Bad kungfu movies

(One of the students at the school has offered to lend me a camera whenever I go somewhere worth taking pictures. So there will be new photos in the future afterall. But since I've already posted most of the really good photos I took before my camera broke, this post will consist of photos of goats. Enjoy.)

This morning, Yevens and I went to the market. Yevens is Jacque-Elie's cousin, but that doesn't really mean much since everyone in Bayonnais is related. You could probably play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (but with Jacque-Elie) and everyone in a ten-mile radius would be connected in two or three moves. I went for a walk on Monday and met three strangers, all of which were Jacque-Elie's cousins. But, back on topic, Yevens and I went to the market. This was the third time I've gone to the Bayonnais market, but the first time that I bought stuff. I wanted to get something for Sabine and Rosene, the two women that run the guest house, because they spoil me. Sabine cooks food for me (food that is beyond delicious) and Rosene washes my clothes in the river. Yevens even thinks of Sabine as practically a surrogate-mother, and refers to her as "our mom" and Sabine's daughters as "our sisters". You can buy anything at the market: fruit, vegetables, goats, donkeys, bootleg kung fu movies on video, etc. But, I bought a big basket of fruit for them. I bought 3 watermelons, 12 mangoes and 16 ginormous bananas, plus a hand-woven basket to put them all in, for a little over $3. I couldn't believe that I could buy 12 mangoes (the most delicious mangoes you can imagine) for 20 goudes (about 65 cents). I recalled the Bonner spring break trip in New Orleans when one of the freshman Bonners bought a mango for $2.50. And it wasn't half as delicious as the mangoes that I bought for like 5 cents a piece.

When we got back to OFCB, Yevens and I watched a movie. Not just any movie. We watched Rumble in the Bronx, the mid-90's Jackie Chan classic. And it was dubbed in French so I didn't understand most of what was said (although I greatly enjoyed Jackie Chan's nasally French accent). From what I understood, Jackie Chan was at war with an evil biker gang in the Bronx, but eventually teamed up with the leader of the biker gang in order to fight a mob boss who after them about some stolen diamonds. And Jackie Chan fell in love with his neighbour, Nancy, and had to help protect her little brother who was in a wheelchair. And then there was a fight scene on board a hovercraft. Or something like that. Yevens had a VCR at his house and a couple bootleg videos that he had bought at the market and we found an old tv at OFCB that no one uses since it doesn't pick up any channels. So Rumble in the Bronx was probably the first in a series of bad kungfu movies dubbed in other languages that Yevens and I will watch.

In other news, I am sleeping on one of the other bunkbeds at the guest house, because my old bed was attacked by Smog and his minions. Tuesday night, I woke up in the middle of the night and felt a nibble on the tip of one of my fingers. My hand had fallen in a little crack between the bed frame and the mattress, a good place for a rat to hide. I was half-asleep when I felt the nibble, so I wasn't sure if I had imagined it or not, and I searched my bed with a flashlight but could find no trace of a rat. But twice this week I have felt something move under the mattress. So I am playing it safe and switching beds. And I have re-fortified the windows. Smog may have won this battle, but the war is far from over.

I will write a longer post this weekend. There may be an expedition to the Fort on Saturday....