THAT, my friends, right out the window here, right where the artificial lights stop and the vastness of night begins, THAT is the Indian Ocean.
This is what we American students at the Universite de la Reunion tell ourselves when we're feeling a little overwhelmed or a little underprivileged or a little downright confused. That's the Indian Ocean; we live here.
The problem, though, is that after a week and a half it really has sunk in that I'm here to stay. Don't get me wrong - I'm having a blast. In fact, here's a little summary of yesterday, easily the most adventuresome day yet....
So as a group of five Americans (four of which arrived 9 days prior, one 5 months prior) we set out at 10 am to take a bus downtown to the Car Jaune station (the buses that take you between cities.) There we immediately get on a bus going westward to St. Paul literally as the bus is pulling out. A pleasant enough 30-40 minute ride put us in this anticlimactic coastal town that had little more to boast than a great view of the mountains and a giant car dealership that was blasting "Get Low" to attract attention from anyone within a three-mile radius. A fifty-minute wait and a euro fifty got us onto a smaller bus that kind of resembled a Fisk Limosine to take us up into the hills to La Petite France. We arrived around 1pm, virtually being kicked off the bus at the end of the line, which was luckily about 300 yards from the restaurant we were headed to.
We settled in to a perfect two-hour meal of vanilla chicken roti, fish in a creme fraise, and shop suey, plus noodles, rice, vanilla coffee, and a tiny taste of a WAY too sweet rhum arrangee (a homemade rum). The food was fantastic and absolutely authentic creole. After lunch, we walked up the windy road a bit to a little essential oil distellery and learned out the distilling process works, bought some oil as a souvenir (and to use as perfume, mmmmm geranium,) and chatted with the jovial man running the distillery.
By now it was around 4:00 and we expected our descending bus in a half hour. We casually looked for a shady spot to wait along the road, since up in the hills there are no official bus stops. A 50 minute wait put us in a worrysome state, and long story short it was another hour and a half before we boarded the bus, sunburned, relieved, and able to say we'd stopped traffic and feared the worst. We got home safe, though later than we'd hoped, feeling sheepishly like tourists who can't read bus schedules correctly.
So anyway... that was yesterday. Today was another trip to the market and a lot of down time. I realized that I'm starting to really feel settled in here, especially since tomorrow marks the beginning of something resembling a routine for me - classes, cafeteria food, etc. Now the more pressing issue has become one of my emotional state. I won't bore you with a long excursus, but I will say this:
Last semester I learned that the spirit of God is water. Now I find myself living on an island. As big as the ocean is, I didn't think about it being salty. This may be a long and lonely semester, but I know that I'm getting exactly what I signed up for: a lesson in dependence.
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