A Big World from a Small Island

  10/08/2021 Two days ago, I came back from one of the best holidays I had ever had. Sunny weather? Check. Sea? Check. Beaches? Double check. The paradisiac atoll my family and I went to was Tikehau, a two-hour flight from Tahiti. Tikehau has about five hundred inhabitants, almost all of whom are fishermen.  When we arrived on 3 July, after a one-hour delay, we were welcomed by our hotel's staff. They drove us in a minivan for ten minutes, past hundreds of coconut trees, to a tiny port where a motorboat was waiting for us. We sailed for twenty minutes before arriving at an overwater cabin, the hotel reception.  Our hotel was called, drumroll please,..."Le Tikehau", with 37 bungalows, 2/3 of which are overwater. The first three days our bungalow was an overwater suite, with a queen sized bed, two single beds, a huge bathroom with a bath and shower, and best of all, a double-levelled outside deck with two deck chairs, a fare pote'e with a table and chairs, and a showe...

25/07/2021  On the 17th of December, my mother and I gave a presentation at the LioHe(六和) high school in Taoyuan, on the outskirts of Taipei. Mom's friend was a geography teacher there and she had invited us to talk about what is was like to live in Tahiti and France, to two classes of year-ten students and one class of year-eleven students, in Chinese. I was quite apprehensive as my Chinese level was that of a local eight year old but Mom said that she would talk half of the time while I switched the slides. LioH e is the biggest high school I have ever been to.  It has three buildings, a basketball court with benches on the side, a soccer field and a  FamilyMart  (a convenience store), in the main building.  Hanged on that building's facade, spread across the entire building vertically, were the names of all of the ex-student's who had entered top Universities in Taïwan that year. Spread in the middle, was the name of the only student who had entered Tai ...

21/07/2021 Diving bell design from "Sketches of Ceylon" Oil painting by Eugene Ransonnet-Villez  based off his submersible sketches(1867) Reconstruction of diving bell ( from   Nhm-wien ) Eugene von Ransonnet-Villez used a diving bell (see picture above in centre and right) to allow him to breath underwater. He sketched what he observed during his travels in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka).  Picture on the far right: a a→ windows                                      b b b b B B → weights                                      c → air tube                                      d → level of the water inside the bell                        ...

  19/07/2021 On the 8th July, after a week of preparation, a 21hr flight with my mask on and a lot of uncertainties, I arrived in Paris with my dad. The preparations involved asking for an authorisation to re-enter our country on the  Electronic Travel Information System ( ETIS)   platform , an electronic travel authorisation, a proof of vaccination for my dad and a declaration to show that we didn't have any Covid symptoms, plus the usual passports and plane tickets.  We travelled to Paris to visit our family and friends. I was born there and it had been my home for five years. My paternal grandparents live in an apartment on the fifth floor and her neighbours had lent us their apartment so we were on the same floor as them. The apartment measured 150 square meters with a wide entrance and mirrors everywhere. There was a mirror in every living space so that you could see your reflection no matter where you were standing. There were thr...

26/06/2021 In July 2018, after our trip to Taiwan and Singapore, I visited Macao with my mom. I had only ever heard of Macao, or the “Asian Las Vegas”, from movies. It was exactly like it had been depicted to me, from the huge hotels and casinos to the replicas of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. It seemed that everything was inspired by Italy, Portugal and France. The city’s occidental touch dates back to the sixteenth century, when it was a Portuguese colony and the oldest European colony in Asia. Macao has switch hands quite a few times between China and Portugal. After the Opium war in 1887, China handed Macao back to Portugal under the condition that they helped Hongkongers smuggle opium from India into China. During WWII, Macao’s inhabitants supplied fuel to Japanese planes. When the US found out, they decided to raid the city, but after protests, had to repay 20,000,000 USD to the Portuguese government. On December 1st 1999, Macao was proclaimed a Special Administrati...