guava from tree at work. delicious - but frustrating, want to scoff it down but those stupid seeds always get in the way. (before coming here hadn't eaten fresh guava; now i wonder just how many it takes to make guava juice; bucket loads for a few glasses; no wonder so cheap - 5 for about 5 aust cents)
**
After work finished at 4, P and I went into town. It was govt payday (fortnightly), and town is packed when this rolls around. We get paid next week, which is good because that way we can usually avoid the massive bank queues (atms close at 7pm every day; and the lines are like nothing else I’ve known: if you go at lunch time it’ll take 40-60 mins to get to the machine. And I bank with ANZ, which is quieter than the local bank (BSP, bank of south pacific); the numbers who line up for that are astounding, 40-70 people from early morning until late; crazy.)

The govt paydays don’t create a bad situation, but being out in town I feel…alert I suppose is the word. And every one is. It’s like we’re all watching out for…nothing as it turns out; but there’s something in the air. Extra people, extra money, extra police. You’re just a bit more cautious and get your business done and head home.

Later, after town, went and ate with some women from work who'd prepared a mumu for a women’s group they belong to. Turned up to the backdoor of a hall, and there was a table laden with food: about 5 different types of bananas cooked different ways, some sweet, some sweetish but eaten as mains, some definitely savoury; and sago; and the mumu-ed food: chicken (I got a breast – thankyou T! You get the choice bits when you work with the server; it's all about connections...), greens, sweet potato (a white one and the orange kind you get in Australia (like bananas, there are lots of versions)), purple banana (savoury tasting, a bit like a version of potato) – all of this is steam cooked in coconut milk over hot stones (the stones are “cooked” overnight) – this is what ‘mumu’ refers to.

We sat on a bench and ate off paper plates with fingers (though some were more fussy and insisted on forks), talking about the weirdness of Michael Jackson and one of the strange greens that we’ve seen at the markets but no one had eaten before (its leaves are densely rippled, it has a reddish spine and tastes almost like meat) and about the people passing before us. A lot came, but the mumu food was almost gone by the time we got there – and we thought we were early. Gotta love mumus. I couldn’t finish everything; I’d bought a lot because all the food is new to me and I love not having to cook, and it was dinner time and I was starving. And i was the novel white skin so everyone was happy to instruct me on what everything was and what i had to try. brought home some sago – the way it's cooked has made it semi-sweet, but not convincingly so; it would be more a main dinner item, not desert. There were sweet bananas and sago going around for one kina (50cents) towards the end, but by then I was stuffed so I missed out.

Tomorrow I go secondhand shopping, looking for a dress for the coffee ball. Yes – I am Scarlett O’hara and I am going to a coffee ball! Very excited about this – when (and where) else will I ever get such an opportunity? It’s a wild colonial dream…