Hasard

I love how great things can just happen par hasard here.

A few weeks back, when I went to handball practice with my host sisters, one of the girls on the 17-and-under team, Tracy, struck up a conversation with me. She's from Spain and spending several months in Martinique teaching Spanish before going off to university. We'd tried a few times to set up a rendez-vous, without success, and then sort of lost touch.

Last night, at the handball match, I saw her again. She was, of course, a member of the winning team, and after the game, she happened to walk past me in the stands. I stopped her to say hi and we started to talk again. She asked me what I was doing the next day. Nothing really, I told her, just working. She invited me to come over to her house when I was done. Okay, I said, pourquoi pas?

She lives with her aunt right next to one of my schools, and when we arrived at the house, they gave me sirop d'orgeat (orgeat syrup, which tastes like sweet almonds) with ice water. Tracy then took me on a hike/tour of La Crique, the neighborhood built on the hillside behind her house. The road was steep, but the hilltop afforded pretty stellar views of the both the greenery (left) and the ocean (right) around Trinité.










We passed a maracoudja (passionfruit) tree, and picked some of the fruit to take home. The ones on the tree were either green or purple, but you're supposed to wait until they turn yellow to eat them.

We saw a really, really enormous cow.
We also saw a dead dog decaying by the side of the road. Its hair was all gone, and its flesh was crawling with worms. I almost lost my lunch.

As we neared the end of the descent, we passed by a house with a tree in the front bearing a fruit we didn't recognize. We decided to see if the people were home so we could find out what it was. After we'd rung the doorbell several times and calling out, an older woman came out. She told us her name was Marthe and that she'd been living in Martinique for 40 years, fifteen of which had been in retirement. She also told us the fruit on the tree was like grapefruit, but with an even thicker skin and less fruit inside, and she gave us each one to take home.

She also showed us a tree in her front yard called a multipliant, so called because it starts out as a very small tree but eventually grows a ton of trunks. Here's me standing next to it.


She then took us into her backyard and showed us her mango tree, her citron vert (lime) tree (they weren't in season, though), another type of tree that apparently becomes white in winter, and what she called her "lime" tree (they were really just huge lemons). She gave us each a lemon to take home, and then she gave us orange-lychee juice before sending us on our way.

On our way back to the house, we stopped at the station-service to buy Floups, which are the Martinique version of Otter Pops. But way better. There were tons of flavors -- bubble gum, pineapple, chocolate, coconut, milk, banana, you name it. I chose mint. It was bright green and tasted exactly how you'd imagine a mint popsicle would. And it was unbelievably refreshing after all that walking.

On the way home, I also ran into several of my students -- school was just getting out. It was cute, though. I love that my students are still young enough so that seeing their teacher in public isn't awkward yet.