Day 4

Day 4. Today was Chinese New Year! First we went to the beach with John and Kristen and the Caine family. President Caine is the branch president here and he is from South Africa so he speaks english natively. His wife is a professional opera singer from Germany. She is giving Jessica singing lessons which is paying in part for Jessica's parent's piano that they are selling to the Caines. And Jessica is singing in the branch the Sunday before they leave. My flight actually leaves Saturday night so I might not be able to see :(. But Jessica hates singing lessons because she does not like people looking at her and noticing her, and also because we have to work our other plans around them. I am really jealous though, I would love to sing for an hour with a professional german opera singer. And Jessica can tell that she is making big improvements. She practices her song at home and she really does sound beautiful, her voice is so sweet and clear and she has the most etherial vibrato. We definitely have to use her as a singing character, Devin. And, as she points out, she looks just like a princess.

Back to the story. I bought a snorkle on the way to the beach because that was the planned activity. J and K had these awesome full face snorkels that they had let us try last time we were at the beach and they were amazing! But, alas, you cannot buy them here and they are very expensive so I just got a normal one. For lunch, President Caine suggested that we get kababs from Gloria's (one of the food trailer/shacks on the beach). It had to be Gloria's because they are the best and everyone else just "stole" the dish from them, accoriding to president (even though kababs are all over the island) ;). He also suggested that we all get them with extra meat and extra cheese. So that is what we did. This is the first time that I definitively ate meat. I'm still a vegetarian, but I have decided to be flexible on the island to both experience the culture, and avoid being rude or unnecessarily burdensome. Plus Kebabs were Helaman's (Jessica's older brother) favorite food when he was here last summer. We topped off the meal with a pineapple and a canned sparkling apple juice. It was perfect!

That afternoon, Jeewansing and Emit came to take us to the China Town in Port Louis for New Year. Once we got there, however, everything was totally shut down. I swear there was never a china town more devoid of people than this one. The street was littered with confetti and firecrackers. That is when we made the connection--we don't celebrate New Years on January 1st! The chinese are no different! So we had missed Chinese New Year. But Jeewansing acted like he knew this would be the case... I don't know why we didn't communicate better. Se we kept driving. At first I thought that we didn't have any other plans and we were just driving around aimlessly. We stopped at a restaurant, but we went upstairs to a bar that was right on the beach and ordered drinks. There was a little bit of push back from Emit when we ordered virgin drinks, but I think it became clear pretty quickly that it wasn't something we were going to budge on. Jessica got a piña colada and I had a strawberry daquiri. We were there on the beach for dusk and it was beautiful.

At this point we did some more driving but I don't really remember it because I kept falling asleep. Jeewansing bought us a pizza and then drove us up to a lookout point next to an old english fortress that they now hold concerts in! The veiw of Port Luis at night was wonderful. The pizza was also the best I've ever had, but that may have to do with how hungry I was.