The Blue Mango now has t-shirts.

Je m'occupe avec ceci en ce moment. Ce ne sont pas des tatouages, juste des pages avec un prénom écrit en grandes lettres et décoré, ou peint, ou rien du tout, c'est selon :). Si vous voulez le vôtre, c'est facile, il suffit de m'envoyer votre prénom. Bonne St Valentin !

While looking for transport down to Lyon on a carpooling website, the destination "Amsterdam" flashed up, and someone was offering a carpool to Amsterdam for 19€ (a single train ticket is around 60€ from Lille). I looked up a host on Couchsurfing (a wonderful guy called Yari who had been "born, bred and buttered" in Amsterdam and knew the city

I went off hitchhiking again on Thursday, and came back on Saturday. A full day's hitching each way. It didn't go quite so well this time. Leaving Lille was fairly easy, but everybody was going to work and most were heading for Valenciennes or Brussels. I don't usually stay stuck in one place for more than five or ten minutes, but Thursday morning

This weekend was Braderie weekend. The Braderie is the annual car-boot sale in Lille, it's the biggest sale of its type in Europe. It starts with a semi-marathon around the town, and lasts for 33 hours once the final marathoner has crossed the line. I'd heard of it, watched documentaries about it on French news, read countless articles about it bec

When I arrived at my Mahorese school, I met several teachers who were in their last year in Mayotte. And universally, they told me that when you're in your last year, you're already at your destination in your mind. One, named Henri Denglades, was going back to his native French Guyana at the end of that school year. From September until the end of

Clockwise from top left: Samianti, Nisma, me, Nadhrati, Moinécha, Moinécha's boyfriend Matthias (who ended up in the photo for some reason), Hoby, Chaharazadi, Djaha, Nabaouya, Laïla and Nassifanya. And the odd unrecognizable fuzzy student. My kids have been lovely recently. Some of them, anyway. It started off with Fatima, who gave me an envelo

Une demoiselle dont je partage le prénom m'a demandé ce modèle il y a peu. ALL, avec une arabesque en miroir. Les premières arabesques étaient trop fines pour pouvoir être tatouées convenablement, donc nous les avons retravaillées et nous avons épaissi l'ensemble. Elle vient de me faire parvenir la photo du résultat. C'est beau!

La collectionnite... Joli mot quand j'y pense, comme la flemmingite, une consonance faussement médicale pour une théorie que l'on voudrait faire prendre au sérieux, un fait-semblant de maladie alors que c'est une passion. Et comme toute maladie, même fait-semblant, il y a apparemment du génétique : la grand-mère a la manie de collectionner q

Seen from Mayotte, the moon looks like a smile. This is the first moon of Ramadan this year. Ramadan, or a period of roughly one month when Muslims do not eat or drink between sunrise and sunset, but gorge themselves on fried food and sugary treats at nightfall, comes a fortnight earlier each year, so you can predict its arrival to within a day or