The Lost Weekend

Life in Mauritius, to some degree, has started to feel like life in Auburn.  Get up, pack lunches, wake the kids, feed them, get them dressed and off to school.  I head to school immediately after that.  Pick the kids up after after school athletic practices, and go home.  See if there is any homework to be done, and if not,  play a bit and then off to bed.  Check e-mail, catch up on Auburn work, off to bed.  Repeat the next day.

The parts that are NOT like life in Auburn:  get to the store every day so that there is fresh bread for sandwiches, make a separate run to the chicken store before all the good parts are sold (if I'm not there by ten I'm left with necks and giblets), get to the vegetable market on Thursdays and Saturdays and find the guy with the good potatoes, and, last, get my neighbor (the father of my Muslim friend across the street) to go to the market on Wednesdays for me, when the meat is fresh.  He knows all the good cuts to buy!  All of this is why everything just takes longer - it is all an individual step.  There are big grocery stores but the produce is of horrible quality and the meat looks just a few days too old.  Everyone goes to the markets.

So, to break this up this past weekend I took the kids to Wolmar (two miles down the road past Flic N Flac) to a five star resort for the weekend.  We went to the Hilton and did the tourist all inclusive weekend.  It was pretty amazing - every luxury was available and we did all the tourist things - glass-bottom boat rides to the coral reefs, pedal boats, torch lighting ceremony at night, and extensive time in the multi lagoon pool with waterfalls.  Of course, I forgot my camera so I have no pictures of all of this.  The tourists who actually stay at such a place for more than two nights (and I'm sorry, but those people are nuts - two days was plenty for me) were wedding couples (the Hilton does a lot of destination weddings on their beach), wealthy retirees from France, Germany and Denmark, and honeymooners.  We stuck out a bit.  The hilarious part was leaving this luxurious resort (for which I paid a months rent (20,000 Ru (735.00)) for two nights) to wait for the Flic N Flac bus to take us home (cost:  50 Ru).

Tonight was cricket night and I played too.  Great fun was had.  Not great cricket, but what the heck.

I've been walking to work some days, about 3 miles or so.  Sometimes I beat the bus to Reduit.  As it gets hotter I may lose my enthusiam for this.  Everyone thinks I'm insane.  Mauritians do not walk too much unless they have to do so, and the entire time I've been here I've seen about four people running for exercise.  The amazing thing is that the vast majority of the population is skinny, and they eat all the time.  But is not a typical American diet - the staple here are lots of fresh vegetables, rice, very little meat and no saturated fats. 

The picture above was taken from an overpass over the Moka river, which I walk across as I go from Rose Hill to CyberCity.  If you look closely you will see a woman doing her laundry in the river.  This is not too common (she was about the third I've seen), but in the poorer sections of some towns you will see it.  As I walked to the boys school this afternoon I go through a poorer section of Moka, and I saw that at a point in the river someone had built a sort of 'wash station' with the stones piled just so for slapping the water out of the clothes.

Sam with my camera on the bus.