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Home by Westlife is a very popular song here. “I wanna go home, I miss you” – I’ve played with that line a few times in my head, but it never fits. To tell you the truth, if I didn’t already have my place at Durham University, there’s no way I’d be going home this year. There are very few things I miss about home, so, for the record, I’m going to list them here in the hope that I will appreciate them more when I actually have them.
1. By far, the thing I miss the most is my privacy. For the first two months or so, it was fine. I had my own cosy little room, which I could at least shut the door to. No one came in my room without knocking and expressed permission. Then my hosts brought back their one-and-a-half year old son back from living with the grandparents, and all of a sudden I was sharing my room with two housegirls and had a toddler running in and out and playing with my deoderant. Then I moved house. I’m still sharing my room, the door is broken and doesn’t shut properly, and there’s two toddlers running in and out and playing with my deoderant. Plus, the whole family treat it like a family room and borrow my stuff as they please. Y’know, I love them and all, but it’s driving me a little bit crazy. It’s selfish, but I’ve discovered that I NEED my own personal space, and I swear to Ieeeesha if Durham try give me a shared room for first year all hell will be let loose.
2. Secondmost, I miss piano. Before I left home I was playing at least two hours a day, and to go from that to nothing is strange. I have found two derelict antique pianos since I got here, neither of which are playable, and once I got a few minutes at a four octave non-touch-sensitive keyboard, but that’s it. Guitar just isn’t the same. I also miss trumpet and harp, but to a lesser extent. And thus I am reduced to tapping out Mozart sonatas on desks and hearing the music only in my head. How sad.
3. Sometimes I miss hot showers, more often now that winter is here. Brr.
4. I miss having a reliable phone network. Vodafone Fiji isn’t great. It’s usually vaguely okay within Fiji, if you can get a signal, but outside Fiji? Forget it. I can usually receive texts from the UK fine, but I can rarely reply, and even then only to select numbers, apparently due to random discrimination. Meh.
5. I miss a lack of mosquitos. My skin is now used enough to the bites that they don’t flare up like they did at the beginning, but they’re still annoying as, well, biting flying insects.
6. Sometimes I have weird food cravings. Currently it’s Heinz tomato soup, which you can actually get in Suva, but my desire hasn’t yet reached the level where I’m willing to spend $60 on transport to get a can.
There are a few things that I thought I might miss, but I really don’t. One of them is Scottish people, as a nation, because obviously I miss my friends and family and whatnot. But let’s face it. We’re not particularly nice, and Fijians more than fill up the void. I also don’t miss channel flicking, because Fiji One manages to pack everything that is good about television into one channel, and they have catchy jingles.
And that’s all I can think of.
So I’ve just been told that apparently I will be moving school in a few weeks time, to Loreto Primary School. Loreto is the closest primary school to Levuka, 5k away in the village of Tokou. If I have to move to a village, I’m glad it’s Tokou, ’cause it’s as close to Levuka as I can get plus I already have some friends there.
The main thing is that I’m going to have a different postal address, and since it takes a couple of weeks for things to arrive from the UK there’s a chance that if you send me stuff now I’ll be in Tokou by the time it arrives. This is not a problem so don’t stop sending me stuff, it brightens up my day 
but if you do post me anything within the next few weeks, address to the current Marist Convent address and tell me when you’ve posted it so if it turns out that I’m not there I can go pick it up. ‘Naka!
(of course, this is Fiji, and there’s a chance I won’t move at all…jeez…)
UPDATE – 30/5/08
“of course, this is Fiji, and there’s a chance I won’t move at all…jeez…”
Yesterday Sr. Mariana told me that I’m starting at St. James on Wednesday. St. James is a teeny tiny primary school (4 teachers!) at the other end of town, so I’m staying with my current hosts, which is fab. I’m really looking forward to this because I’ve been struggling to find stuff to do the past couple of weeks. So I’ll still have a change of postal address at some point which I will post up later.
Fiji is not a place to go if you want to lose weight. Plates are always filled sky high and there’s always a second helping coming. Meals are often eating sitting on the floor. Cutlery is not neccessary.
Breakfast is always carbohydrate-y. We’ll have breakfast crackers (awful dry biscuits, people float them in their tea, bleugh), bread and butter fresh from the bakers, roti (indian flatbread) with coconut milk, or Fijian pancakes, which are like greasy huge thick triangles of pancake and quite yummy. This is usually accompanied by (and dunked into) a hot drink of some sort.
Most days, I buy my lunch in town. One of my favourites is Emily’s Cafe, where they serve the Fijian equivalent of fast food. I can get a fresh egg bun or hot dog for $1 each, or my favourite vegetable roti (watch out vegetarians, it’s usually more like tuna and potato than vegetable; yesterday I found a lump of chicken in mine) for 50c. Sometimes I treat myself to a fantastic sandwich at the Whale’s Tale restaurant. I might have bread or a sandwich from home, or I might make up some noodles.
(Noodles, by the way, are a staple here. And not fresh noodles, instant 2 minute noodles. In fact, you don’t even need to cook them, people sit on the street eating dry noodles like crisps (actually, chicken Chow noodles dry are delicious!))
At dinner time, if we have meat it’s usually lamb or chicken or fish, and you always have to pick out the bones yourself. Otherwise, it’s tinned fish or the hugely popular corned beef. We’ll have it in a stew, chow mein, or curry. It’s always with mixed vegetables or with greens – bele or roro, both of which are yum. (Although if roro isn’t cooked properly you get an itchy throat, ew!) It’s served with a starchy thing on the side – rice, dalo, cassava or breadfruit, for example. I’m not a big fan of the root crops, to be honest. They don’t taste of much and they’re difficult to chow down, but I’m starting to not mind the odd bit of cassava. My favourite Fijian dishes are the ones in lolo – coconut cream. It’s always absolutely delicious, unless they put chili in, ’cause I’m a wuss with the spice.
(They love their condiments here – chili, lemon juice and ketchup will be smothered over everything, and I mean EVERYTHING.)
Drinks are often hot. Fijians love tea, and quite often it’s black with tons of sugar. I still don’t like tea, but I am absolutely in love with lemon leaf tea. It’s fab. All you do is go to the nearest lemon tree, pick a few leaves, put them in your mug, pour boiling water over them, et voila. A delicious lemony yummy yum yum drink. I’ll also drink Milo or Vico, chocolate malt drinks that taste identical and apparently differ only in price and packaging. Cold drinks are fruit juice (always from squash or powder, never fresh) or water or beer, usually Fiji Gold or Fiji Bitter.
My sweet tooth is quite flourishing here, and not just because everything has more sugar in it here (and I mean everything – tea, bread, Coke, ketchup, etcetcetc…). I love Oreos and ice lollies for a treat, or cream buns – only 30c for a “small” one! Mandarin season has just begun, and I can buy a pile (usually about 4) for $1 to keep my vitamins up. Chinese sweets are huge here – dried mango skin or pawpaw skin, but I’m not a fan. The ones I like, nay, love, are “monkey balls” – dried red peaches. Oh, they are delicious.
When I go to Suva, I treat myself with goodies that you can’t get in Levuka – fresh lemon juice from the market (20c a glass!), or sliced pineapple, pawpaw, or bila. Bila smells and looks like cheese, is long and thin and is packaged in leaves. It’s grated cassava with coconut and is much nicer than it sounds/looks.
It’s a miracle how I’m not obese already, I swear…
Holidays are over. Today I went back to school. This is a shame, so I’m going to immerse myself in the two weeks past and tell you about my break.
Firstly, here’s a rough map of my route:
School finished on Friday. We celebrated on Saturday and didn’t finish celebrating until I had to get the bus at 4.30am. Two kamikaze bus drivers and a prompt boat meant I was in Suva by 8am, which is something of a miracle. Met my fellow volunteer, Chris, and we did the touristy things that I’ve never had time to do in Suva before – ie, taking pictures in town and wandering around the USP campus. On Monday, we met Helen and David and spent the day in town, and on Tuesday morning we flew up to Labasa.
Labasa is the main town of Fiji’s second island, Vanua Levu. It’s an Indian town, so everything is extremely businesslike, and it’s very very effing hot. Like, unbearably hot. (It’s weird getting your head around the concept that North is now hot and South is cold.) We didn’t spend long in Labasa, it’s not got much for visitors. We went to see the growing rock snake temple, and would have gone to the beach if it hadn’t been for sudden rainfall. The next day we took a fantastically scenic bus journey down to Savusavu, which is now my second favourite place in Fiji.
Savusavu is almost like a bigger verson of Levuka, save the lack of colonial buildings, with a big bay on one side and mountains on the other (smaller, further away mountains, but whatever). The ground is hot and natural hot springs are all over the shop, hot enough to cook vegetables in, and the place is filled with expats and yachties. We stayed in Savusavu for three nights, and went trekking in the rainforest reserve, kayaked in the bay, and just generally absorbed the town. I also had my hair cut by a transvestite and was asked by a German bloke if I’d plait his mullet, but that’s neither here nor there.
On Saturday, we got a minibus to Buca Bay on the Eastern side of the island, the journey to which was extremely bumpy and would have been horrible had we been in a local bus. From there, we took a ferry over to Taveuni, then a speedboat back to Vanua Levu to Dolphin Bay Divers Retreat. (Seems like a roundabout journey, doesn’t it? But there’s no road to Dolphin Bay and it takes way way longer to get a boat straight from Buca Bay, so there you go.) We stayed there for two nights and I loved every minute of it. Gorgeous setting, with only the barely-there lights visible on Taveuni shattering the illusion of complete isolation. Dolphin Bay operates in their own time zone, one hour ahead of the rest of Fiji, to make the most of the daylight for diving. It’s a tiny resort, with Swiss/German owners and staff so friendly you want to pack them in your rucksack. All the guests eat together and this made for two lovely, boozy, guitar sing alongs, which was fab. I should probably mention that I did an introductory scuba dive. I don’t want to do a PADI course - it’s far too expensive a hobby for me to get into, plus I did have a little trouble equalising at one point due to my crap ear, so this course was perfect for me, allowing me to, y’know, have a shot without spending megabucks. It was fantastic and I was pretty sad to leave.
From there we went back to Taveuni, which many Fijians assert is Fiji’s best island. It’s gorgeous, too. There’s not much to do there that doesn’t involve exercise, so we spent three energetic days walking down Des Voeux Peak (yeah, only down. Go figure.), visiting two of the three famous waterfalls, and kayaking and walking and swimming the Lavena Coastal Walk. I was pretty glad for the peace and quiet that are your only option for Taveuni evenings, which gave us a chance to relax. I also shared a taxi with a dying chicken, as you do.
On Friday, we flew back to Suva, and spent an hour or so in town before spending the night at the fantastic Raintree Lodge. It feels almost like a themed Disney resort in the Animal Kingdom, but the place is just gorgeous and so cosy (an impression probably helped by the free upgrade from the dorm into twin rooms, woo hoo). Fantastic food and drinks made for a lovely end to the holiday (marred only slightly by the presence of the German mullet man from Savusavu. Creepy…). The next day, I took the boat back to Levuka, and found that my house had been broken into, but that’s another story for another time.
I have a new camera, and maybe one day I will upload and post pictures from this holiday. Until then, cheerio.
