Mauritius Day 2 (Day 40)

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

We're suppose to get free breakfast, like omelets and everything included with our stay. However, the catch is that you have to wake up before 10am to get anything. Most all of us tried to get up for it, but only 2 or 3 made it. Apparently it was really good. It's just nice to sleep in past 9:20am (when Global Studies is everyday).

Before we got here there was all of this talk about the island of Mauritius being 98% wireless accessible. I had high hopes for this, especially so I could upload my pictures from Brazil, South Africa, and Mauritius and Skype a bunch of people back home. Unfortunately, in our villa you had to pay for it (about $11USD for one day) and it may have been slower than dial-up way
in my opinion. So no pictures got uploaded, I'll try again in India for sure though. The island definitely isn't 98% wireless as advertised. Oh well, there could be much worse things when on a beautiful island in the Indian ocean!

The TV in our villa has like 15 channels. At least two of them are always showing a soccer game, and one of them is always playing a rugby game. Of the 15 channels probably 9 are in French and the rest were in English. One of the channels in English was the E! channel. How random is that? They advertised The Girls Next Door as 'The Girls of the PlayBoy Mansion.' Most
everyone here speaks both languages but (from what I can tell) French is most of their first language, and many learn English while in school.

Today, once we got up we just hung out at the beach for a while. Our villa also has some free activities that we can do, so we all went on a little banana boat ride. It didn't work so well when there were 4 guys on it, we were too heavy to get going fast I think. The girls went after us though and they were cruising over the waves. Way more exciting than what we did :)s

Sundays in Mauritius are considered 'half-days' nobody works past noon. Including grocery stores and most restaurants. We ended up going on a 2 hour journey all around Grand Bay to find anything open before we found this small hole in the wall type of place that was open. Of course the one place that was selling stuff that day was packed with people. If I were ever going
to open a store in Mauritius I think I could just open it on Sundays and make a living that way. All of the stores and shops also close promptly at 5:30pm on a regular weekday, leaving only restaurants open.

At night there was one dance club called StarDance that was open. It was full of SAS people but was still a good time. I've heard that the people who went to Flic n Flac all went to the same place and filled it with like 300 SAS people. I'm glad now that we weren't in that area because it was just drowned by tourists. Also, it sounds like there are a lot more things to do
during the day in Grand Bay than Flick n Flac. In the end we really just got lucky with the place and location that we got. I heard more than one story from Flick n Flac about villas that were disgusting and people who didn't even stay their full 3 nights there because it was so bad. They also ended up paying more than us.

On the way home from the bar we stopped at this small casino that was just on our way. We were playing a really weird version of black jack, called Varsik or Vacik or something like that. I can't remember the exact name of it. Most of the rules were the same as blackjack except the rules about the aces are all weird. Two aces is a black jack, so you can't split them. Aces
are a 1 or 11 ONLY with the first two cards, if it's the 3rd card it's 10 and if its the 4th card it's one. That's how I ended up understanding it at least. If the dealer ever pulls 5 cards he automatically wins, likewise if you pull 5 cards without busting. I didn't like it at all so I stopped
playing pretty quickly. The minimum bet was 50Rupees (less than $2USD) and the max bet was 500Rupees (less than $20) so it wasn't like I lost a lot of money. I never bet more than 100 Rupees. By the time 4 of us were done losing our money and the one guy was done winning we headed back to our place.