The French Ministry of Education offered me an obscene amount of money to leave my home and family for seven months and live on a tropical island working twelve hours a week, with regular school holidays. The other option was my old university offering me a reasonable amount of money to get an M.A. and a nervous breakdown. So I went to New Caledonia to fight French bureaucracy, get bitten by mosquitoes, and stay as white-skinned as ever.
For a while I kept a diary.
Here are some photos of Lycee Jules Garnier, the school where I worked.
Here are a couple of snippets from the boarding house kids at Lycee Jules Garnier. Every now and then they'd sit on the steps near my studio and sing, so one evening I recorded them (mp3 format (~155kB)). And then another evening I recorded them again (mp3 format (~170kB)).
Towards the end of my time in Noumea I finally got around to getting some culture into me; here are some photos and some notes I wrote up after a visit to the New Caledonian Museum of Noumea, and some more notes and photos from the Tjibaou Cultural Centre.
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