Busy Days and Changes

Tomorrow is a big day in the Bradley-Trombetta household.  We have two big events (three if you count Samhain/Halloween, a big favorite in our house).  It's Sam's first day at school and we're getting the keys to our new rental house.

Sam is starting the second year of "maternalle".  School here is done by year of birth and since it starts at 3 years and Sam is 4 he goes into the second year.  He's really looking forward to it and it seems that he's at the right level to start in the class so thats all good.  Aurelie assures me that his French is up to the rigors of classroom life which is good but of course all the other children will speak créole as well so that's another language for him to pick up.  He's been picking some up already here from the guys working in the hostel and it's pretty astounding how well they can learn languages (me, I'm concentrating on French, créole can wait!)

The school is 1.4 km (down a steepish hill all the way) from our new home, or what will become our new home between tomorrow and Thursday (we get the keys tomorrow and have booked our place here until Thursday to give us a few days to set up in the new place).

Our new place is a créole house, four bedrooms, a big living room with a terrace, WC, bathroom and a kitchen, all very nice. What sold me on the place though was the garden.  While it's not huge, it's big enough, the lower garden is dense trees (shade being important in the summer here), litchi, banana, custard apple and maybe more while th upper garden (where the living room and terrace open out to) is more open with grass and a number of coconut trees as well as other plants, hopefully we'll be doing a lot of our living out here instead of inside!

One difference to renting here from Ireland is that like in France houses are generally unfurnished. All that will be in the house will be the kitchen presses and hob so we have been busy picking up stuff for the house. Fortunately there is an active second hand scene here as a lot of folk come out here from France for a year or two and then return, also the local hypermarket has been celebrating it's birthday for the last couple of weeks so there has been lots of promotions there too.

So far, second hand, we have:
Bunk beds for the kids
A double bed for us
A rocking chair
A washing machine
A fridge

And new:
A vacuum cleaner
A microwave
Plates and bowels
Cutlery
A rice cooker/steamer (for the grand total of €9.50 on sale)
A stone coated (magic) frying pan - this thing is unbelievably good, go look it up online right now!
A spatula

We also brought over some bed linen, kitchen knives and a hammock.

Other than that we are planning on getting a table and chairs, a couple of presses/wardrobes for clothes, a dust pan and brush, some cups, some pots, bed sheets, big cushions or bean bags and a low table for the living room.  And that's about it, it's going to be a fairly minimalist household (I hope, though Aurelie isn't fully convinced yet) though I know that there is a lot of other bit's and pieces we'll need to get to keep the house going but I'm hoping to keep that to a minimum so that we can concentrate on the important things in life rather than just on things.