Welcome to the Neighborhood, and the Tribulations of Tropical Bureaucracy

Ah. So much to tell.

First off, I've signed a lease, and I've moved in to an apartment very near the beach at Flic en Flac. It's a one-bedroom third floor apartment with two terraces- from the front one I can see the beach, and from the back one I can see the mountains. I am, however, not alone in my house. I've found that (in addition to tons of ants), I share the house with a few lizards. I've started naming them after notable lizards in zoology, paleontology, and pop culture. So far I have Godzilla, T-Rex, Komodo, and Geico. I'll probably have more to name, so if you've got good lizard names, I'm all ears. Lizards, I've been told, are the least evil of the household pests in Mauritius because they eat mosquitoes, ants, other lesser animals. They also aren't grotesque to look at like roaches, of which I've killed exactly one. It was New Orleans-sized, but hey, this is the tropics. 

In addition, I've found that I really like the neighborhood. There are a few good restaurants and an ice cream store. Oh, and the Indian Ocean. I've also found out that the other international students are renting a house very close to my apartment. Next, please let me correct some misinformation I'd passed along. There are eight international students this semester at UoM- five Germans, a Czech, a Finn, and me. I've met one German and the Czech. They seem like wonderful and interesting people. I constantly feel surrounded by wonderful and interesting people. And the Indian Ocean. In addition to the international kids, my real estate agent also lives in my neighborhood. She's French and terribly suave (note: this is not the first French lady realtor I met with in Flic en Flac who showed me properties that I wasn't interested in. This is the second, who negotiated the lease that I signed). She lives with her brother and they work together. She also introduced me to her Canadian friend, who works in exports. The Canadian friend in turn put me in touch with a man from a communications company here, who then set me up with an internet connection. Also, my downstairs neighbor, Lucia, has proven to be incredibly charming and patient with my French.

You would think that having signed a lease on an apartment, my banking woes would cease. This has proven to not be the case. After signing my lease agreement, I took a copy of it to my bank in Port Louis. My banker, the aforementioned and lovely Priyam, informed me that this was good, but that I also needed a recent utility bill. I told her that the utilities were included in the rent and that I wouldn't be getting one. To this, she responded that I would need a utility bill for the apartment in the name of my landlord. Having received this news, I called my landlord (read: Priyam called my landlord for me and explained in Creole exactly what I needed). Turns out, my landlord only recently purchased the small apartment complex where I live. Thus, he does not have a utility bill for my address. Perhaps you can imagine my exasperation. Priyam, though, was very clear that I needed something else in addition to the lease, or the omnipresent and ever-evil compliance department would close my bank account. Priyam then had an idea. I would get a telephone line. "But Priyam," I said, "There is already a line in the apartment and I don't think the landlord would see fit to letting me install another, and we've established that he doesn't have a bill for the one that's already there." 

She told me that she realized that, and she then tried to explain to me exactly what she meant. Being extremely fatigued and emotionally bankrupt at this point, though, I didn't even try to understand what she was saying, I just decided to trust her. She took me out of the bank on her lunch break to another telecom company in Port Louis. There, she explained to the manager that I needed a fixed telephone line for my apartment. I was still unclear as to what exactly was going on, but Priyam knew best. Eventually, the manager took my documents and made photocopies. I then paid him some comparatively negligible quantity of rupees. He handed me a land-line style telephone, but it didn't have a wire. I had just acquired "un ligne fixe sans fil" (read: a wireless fixed line). It cost me next to nothing and I will now have a receipt and a bill that Priyam can photocopy to stave off the malicious advances of the compliance department. I will admit, I don't really see the utility in having a fixed-line wireless telephone. If someone wanted a wireless fixed line, couldn't they just buy a cell phone? I will also say that, having been here just over two weeks, I now have agreements and services from three different Mauritian telecommunications companies. My cell phone is one company, my internet another, and the phone-I-only-need-for-address-proving-purposes is a third. (note: my cell phone bill might have worked, but I had arranged for a pre-paid plan because ironically, I thought it would make my life easier)

Also, classes started this week. I, finding myself once again in a crack in the infrastructure, have not yet received my full schedule of classes. I got the partial schedule from someone in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities just as, it turns out, my first scheduled class of the week was ending, unbeknownst to me. I have been all over that university trying to figure everything out, but I have yet to be able to get it settled. I've found that administrative functions here take a great deal longer and are arguably less reliable than those at home. I know my father, for one, thinks that the Tulane bureaucracy is difficult to deal with. He would invariably be astounded at some of the stuff I've been asked or told to do here in Mauritius. I wait for vast quantities of time. I speak in muddled French and receive replies in muddled English. All in all, it's a pretty standard bureaucracy with a couple tropical twists.

I do miss Tulane, though. Roll Wave! I would reference here the mascot of the University of Mauritius, but given its remote location, it really lacks peer institutions. Maybe that's why, as far as I can tell, it has no mascot. I would say, though, that if a mascot does exist, it is probably the dodo bird. The island of Mauritius was the only home of the now-extinct dodo bird. In fact, that might be the most famous thing about it. GoGo DoDo? 

I did, though, manage to attend a class today. It's called, "Socially disadvantaged populations and intercultural social work." Obviously, this is exactly the kind of thing that interests me most and simultaneously the sort of thing my father considers silly. I arrived at the classroom at 8:45 AM before class was supposed to start at 9 AM. There was no one in the room. I waited for a few minutes, and then concluded that I must have been given the wrong room number. I set out frantically in search of a staff member who could tell me where my class was so that I wouldn't be late. I was told, eventually, that the room number I'd been given was correct, and that I should return to class and wait. It was now 9:20 AM. I went back, expecting to find an empty room. I didn't. Though the professor had yet to arrive, many of the students finally had. Apparently, punctuality is not a tradition at UoM. Anyway, the social work program here is made up mostly of practicing professionals. Thus, I was one of the only people in my class today who looked like a college student. I also found that these people have every single class together, and thus they know each other very well. In spite of these things, I found them to be very accepting and congenial. One might expect that from social workers, though, right? I also found that the professor taught in English. You cannot possibly imagine how relieved I was. 

I've been getting especially frustrated, but I've also been cooling off pretty quickly. In the Indian Ocean.

Spotted: Alabama hat on a Mauritian. I said 'Roll Tide.' He stared blankly. 

Consumed: All manner of cooked foods. To be honest, I usually have no idea what I'm eating. Ah. Adventure.