Ok, we did not come up with much … but as said before, no stuff to buy and no real parties and he is to young .. so THIS year, he is disguised as a scary DJ!
This post comes with Happy belated Birthday greetings to Christine!!! Look, he is a DJ!
So, I went to get some chicken mcnuggets and had the silly idea to film that …. kinda silly but a fun clip .. i believe the lady had served me before as she says ‘you always only take nuggets’ … later about the Filet o Fish she actually says I should not take it.
Click here in case you are really bored or you always wanted a Fiji McDonald Drive Thru experience
The funniest thing for me was that this girl actually spotted the camera and said something at the end … I wonder if they have been trained on that (after movies like “SuperSize Me”)
I am still not sure if we are dressing up Julius. There is no real party going on anyways and Halloween is not really something we grew up with. But I was looking around for some quick and easy costumes and anarchist friend Jon pointed out This Link of really scary costumes!
I wonder which one is the best … I like the Nancy Reagan or the shoe bomber best .. the voting machine is funny, but no one here would get the joke.
Oh … and HAPPY BIRTHDAY Juergen!
Using the internet for a phonecall is nothing really new. I think I had first test calls back in 1997, at a time when 56K was the fastest. Over the years many formats and ideas came and went. Either you had to buy some software or hardware and then it was only compatible with a few people who you would not want to call anyway … But it seems the topic is coming up again … with iChat AV last year a lot of mac users started talking to each other, in pretty nice quality, but way too often did I run into server problems or the fact that one side cannot here the other and calls started with a repeated ‘can you hear me NOW?’
Enter skype. This one is pretty amazing so far. Cross platform, computer to computer or computer to fone. Even on 56K I got some good results, but yesterday we tested a call to Japan in 128K and it worked perfectly. Not sure if Ritsu’s mom realized that we were calling via a computer. And for us, the cost is a big factor … calling Japan from the Telecom fone costs 2.89 FJD a minute … so that 15 min call would have been 40 FJD (around 20 USD / EU or 2000Y). With skype, if you call pc to pc it is free! .. If you call phones, then there are rates … USD, JPN, EU and AU are all 2cents a minute, no matter where you are calling from. To call Fiji it would be 23cents a minute. not too bad either. Those 15 minutes took up around 4 MB bandwidth. If we were over our slim limit of 500MB a month, this would have added 60 cents to the call .. so .. the whole call was around a buck, a euro, hyaku yen … sounds much better.
Some people told me that the technology in the background is evil, but who cares, it is working. Others say that Vonage is a better option, but from what I saw it is a 25USD minimum each month and I just don’t use the phone that often.
If you get skype and want to chat, leave your skype name in the comment field 
(and yes, those are my boxers that Ritsu is wearing)
Your dad is half blind, your mom needs glasses (or contacts) … 3.5 out of 4 grandparents are using glasses … chances are that you will have to play the glasses / contact lense game as well … but don’t worry, not that hard and kinda cool to wear actual glasses instead of fake ones to look smart
And we promise that we will avoid Elton John styles.
James and Vikash stopped by to ask what the general mood about happy hour is and after a short while me, Julius and Ritsu joined at the Holiday Inn. Casual fun as usual, cheap beers, Ritsu went with Julius a few houses down for a UNICEF happy hour but was back soon. Sunset was so so (Holiday Inn is a great spot to watch the sunset and sip a beer at 1.75 FJD) but at least there was no big sports game going on.
(we will never find out where James’ hand was)
Last weekend, on Toberua, when taking those cute pics of Julius playing with the flower, I also took some video
Have not talked about food in a while (besides the Toberua stuff) .. but that was in a way an inspiration. I had noticed that suddenly fresh asparagus has become available … rare and expensive, but as it turns out, well worth it (actually, come to think of it, the canned variety is equally expensive). So .. after peeling the lower half and cutting into pieces i steamed that with some zuchini and carrots and broiled / grilled some chicken pieces on the side … fairly simple, but the flavor of the veggies were very nice.
I wanted to do that already last time. Just like the bar bure, they totally redid the main jetty (these are those longish things going from the island into the water, where the boats dock, for all you landlubbers). Now I had the great occasion to the a before and after shot. This is a first version of some animated gif, i’d love to get that bigger, clearer and with less filesize .. but ah well … so far, not too shabby:
It is 327 KB in size, so if you are in a similar internet market, it may take a bit, if you are not, you may be wondering why I even mention this ‘tiny’ file.
This is a pretty bare bone write up of the 3 days/2 nights trip to Toberua, our favorite island resort in Fiji. This would mark the 12th time within 20 months that we have visited and we have already plans for trip #13. The following may be full of grammatical and other errors which I might change around in the days to come … but right now I am very tired. Some pics are already further down, but this time I plan on doing a full gallery with lots of pics of this trip.
First time we are not here over the weekend.
Monday:
Arriving at 9:30 Nakelo Landing, waiting for other (no-show) guests, trip to island, our usual bure #9 (Wakaya), everybody happy to see us. Morning Tea, walking around.
Lunch:
Asparagus/corn/egg thing in filo shell (too eggy / corny for me)
choice of: Herb Fettucini with chicken and cream sauce / Beer battered Opaka with capersauce, crab butter and fries / Thai Beef Salad (we both had the “fish’n chips”)
Desert: fried cinnamon pineapple slice with ice cream
Lazy afternoon, checking out the books, dozing off, first time I see people arriving with a seaplane (as I hear later, total cost 1400 FJD to get from one resort in the west to this resort in the east, but the alternative would have been: boat from Muscat Cove Resort to Denarau, Taxi to Airport, check in and wait, regular plane to Nausori, Taxi from Nausori to Nakelo, boat trip to Toberua. This would have meant wasting a whole day and maybe saving half the money)
Hopping in the pool (For Ritsu it has been a long time). After hearing they just got fresh lobster, me and Julius are invading the kitchen (first time for me [and him]) to get a good shot of them.
Getting ready for dinner. 7 PM at bar, scaring off people with the baby (this time NO other kids around). Nice Margarita, Ritsu has Pina Colada. Pre-dinner snack: spicy meat balls with spicy dipping sauce. Nice people around, mainly older couples, some young ones, an artist (Ken Done) with his family.
Dinner:
Blue Swimmer Crab and Prawn in a pastry shell (vol-au-vent)
choice of: Coconut lamb curry / Lobster (it was either thermador or thermodore, neither of both recipes sound as yummy as the final dish was) over mashed potatoes and asparagus (guess what we selected)
Grilled banana with caramel sauce and ice cream.
Tuesday:
Early wake up with Julius, first time I think I went to witness the sunrise.
then some more dozing until the drums announced breakfast. First time we see “almond & vanilla hotcakes” as the daily special. Ritsu goes for it, I just have some hard boiled eggs, yoghurt and fruit. Short walk afterwards and then all 3 of us keep snoozing a bit. Weather and water seems to cold to consider the pool. But instead we shot some pool.
Lunch:
Beef-potato curry parcel with tamarind sauce. (spicy)
Prawn-Fish Kebab with rice pilaf. (3 prawns, 2 cubes of fish and very nicely, not overcooked, pieces of veggie, pilaf with raisins and yellowish spices)
Coconut pudding with icecream and caramel sauce. (Pudding as in the british, baked variety. Looked more like some muffin)
Lazy afternoon with reading, walking around, Ritsu and Julius feeding and dozing. Beautiful wind and temperature on our side of the island. And an extra beautiful sunset:
(click above for a nice screen saver sized version, then right-click / ctrl-click to save)
Pre-dinner snack: Plantain chips with dipping sauce.
Had another fantastic Margarita (note to self: Ask Jale to make it. He has his special recipe: does half half triple sec and Contreau and shakes it). Dinner again outside of bar bure.
Dinner:
Calamari Rings in tomato/white wine/cream sauce
Cream of Coconut / Lobster Soup (Very nice and subtle, 2 flavors which could kill each other in a perfect blend))
Walu filet with crab butter and very nice veggies (Choice B was chicken/potato gratin)
Desert: Brandy Pawpaw triffle (with lots of some goo-y red sauce)
We finished our wine bottle, I had some Kava with the Band, this time we actually stayed longer than half of the other people, enjoying the music and a nearly full moon)
(ok, THIS one i had to photoshop quite some as it was shot without flash with only those candles on .. I hope that it gives a bit of an idea)
Did not sleep much … first Julius got a bit agitated after his usual middle-of-the-night run of food and diaper change and after 2 hours I had him asleep again, then Ritsu woke up from a nightmare .. my 2 poor babies
Breakfast had a fried egg, sausage, bacon, grilled tomato combo special … while I had been fantasizing about something like that the evening before … in the morning I just can’t eat much. I stayed with yoghurt and fruit. After that, general dozing, reading, walking the baby, but also slowly packing. The big event of the day was a boat trip to picnic island where they would also serve a BBQ lunch. We opted out to be close to our bure in case we would need it for Julius. As it turned out later it started to rain. We never got to hear how the picnic people survived that, they were not back when we left.
Our Lunch was probably similar to the picnic one. We had 5 battered prawns in a herb cheese cream sauce as appetizer, a mixed grill platter as main (I was already full) .. the platter had a piece of walu (fish), a chicken drumstick, a patty of minced and spiced beef in BBQ sauce and a sausage. The beef and the fish were very nice … the chicken tasted a bit greasy, but that may have been me already being full from the prawns (and 2 prior days of hard core gourmet food). The fries were a bit soggy … and I keep wondering if the salad was meant to come without any dressing … but the fresh crispy taste was great to absorb some of the greasiness Desert was a minted fruit salad with ice-cream, which was as always superb.
I settled our bill and we finished packing and to our surprise, being the only guests leaving (and being a mid week day AND the 2 nice fast boats probably in usage for the picnic trip) we left for the first time since our very first trip in one of the older boats … including 2 minor engine snafus we arrived back at Nakelo after 40 minutes (instead the usual 20). The car ride was ok, I was tired, but we made it and found house and cat safe and sound.
Yet another great trip!
More pictures will be up soon in a seperate gallery … and I added ‘toberua’ as a category and plan on importing the old trip reports from the old blog. This way an easy click on ‘toberua’ will list all story entries I have written so far.
This is him already dozing of while we are leaving Toberua and they gave all us us flowers to wear.
Day 2 on Toberua and as ususal we skip all these exciting things like village trips, snorkeling, diving, kayaking in favor of napping, dozing, sleeping and reading. Julius turns out to be quite cooperative in the latter.
When I heard ‘they just got fresh lobster’, for the first time ever I invaded the holy temple which is the kitchen at Toberua and asked to take pictures of them. Later we will have pictures of those critters being eaten! Don’t they just look fantastic?
On our 12th trip to Toberua Island Julius discovered his love for pretty tropical flowers and sitting on a swing with his mom.
And here is a VideoClip
I know, this is fairly unrelated to what we usually have on this website (besides my addiction to certain types of Japanese food) … but this find today just rattled my brain and made me want to post it .. it also made my saliva flow … pawlovik Peter ..
What is it? These are USB sticks … little computer memory units in the shape of sushi pieces … you can e.g. save your work stuff and bring it home to continue working on it (as if) …. the pricing is a bit steep and it is only a novelty effect … but more than ever I am craving Ikura and Uni.
Not a big fan of Sushi? How about duckies?
Best way of distracting him while changing his diapers (which by the way are starting to smell, yippieh): This mirror thing … he is totally fascinated (it also plays music)
Even Misha joins in into the gentle flow of the relaxing sunday snoozing marathon.
This is becoming an even bigger temptation these days. McDs is a pretty easy place to bring Julius, it is loud anyway, lots for him to see, Saturday lunch seems to be FULL of families with kids, some bored looking clown lady was waiting for a birthday party (Gosh, someone help me, one day Julius will want that!)
Also, the area around is becoming more and more of a shopping Mecca. Cost-U-Less, the big warehouse style supermarket is on our list anyways (especially when they have freshly imported yoghurt), the register people know us (and adore Julius). And now a new ‘mall’ has opened there, and it actually looks pretty much like a ‘real’ mall. Most of the stores there are still closed, but my favorite DVD rental place has opened it’s new flagship store there … so that alone is a reason to go often, and it is close by.
I will post pics of this mall later, when more shops are open.
Amazing how McDs looks so similar everywhere.
There is quite a discussion these days about dual citizenship based on the State mooting passport plans (I actually had to look up the word ‘moot‘, never seen that before)
So yesterday was a letter on dual citizenship in the FT, based on some other letters before (which I can’t find anymore). This person said that Fiji should not allow dual citizenship, and Julius just had to chime in about the fact that he does not even get Fiji Citizenship, although he is born here!
Wonder where he got that ‘writing letters’ from
This was the first time we brought him to Daikoku and he behaved amazingly well and the staff was all over him. We also ran into Jon and his colleague Alfred. I had the small sushi platter (2 piece tuna, 2 piece snapper, 6 mini pieces of cucumber roll, miso soup) and Ritsu had some tonkatsu pork dish which had quite some greasy parts but was all in all very nice. I think we are ready to try the early bird special soon with Julius. When we were about to leave we also ran into Angela, a german lady running the Maravu Island resort who we know from 2 stays at Toberua. Suva is such a village sometimes.
This is him and Ritsu with one half of the managing couple, Takeda-San
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