In December 2012, it had been almost a year that I was living in French Guiana (South America), in the midst of the Amazonian jungle, in an open-air hut.
The area I lived in was near a region called Quesnel, which is about 14 kilometers south of Macouria, the latter a commune located near the ocean.
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Professionally, I was mainly giving Thai massage sessions (clients would come to me in the forest to have a massage), and now and again, I also offered 5-day Thai massage training courses in the form of a jungle retreat.
Anyway, the idea (and feel) of Christmas is a bit weird in a hot and humid tropical forest, but I can remember we had bought a small plastic Christmas tree of around 30 cm in height, which contained five little integrated, colored lights. We also hung a yellow cardboard star — the size of a football — from the ceiling. That was about it as for the decorations.
Christmas Eve and dinner, we spent with Beth, her husband, and some friends of theirs at their home in Cayenne (the capital city of French Guiana). Beth, my girlfriend’s longtime friend, was an American expat who had been living there for twenty years, teaching English at a high school. Her husband (originally from Britain) was a househusband, an aficionado of cooking and French wines, so, yeah, dinner was really exquisite.
New Year’s Eve we spent in Kourou, which is a coastal town famous for being the location of a space center, the main rocket launch port of France and the European Space Agency (ESA).
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There, we visited a lesbian couple — friends of ours — to have dinner with and celebrate the New Year. I explicitly mention “lesbian couple” because they had an extraordinary, funny habit: in their house and garden they would always be undressed for the upper part of their body sitting next to each other (no matter who was there or how many visitors were around), which exposed their breasts.
It makes for a funny way of conversation and communicating because if you want it or not, in some way your eyes are always involuntarily again and again drawn to the “dangling goods.” But, at some point, you get sort of used to it, although it’s still a somewhat “special” way of “hanging out” with friends.
The night — or next morning, actually, when we were about to leave — ended in the typical French Guianese style: our car, which was parked outside on the street, was broken into, with one of the car windows smashed. As it happened, we walked to the car just when the robbery was in full swing: two masked guys on a scooter left at full speed with our umbrella, which was their only loot.
Happy New Year.
