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Did you think that I was disappearing again? Those who follow me on Twitter or who are friends with me on Facebook probably know that I went back to Mauritius.

Everything happened too fast. On Christmas eve, all job-related procedures were completed (medical check-up, work visa etc) and I phoned my youngest sis. She bought my plane tickets on that same day & emailed me the e-tickets. I packed my small suitcase with some clothes, filled my big suitcase with things for my sisters, went shopping and on Christmas day, I took a cab to Changi airport at 10 p.m. I took the 1:20 am flight on 26th December. It was my first time flying Singapore-Dubai-Mauritius. I couldn’t get a seat on Air Mauritius and that’s why I flew on Emirates instead. I don’t want to criticise Air Mauritius but I’m seriously considering flying on Emirates again if I need to go back to Mauritius in the future & of course if I’m not in a hurry.
Singapore to Dubai took about 7 hours and I had to wait at Dubai airport for 4 to 5 hours (didn’t feel long because I was in the duty free shops) before the Dubai to Mauritius flight. Dubai to Mauritius took another 6 ¹/₂ hours. The tickets are more expensive than for Singapore to Mauritius on Air Mauritius but the food was better, the service was better. Enough said.

Something I noticed when disembarking from the Singapore to Dubai flight was that the plane was quite clean. I was impressed. Were most passengers Singaporeans? I couldn’t help wondering. In Singapore, people usually don’t litter because they risk getting fined heavily. On the other hand, I noticed that the plane for the Dubai to Mauritius flight wasn’t that clean when I got off the plane. The passengers were mostly Indians, French and Mauritians.

After I reached Mauritius, it took me a few minutes to get used to hearing most people around me speak Creole or French again and I smiled. This is home. I love that feeling of being back home, back to our sunny little island. :love: Well it wasn’t really sunny because it rained for a few days but my stay was still enjoyable.

I went to the beach once, went to Shout & Shotz once (but didn’t enjoy myself much because of cigarette smoke. I don’t have anything against smokers but I have breathing difficulties on and off. FYI, people aren’t allowed to smoke in bars/clubs in Singapore), met up with a few friends for lunch or dinner but I’ve been spending most of my time with my family. I didn’t have time to meet all my friends but hopefully, I’ll be able to see them next time. My parents weren’t keen on letting me go out at night and I had to stay at friends’ places instead of going back home after midnight because they reckon that our neighbourhood isn’t as safe as it used to be years ago. Mauritius is said to be an ideal destination for tourists but how do the local people rate Mauritius when it comes to safety, esp. when it’s not in the city centre? I’ve heard a few stories about people driving back home after clubbing , seeing bricks/crates/barrels on the road, getting out of the car to move them and then getting attacked & robbed? Something like that. Can anyone confirm those stories? To my non-Mauritian friends, please don’t get a bad impression of Mauritius. No country is 100% safe. I love Mauritius. (note: 2009 report about Crime and Safety in Mauritius. )

Staying in Mauritius from 26 December 2009 to 7th January 2010 was NOT ENOUGH. The last time I went back home was 2 ¹/₂ years ago and I had stayed for about 1 ¹/₂ months.

The good thing is that I’m back to Singapore with a clearer mind and feeling better than the last couple of months. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year for me. :flowers:

I will write about my stay in Mauritius soon and of course, I’ll upload some photos.
I want to enjoy my Saturday lazying around at home after this long, tiring week.

These are probably the biggest photos that I’ve ever posted. My photos are usually smaller than these.
One of my sisters sent me the photos that she took of our kittens back in Mauritius.


awwwwwwwwwwww . :love:
Cute right? :cloud9:

This one is my fave because of the ‘mustache’. :laughing:

There were 6 kittens in all. Unfortunately we are left with only 2 kittens now. My mum gave two of them(one of them was the black one I like!) to someone living nearby and two others (the two who looked very frail) died. The remaining two at home are healthy. Our female cat abandoned the kittens when they were born and my sisters took care of the kittens but they still haven’t been able to save all of them.

All good things come to an end.

That’s what the Mauritius Interactive(also known as MI) creator and main administrator Joey wrote on the main MI page. I’m not sure when he closed down the website but I heard about it last month. Apart from that sentence and his email address, there’s nothing at the Mauritius Interactive website now. :weeping: (Mauritius Interactive’s url changed a few times over the years but the most recent one that I know of is http://www.miweb.mu )

This means that it’s the end of Mauritius Interactive. It must have been really a very hard decision for the webmaster to take. After all, MI has existed for almost ten years. Users were able to sign up for membership as from year 2000 but at that time, there were few features available on the website. The main feature at that time was the forums. The personal pages or blogs were implemented around March-April 2001 and the webmaster started keeping track of the date of registration of the members as from Sept 2001. The commenting system was implemented in early December 2001. (information obtained from the creator of Mauritius Interactive himself. See: here.)

I think that I got interested in blogging because of MI. It was fun writing about whatever I had been up to, ranting about things which got me upset,posting photos and it was also nice to have people visit and leave their comments.


(Click on the photos to see a bigger version of the photos.)
They are some screen captures that I made out of the old saved pages. I was looking around in my old external hard disk and those those saved pages and even some old IRC chat logs dating back to 2002. Unfortunately, I haven’t found saved pages of the entries written before 2003. :faint: I’ll try to find more saved pages or screen captures and I’ll upload them there.)

Something I liked was the option to set the blogs to public or private view. I opted for private view because I liked to be able to see which registered member of MI had visited my page. (There was a Visitors page.) Some people opted for public view and non-members of MI could visit their pages. At that time and all the way up to 2005/early 2006, logging in on the Mauritius Interactive website was something that I did everyday. I enjoyed updating my blog and reading other members’ blogs. I made many new friends on the Mauritius Interactive website and even got to know them in real life. There was even a MI party organized a few years back at a night club. (I think it was at Arena.) It has been so long now. I’m not sure about the exact year. I think that it was in late 2003. That also was fun. Being a member of the Mauritius Interactive community was on the overall a good experience. However, some people created a few problems on purpose, ’stealing’ photos of some of the female members of MI ,writing mean things about them and posting the photos in a newly created blog there, hiding behind nicknames, leaving no clue about their real identities. Fortunately, the website administrators listened to the complaints, deleted those ‘fake’ accounts and even went so far as to implementing ‘Private pages’ on MI. I won’t go into the details about this but my main point is, the webmaster and the administrators of MI really did a lot of work on the website and they listened to the members’ suggestions and helped to solve the problems. However, despite all their hard work, a lot of people were really annoyed by the increasing number of persons who registered on MI with the main purpose of spying on others. Their own accounts were ‘empty’ and there was no information about themselves in their member pages. I hated that.

I stopped updating on MI one or two years after I left Mauritius to go to study in Shanghai. That’s mainly because I finally had a place to call my own, i.e, my personal website and blog. A friend gave me two domain names in early 2004 and even provided web space. I was overjoyed and concentrated more on updating my personal blog. However I was still going on Mauritius Interactive to see other people’s updated blogs. Then the Mauritius were hit by the sudden Facebook craze. Everyone I know got an account on facebook and less and less people were still updating on MI. Last year when I checked the Mauritius Interactive website, it seemed more or less dead. There were almost no updates. Now, Mauritius Interactive has officially reached its end this year. I can’t help feeling a bit sad. After all, there were a lot of memories there, the blogs, the comments and the emails. I wish that the administrator had given us some notice before closing down the website. I’m sure that like me, many of the members would have liked to save their own blog entries, comments and emails somehow. For me, my time at Mauritius Interactive was a record of a few years of my life. Now I feel like I’ve lost that record of those years.

I guess that now it’s finally time to say goodbye and let go of yet another part of my life.

(I have added information about Mauritius Interactive in my page Blogging before getting my own domain. I feel a bit silly saying this but I’ll really miss MI. )

I’ve joined a few online communities/forums during the past few years, for example the protag board, RBJ and dododsmb. However, they have all become inactive by now. I guess that’s why I’m not joining any other communities/forums now.

I got quite alarmed when I saw that my blog got nominated for Mauritian Blog of the Year 2008 organized
by another Mauritian blogger. I requested to have my blog removed from the list and I’m still waiting. What’s so alarming about that? Well, I don’t like my blog to be listed anywhere where many Mauritians might be visiting. One thing I noticed is that apart from 2 Mauritian blogs I’ve been reading, I don’t know the other bloggers. Ah.. and most of them seem to ‘know’ each other and are currently in Mauritius. To me it feels more like a local Mauritian Blog of the Year contest. I know some Mauritian bloggers who are overseas and who have been blogging for a long time but none of them were nominated for that Mauritian Blog of the Year thing. The ‘newer’ bloggers know each other and the ‘older’ bloggers know each other I guess.
All this got me thinking about the good old days..

I wrote about Mauritian bloggers back in 2004. (See old entry written on 19th August 2004 -> Mauritian bloggers. )
Like I mentioned in my About page,
Why this blog?
I tend to bottle up my feelings. Writing is the only way to make me feel better…
This blog also allows me to let my loved ones know what I’ve been up to.

They are still the 2 main reasons why I write here. (Also, maybe Email and blogging, Getting in touch with old friends as well.)
Most of the bloggers from back then have stopped blogging by now,some are on hiatus but a few are still updating their blogs. I’ve been on hiatus a couple of times already and I don’t update my blog as often as I did a few years ago but my blog is still alive even if I only update it when I feel like it.
I don’t maintain a list of Mauritian bloggers anymore and I have to admit that I don’t keep track of what’s going on back in Mauritius. At some point ( I don’t remember anymore. Maybe around year 2006?), there were more and more Mauritians blogging. I got an email from Stephane who was asking me if I was interested in having my blog syndicated in the Mauritius Blog Tracker. I said yes. That was on the 9th April 2006. On the 24th April 2006, I emailed him because I wanted to have my blog removed.
What I wrote in my email back then :
***
Hi!
I’m sorry but I’ve changed my mind about being tracked. I’ll be keeping the link to the Mauritius blog tracker because I enjoy reading some blogs tracked there but I’d rather not see my full entries(plus photos) over there.
It just feels too weird. I didn’t write with the intention of having Mauritians read my entries. As you may have noticed, some of my entries are like journal entries, i.e kinda personal and detailed. Most of my blog readers are people I’ve met in China or know online. Mauritius is a small country and gossips spread like wildfire. I hope you understand this and delete my entries there. (not to mention that linking directly to my photos might bother my friend who’s hosting me).
Thanks

aline
***

Now, more than 2 years after I asked to have my blog removed from the tracker, my feelings still haven’t changed. I’ve just visited the Mauritius Blog Tracker website and I noticed that the list of Mauritian blogs listed there has become longer. (Of course, not all Mauritian blogs are listed there.) I think it’s great that so many Mauritians are into blogging now. I’ve been reading a few Mauritian blogs from the Mauritius Blog Tracker but still, I can’t help missing the old Mauritian bloggers. I wonder what they are up to and why they stopped blogging.

Anyway, good luck to those participating in this Mauritian Blog of the Year.

-edited on 23rd Dec 2008 @ 11:58 pm-
The blogger organizing the Mauritian Blog of the Year finally removed my blog from the list. Hurray.

Bruno Julie won a bronze medal for Mauritius in the 2008 Beijing Olympics -54kg Batamweight boxing category. Yay for Mauritius! When I saw the photos, I was like “ey, it’s the guy with the orange hair” . :laughing: During the opening cermony, I was watching the athletes delegation from each country parade into the stadium and of course, I wanted to see the delegation from Mauritius. This guy caught my eye because of his hair.
See how a journalist described him… (source)
“I’m a very experienced boxer, and I felt I should win,” said Julie, who has a burnt-orange mop of hair that sits atop his otherwise shaved head like a plate of spaghetti Bolognese. His frantic, overeager boxing technique suggests a man who’s late for his dinner.

Congratulations to Bruno Julie and to Mauritius! :flowers: :party: :cheers:

This is old news(two weeks maybe) by now… but the HSC results were out in Mauritius and as usual, QEC (Queen Elizabeth College ,the middle + high school(all girls) i had attended) got the most laureates (again!It’s the same every year. Go girls!). All laureates will benefit from a full scholarship to study abroad. (as far as i know, there are around 30 laureates (girls and boys) every year and they all go to study in UK)
More info about the laureates there. (it’s in French)
Ever since the educational reform a few years back, I don’t follow the news when it comes to education in Mauritius . I’ve heard of a new reform not long ago but frankly, I’m not interested in knowing more about it because I think our present educational system is all messed up. I consider myself lucky not to have gone through that. I was perfectly happy with the old ranking system. I think that competition is needed to bring out the best in everyone. Bah. I don’t want to talk about education in Mauritius or about the government. I only want to post these pics, simply because I miss high school.
I saw the photos on an online community for Mauritians (where everyone can have their own personal pages) and asked Kendy (the girl who posted the pics) for permission to use the photos on my blog. She kindly agreed and emailed me the photos.
Here they are:
QEC girls,happy & excited upon hearing about the number of QEC laureates. I was once like them too, celebrating with my friends.

I like this pic. Number of fingers equals to number of QEC laureates. Twelve!
From left to right: Nadya, Kirsty,Kendy and Terry.

I miss my QEC days. Time really flies. It seems like not long ago that I attended my last Prize Giving Day at QEC.
ah yes, the QEC school uniform is like that. The length varies from person to person. Usually it’s knee-length or ( *gasp* ) way below the knee during the first year and gets shorter and shorter (above the knee) but still, at a decent length (for most girls anyway) when we reach our final year. For other girls’ colleges, the colors are different but it’s the same thing when it comes to the length of the uniform. The QEC Winter uniform (optional) consisted of green trousers (or jeans) and a white blouse. When I had first started attending QEC, it was even green trousers ,white blouse, black blazer and black tie(influenced by the formal British-style school uniforms) for the Winter uniform. I never got to wear that. They stopped wearing the tie and blazer when I was in my 2nd year. I don’t like green but I grew fond of my old school uniform over the years. I have a few photos of me wearing my school uniform somewhere on a CD. Need to look for them.

(Note: I said that I was happy with the old ranking system . If you (esp Mauritians) disagree with me or want to tell me why the new reforms are better, well no need to tell me about it. I don’t want to have a debate here. Everyone is entitled to his/her own preference. Comments will be moderated and deleted if necessary. )

We had a big gathering with the other Mauritians in Shanghai at the Shanghai Second Medical University a few days before I went to Xiamen. It was fun.

It’s hard to say what’s really Mauritian cuisine because of the ethnic diversity of the people of Mauritius.
I did some research to try to explain what Mauritian cuisine is like and also its history.

Quoted from The Republic of Mauritius Web Portal,

Mauritius is a paradise for the senses, not only for the eyes with its beautiful landscape, but also for the palate. Gastronomes will find a variety of flavours and aromas inherited from the different migrations through its history. Culinary traditions from France, India, China and Africa, the best-known and appreciated cuisines in the world, have been passed on through generations. The story of a Mauritian starting the day with a continental breakfast, followed by an indian lunch and finishing off with a chinese dinner is a common cliché.

Along the years, each community has adapted and mixed each other’s cuisine to their liking, which has resulted in a Mauritian cuisine. This can be seen in the Creole cuisine which is a blend of different ingredients and savours. The ever-present creole “rougaille” is served with a number of “achards” (pickles) or dals and rice from Indian origin. There have also been some changes during the last twenty years with the arrival of some fast foods: burgers, pizza and chips.

Anyone visiting the island should try a pair of dholl puri with a large glass of “alouda” or tamarind juice to have a genuine taste of Mauritius.

———-
Sometimes, I feel like eating samoosas, chili cakes, roti, farata, dholl puris,halim, normal sui mai (also called sow mai in Mauritius. Those that I have eaten in Shanghai are filled with rice and meat… ) ,gateaux arouille, briyani, etc.. but since I’ve never been into cooking when I was in Mauritius, I never learned to cook those.
Fortunately, there are other Mauritians in Shanghai and they can cook!! hehe
I’m trying to learn from them now.

Making Samoosas (also written Samosas or Samoussa)

gram dholl or Dholl gram or Dhal gram or yellow split peas… used to make chili cakes (called gato pima in Mauritian Creole) and Dholl puris. Unfortunately, it is not available in Shanghai. Same for black or red lentils. Varun brought this packet from Mauritius.

Chili cakes (called gato pima in Mauritian Creole)

The guys learning how to make dholl puris

Click on the link below for more…
Warning: 13 more photos
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So the day has finally arrived. I was looking forward to going back to Shanghai during my very first days back to Mauritius but now, I kinda wish I can stay one more week. I still have so many things I didn’t get to do and so many friends I didn’t get to meet. I plan to go back to Mauritius again in 2008. Hopefully, I’ll be seeing those friends who are studying in SG, UK and CA before that.
I started packing last week but I’m still not done. So far, I have a small suitcase, a backpack and a big suitcase. I have one more suitcase or sports bag(still haven’t decided which one) to pack. arghh… and I’m going to do some last minute shopping later. I need to go get a few things for a friend who hasn’t gone back to Mauritius since 1999 or 2000.

I’ll be posting some pics when I get back to Shanghai. I won’t have time to resize them now. I’ll reach Shanghai on Monday evening.