This little lady joined us a couple of days ago at dinner, and a little research determined she is a female Giant Leopard moth.
Banana for scale.
Breakfast is also lazy, but not. Rather than fall back on our go-to granola, fruit and yogurt, I instead walk next door for pains au chocolat from our favorite bakery. Pastries, fruit, yogurt, all enjoyed in the sunshine on our front patio - and you know there was a second coffee, too.
Reading, blogging, relaxing - this how we spend much of the morning. Mario does a few more loads of laundry. We've bought a box of 20 laundry pods, and he insists he is going to use them all up before we leave! It is a nice luxury to be able to have clean clothes to pull from every day, and the breeze and sunshine are enough that everything dries out in the garden but the end of the day.
Around noon, we head out for a walk through town. We need a few things, like more bottled water, juice, milk, and Mario wants to revisit La Ruche, a nearby caterer that does amazing home-cooked meals.
A lot of new street art has cropped up in town, so finding them, like a scavenger hunt of sorts, has been fun. It also reassures us that this town is slowly improving its appearance, which is a good thing for the future.
La Ruche is busy today. In fact, we might have been better off stopping before heading to the grocery store, as a lot of the trays in the steam table are just dried-up pans of sace and nothing else! I miss out on my fricassee de chatrou, a tomatoey stewed dish of baby octopus, but there is plenty of Colombo de Cabri, goat curry. I also am thrilled to see one of the side dishes is a giant pan of giraumon, the local pumpkin, mashed and baked with cheese. It's very seasonal right now and so tasty. We order a couple of dishes, and walk back home with our spoils.
One thing to note in Guadeloupe : there are always bugs. Today, we inadvertently found ourselves sharing our lunch with an army of tiny ants.
Not wanting to waste the entire day lazing around the Airbnb, we don our bathing suits and head down to Plage de Grand Anse, to instead laze around the beach!
It's Saturday, so the sorbet coco lady has finally taken up her spot in the parking lot, cranking the old-fashioned wooden ice cream maker to churn out her batches of creamy, spiced, refreshing snack. My miscalculation was thinking the treat would stay frozen enough for me to make it all the way back to our spot on the sand without it completely melting in my hands. I was slurping from both cups as I hurried along to return to Mario!
Sorbet coco : laced with lime zest and nutmeg, balanced with sweetened condensed milk, and still just as delicious melted.
We take a short walk through town in the evening, to the bright, clean, newly build plaza between city hall and the church. Of to the side under a pergola, a small group of people is gathering, singing and playing traditional Gwoka instruments. I`m not sure if it was a regular Saturday night jam session, a music practice, or a pseudo-performance for the slowly-increasing group of gathered locals, but it was a very beautiful moment. The breeze from the ocean cooling the night air, the rhythmic tones drifting through town, families sitting on benches, snacking on fries from a bag, two men sharing a pizza on the steps of city hall. I'd like to imagine this sort of impromptu gathering happens every Saturday night.
We get our chicken from Kaza Manjé and head home, making sure to walk back through the park to listen to the music a bit longer. We thought about staying, but the chicken is too messy to eat with cutlery. And it was a good thing, too - not 5 minutes after we got back, the rain started to pour down on Trois Rivières.
And for the first time, we decided to try the frites local, those precious fries that people line up and wait for at the chicken place. We always kind of laugh at their patience to get the fries.
They are pretty tasty. Oh, and that's ONE portion you see there. Worth it.
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