Weekends here can be dizzyingly slow. They can also be full of parties. Ask just about anyone here what's to and they'll say, "Party". In the absence of other goings on, folks gather and dance and drink a fair amount and so we get to know each other fairly quickly. It's nice.
Last weekend our new teammate Greg had his twenty-somethingth birthday and declared it a Funk party. Oddly enough, in the average Chinoise (the FG equivelant of a bodega) one can find neon afros, giant gaudy sunglasses and even hair picks, so the revelers were well equipped. James Brown, Jackson Five, P-funk and Aretha made audio appearances. The party throbbed along until at least 3AM when I hit the road. By then a good portion of the funksters had moved, mostly clothed, into the swimming pool which had long since turned murky.
Perhaps it was the weekend before that that a bunch of us campus folks got together to turn some unused greenhouse space into a veggie patch. Afterwards we grilled at my (and Seth's) place. More and more people arrived and before long there were conversations running concurrently in French, English, Spanish, German and Portuguese. Love it. Probably much of this confluence of international minds and talents represents western glut and a waste of resources (is it really necessary/worth it to fly in a climber from Brooklyn?). That said, it's an amazing group of people and I feel lucky to have stumbled into the fold.
Besides parties there is the beach. On weekends I try to take at least one long, beach stroll before it gets too hot. The beach is wide and clean but yields to a milenia-thick layer of goopy sediment. At low tide the goop sprawls miles out from the coast. Egrets poke along snatching out this and that. The sky is intense looking with clouds that are somehow always severe even when not at rain-capacity.
Walking East from campus along the beach plops you on the edge of the older part of town. As a general rule, the architecture in Guyane comes in two styles; colonial and boxy. Kourou is almost nothing but boxy. It's one of the ugliest places I've been. Parts of it rival communist Russian housing. If it weren't for Lifesavers colors and kooky giant satellite dishes everywhere, the place would be really hard to look at. There are also dirt-floored, tin-roofed shanties that recall pleading Sally Struthers ads. It's mind bending that this exists just kilometers from where a good portion of the world's satellites head skyward. Inland is the Saturday market, one of the better bakeries in Guyane, an open air fish market, and restuarants (about ten of them) that range from Chinese to Moroccan. I settled in a creole nook and ordered an iguana.
I suppose I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised when it arrived that it looked an awful lot like an iguana. The chunks of meat had distinctly lizard looking skin. I recalled my Americorps colleague, Regina. She was posted in Harlem and would lament when she forgot her lunch on Wednesdays. She was vegetarian and reported that Wednesdays were foot days in Harlem. Chicken foot, pig foot, etc. Peering into the stew I could imagine how she must have felt. The stew was dotted with half a dozen or so eggs that I supposed were also iguanan. These were so squishy and leathery that they couldn't be pierced with a fork. The best I could manage to do was to pin one down with a fork and slice it open. The insides were a lot like boiled, mashed and spiced egg yolk...and they were yummy. As for the iguana, it was tender and tasty, skin and all. At the first bite it proved to be irresistibly tasty. I took my time with it and considered that Michael Pollan probably would have approved.
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