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#2026 May by Connie Prince Designs
Journaling:
May 2015 marked the first month that I was really on my own in Fiji. My predecessor had been on contract until the end of April to do a really good handoer of the role but as of the first of May, she was officially retired. I had found a house to rent and she had been very generous in giving me a couple of pots, some plates and bowls and cutlery to make do until my own things arrived from Canada. I had also gone to the MHCC to pick up an inexpensive cutting board and a knife to allow me to prepare a few things in my own kitchen. I took some time on a Saturday morning in early May to head to the market downtown. Next to the big building where local people sold all kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables there is an open-air seafood market. I was able to buy a few very fresh prawns and then picked up some avocados and vudi (pronounced voondee) from the market stalls.
The adventure was just beginning. This was the first time I had been faced with prawns in their natural state so I looked up how to take of the heads, peel and devein them. With that accomplished I turned to the vudi. It is sort of like a plantain that is very starchy and needs to be well cooked to be digested. I cut this one up in slices and then fried it, kind of like you would prepare fried potatoes. I cut an avocado in half and pan fried the prawns to make a prawn and acovado kind of salad that I put back in the empty avocado halves and then added my vudi as a side. None of this seems particularly remarkable as I look back on it 11 years later but at the time it was a pretty big jump from my prairie roots that didn’t really include any of the foods I was using. To add to the challenge, I had never had a gas stove before so I wasn’t really used to how to manage the gas levels on the stove to not burn anything. At home, Jason always lit the barbeque and used it to cook but he wouldn’t arrive for another two months so I had to get used to doing it myself. Because I was waiting for my belongings and had no real extra money to buy things that would eventually arrive, I was kind of camping in a mostly empty house. With all that in mind, I was pretty pleased with my efforts although if I remember correctly, the whole effort from the time I left for the market until the time I sat down to eat the meal I had prepared took up most of the day. I guess that wasn’t such a bad thing, because it was relaxing and there was literally nothing else to do as I had no television or other entertainment and internet data was extremely expensive at $60 for 10GB for the month. That was the way I said “hello” to May in 2015.