garlic, chopped and whole. Then I threw in some mustard and a bit of water to make it more of a sauce. After a while I added about 4 ounces of carangue. At the end, it was too acidic, so I looked in the fridge, and there was a small tub of cream, right at its sell-by date. I threw in two dollops, and I was done.

The result:

Frickin' delicious. You can serve it over rice, though I served it over kwak, manioc flour. I'll be making this again.

Getting settled

Today was the first day that the market was open. I desperately needed to go, as the food in the house is all a bit questionable. Dominique, who is usually the one who spends the most time in the house and the cook of the house, is not around, and no one seems to have eaten the meals she left behind. So some of them are good, but others have gone bad, like, spit-the-food-out-as-fast-as-you-can bad. Unfortunately, as I lay in bed this morning, still tired from a long couple days, I forgot about this fact, so I jumped out of bed at 11:45 and hurried to get downtown before 1:30 so that I could get there in time to actually buy enough food to hold me off till Friday, the next market day. Despite traveling on foot, having just missed the last bus that could get me into town when I needed, I managed to make it, doing a lot of impulse buys to get the ingredients I'd need for a sauce tonight and fish tomorrow (except I didn't get any fish, but I can pick that up tomorrow, something I couldn't do with the produce). I spoke to the same merchant who was so nice to me near the end of my last trip, and she introduced me to her Haitian merchant friends, who all asked me to come back on Friday to talk (and of course to buy things from their stands). It's so funny to me to hear how they talk to me, because they talk to me like I'm a child. To be fair, they're old enough to be my mother or grandmother, but I'm just not used to being talked down to. As a language teacher, I understand the desire to simplify language so that even a learner can get what you're saying, and it's been a really long time since I've been on the other end of it. It's actually kind of nice.


Anyhow, traveling to and from town in the hot equatorial sun took all my energy, so once I got home, I was done for the day. I spent my day working on my dissertation and making said pasta sauce. Tomorrow morning, I get the bicycle that I borrowed last time I was down here (and hopefully the helmet, which I consider mine since I bought it and it doesn't fit anyone in that house), and I'll be on my way to zipping all over town.

An anecdote

Today was mostly a day to recuperate from the journey: sleeping till noon, walking around, getting reacclimated to Cayenne and picking up a few things that I needed, such as tropical strength mosquito spray and a card to put minutes on my phone. The bike that I used last time I was here has been returned to its rightful owner, and I’ll have to wait for Dominique to return so that she can take me to her friend’s house to get it back. Anyhow, onto the anecdote:




I spoke to Alex today about a topic we’ve discussed many times, namely the intersection of immigration, integration, and language in French Guiana. He pointed out to me that, despite all the institutional pressure to learn French (school, white-collar work, government, etc.), immigrants generally learn the local creole alongside French, though for this language, no institutions exercise any pressure. It is merely the desire to fit in, to become part of this society that they learn the language. I listened carefully, skeptical, as my experience with the Hispanophone immigrant community strongly contradicts this. A few hours later, having written an outline of my first dissertation chapter, I decided to go out to get a pizza. While I was waiting for my pizza to cook, a Brazilian man came up to the window and started talking to the chef (an African immigrant), the employee taking orders (a Guianese woman), a regular customer (a transplanted Frenchman), and me. And even though he was greeted in French by the employee, he immediately switched the conversation to Creole, where it stayed for the rest of the time I was there. So there is definitely something to this notion that Creole is a language of integration. The Spanish-speaking immigrants I’m used to talking to generally don’t see themselves as part of this society, but rather passers-through on their way to France.

Back!

In each of my trips down to Cayenne, I have become increasingly paranoid that during my overnight layover, I won’t wake up in time to make the morning flight out, the one and only flight that can get me to Cayenne on time. This has driven me to pull all-nighters each time that I stay in the airport. As a result, I am utterly exhausted on the plane and sleep like a baby during the flight. Actually, having sat next to a baby on the very first flight, I’d say I sleep way better than a baby (though to be fair, babies are really bad at most things, so I shouldn’t really be bragging). This caused me to miss the free lunch—if you believe that there is such a thing— that they handed out on the plane, which was a disappointment. Luckily, at the layover in Guadeloupe, they actually had food, a pleasant change from earlier trips when there was almost nothing to eat. When I wasn’t sleeping, I had an audiobook to listen to on my iPod, Tina Fey’s Bossypants, a very funny autobiography slash management advice book.

At long last, I arrived at Cayenne, much earlier than my previous flights here. I took a taxi home, and I could tell early on that the driver was taking advantage of me. Instead of going directly to Cayenne, he took me through a nearby town. In his defense, the house where I’m staying is close to the border with that town, but still, it added extra time to the drive. And then when I got here, he tried to charge me an “airport tax”, and that was it for me. Having made this trip twice and having never heard of such a charge, I paid him what it said on the meter and not a Eurocent more. I said if there was an additional tax that wasn’t going to show up on the meter, he should have said so before the trip, or he should have put it on the meter. He was pissed but he left without issue, only telling me I should look it up.

And unfortunately, no one was home in time to open the house for me, so I had to wait for someone to get home. Or so I thought. In reality, Joris was home and simply didn’t hear me knock. After an hour, his father — who lives rather close — came looking for him and found me waiting on the back terrace. He was able to call him, and lo and behold, I was able to finally get in the house after an hour. And now, I will finally be able to sleep.