This Long Weekend.....

There is a little known fact about Fiji and the people who live here..besides been warm and friendly and extremely well tanned! heehee there is something else about us...WE LOVE PUBLIC HOLIDAYS! yes so much so that we have 13 or 14 public holidays every year! Take for instance this month, after a long drought of public hols since Jan we have the month off! Well almost! This month we have a total of four hols. This Monday we got off for Prophet Mohammed's birthday (Muslim leader) and this Friday we get off for Good Friday!

Public Hols are not days to laze away under a shady mango tree....no way, these days bring us together, take us to the beach and unites us with our greatest passion.....FEASTING! Thats right, garanteed this weekend there will be smoke rising from many a backyard as ground ovens are prepared for the lovo feast. Hours later the mouth watering aroma of cooked taro, fish, chicken, lamb shanks and palusami (taro leaves cooked in coconut milk with the option of a corned beef/mutton center) intoxicates the air.

Alot of work goes into the preparing of the LOVO (also called imu, umu in other parts of the Pacific). We are actually lucky at home coz our lovo pit is usable all year round.

In the old days (like when I was like knee high) all the food was delicately wrapped in coconut or banana leaves, but these days we use alumi foil....thats another thing, I don't think there are any other group of people who use alumi foil as much as the pacific islanders do. We are ever so gratefully (fully) to the inventor of that handy piece of item.

After the food is marinated, and wrapped, it is placed in the hot ground oven and covered. Three hours later.....Voila! A handsome feast!

Well that's what we will be doing this weekend! And when we are not feasting? well we will be at Church observing Easter, thats another thing we are passionate about....Jesus Christ.

P.S We get Monday off too.

tits, bits, odds and ends of Noesh

Okay!!! i was reminded by a little fairy that i needed to update my blog! so here are a few tits, bits, odds and ends of my life...which of course would automatically mean ....everything i am going to say/write about will be all about Noesh. Where to start...the night we went to watch a very entertaining Hindi movie called "chak de India" all about an Indian womens hockey team..this movie was a first for a lot of things, the first of its kind that was made in India, the first debue of the director, first i think Shah Rukh had so much facial hair...and the first, my daughter fell off to sleep the min we got home, literally,

check out the picts....

Then there was the time, after a long bath (because she is such a water baby) We got dressed up for some photo time...i have to tell you this kid must have had modelling classes in heaven before she made it to earth, because she does not need any direction what so ever..this makes it even more difficult when we have to go into a real studio for a real photoshoot, because Madam just wants to do her own little thing

As much as i know you're sitting on the edges of your seats waiting for the next slice of life, i have end this post here! As you may have already gathered, Noesheen is very much the most eventful, exciting part of my life. Just the other day she discovered that the word, "whatever" can draw all kinds of reactions...so she spent most of the day telling people..."whatever" this included the people at the supermarket, her aunty and her grandmother, finally after a lot of failed attempts i had to remind her that not everyone liked their requests returned with a "whatevvvverrrr"