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...

  16/06/2021 Hiva Oa Nuku Hiva          In July 2017, my family and I visited the wild Marquesas islands which has a total population of about 9 346 over 13 islands.    It is best to visit French Polynesia during the cool season between July and September. (Nuku Hiva, Hiva Oa, Ua Pou, Ua Huka, Tahuata and Fatu Hiva are the main islands) These islands are 1 418km east of Tahiti.  Our flight to Hiva Oa was three hours and thirty minutes long and there were only 42 seats in the plane so you felt like a part of it. Before we took off the crew asked us to weigh ourselves to make sure that the weight was evenly distributed in the aircraft for security measures. The Marquesans do not speak Tahitian, they speak Marquesan. They are very proud of their differences from Tahitians. In Hiva Oa, we had at first, been surprised by the locals' customs, they would hunt mountain goats and wild boars. Since these animals are wild the Marquisieans are allow...

07/06/2021 Moorea is an island of French Polynesia. It is a fifty minute boat ride away from Tahiti, French Polynesia's main island, where I've lived with my family for the past six years. I have a friend from Moorea who takes the boat each morning at 5h30 to make it to school by 7h15. Moorea is home to about 17 000 people, its population has more than tripled in the past 45 years. The word "Moorea" means yellow lizard.  Long ago, on the small island of Maiao a woman gave birth to an egg. When it hatched, a yellow lizard came out. Its parents called it Moorea. But one day the lizard became too big for them to take care of so they decided to abandon him on a canoe.  The lizard waited for its parents, however, seeing that they weren’t coming back, he understood that he had been abandoned.                                                       ...

09/04/2021 My last trip,  before Covid-19 struck the Earth like a meteorite and changed everyone's life,  was to Auckland, New Zealand, in January 2020.  Auckland is the economic capital of New Zealand, and Wellington the actual capital. My mom and I were supposed to spend 6 days in Auckland but we decided to stay four more days since there were so many things to do. We walked along the Harbour admiring  the boats bearing names such as Lauren or Janice or Mary Anne.....The bridge that you can see on the far left of the picture is a Drawbridge with a traffic light. It could be crossed by car, on foot or bike. Near that bridge was an open reading space. You could borrow a book and read it on the spot on a bean bag. We found a lot of bean bags in Auckland and none of them were attached with a lock. If this was in any other city, they would've all been stolen. We went to the cinema almost everyday since we thought, why not?   The spotlight of our trip...

  07/04/2021 On our family's trip to the US, we decided to discover the Yosemite National Park, in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. My mom hired a car from San Fransisco so we could drive there. Unfortunately, my dad scraped the side when he was backing out of the parking lot.... And of course, mom had forgotten to pay for insurance😩. So dear readers, don't forget to pay for insurance when you travel. The drive to our inn took 9 hours whereas it should've taken 5. Why? We got lost, because we hadn’t entered the right address in the GPS. Dad stumbled across a Christian camp. The campers called our inn for us and helped us find it.  It was 9pm when we finally arrived at the inn , we were so hungry that the first thing we asked was if they had any food. Everything was already closed....except the vending machine. Those instant noodles were the best meal I had ever had. Any kid who hasn’t  eaten anything for more than 6 hours will agree with me. We spent the n...