Halo Bakagen!

It’s 2010 and we are bakagen and blogging.

This is some of the stuff we’ve been up to.

First up: Christmas in France. Romain and I met up in Paris around mid December. We stayed a place called Hotel Minerve – whose name in French actually sounds something like ‘this hotel annoys me!’. But it didn’t annoy us at all! In fact, it was delightful.

This is a picture from the hotel’s website because for whatever reason we didn’t take any of our own. But when we were there it was all decked out in Christmas lights. Magnifique! It is an old place with a creaky wooden staircase and rooms with tapestries in them and it smells old and Parisian and good. Our room even had a bath – fancy! And it was just up the way from The Notre Dame cathedral.

So we spent three lovely days eating our way around town. The privations of life in Timor must have really affected Romain because he also merrily accompanied me on a half-day shopping trip, a large part of which was spent inside Galeries Lafayette; one of the very original department stores and a very happy place. Ten floors of stunningly unattainable couture with a few corners of stuff us plebs could afford. Look at it!

Every inch radiates gorgeousness - from the amazing art-deco glass ceiling to the gold gilded balconies, down to the marble floor. The centre piece at Christmas was a giant tree bejewelled with pink and ruby red baubles, ringed by floating presents. I think the preceding six months of thongs and coconuts made me revel in its decadence all the more. My happy heart sang.

After we had spent all our pennies in Paris, it was time to jump on a train and head south to the centre of France to St Amand Montrond and the warm welcome of Romain’s family. On the first morning there we woke up to snow!

And it snowed pretty much non-stop for four days until everything was blanketed in white and all those images of Christmas from a thousand different Christmas cards finally made sense. He we are with our ‘homme de neige’.

In that one outfit I managed to entirely undo any skerrick of glamour I had absorbed from my time in Paris. Spectacular, isn’t it?

So we spent about 10 days sitting around the fire place preparing our tastebuds for Christmas. Romain’s mum loves a good dress up (yeah!) and she had decided to theme this Christmas....Les Illes! (the islands).

So we all dressed up in grass skirts and leis and ate carefully prepared tropical tasting dishes like mango chicken salad (we paid $8 for a mango in a French market place while a hundred mangoes rotted in our yard in Port Vila) and coconut fish curry. This is the table ready for the feast.

And Romain’s little twin nephews made it really feel like Christmas.

But good times end, and on boxing day we parted ways – me back to Vanuatu and Romain back to Dili via Singapore, where he saw in the new year and ate weird stuff.

So 2010 has been racing along at a crazy pace. I have been organising a lot of parties – we held a big one at the High Comm for Australia Day where my personal triumph was to convince the High Commissioner that it would be a good thing to have a giant lamington cake in the shape of Australia as the centrepiece. Here he is carving up our coconutty continent from Alice down through to Adelaide.

The Aussies loved it and the Ni-Vans smiled politely. The cake was so big that it wouldn’t fit through doorways unless you turned the tray on a very sickening angle. It was happily devoured by 300 or so revellers. Tassie is missing from this photo because it had been given away moments before to the Vanuatu PM – what a gesture! I am trying to think up something even better for next year – maybe a giant meat pie in the shape of Bert Newton's head (shouldn’t be too hard). All ideas welcome.

There have been other parties – toga parties!

And the neighbourhood collectively hosted a very fun Mad Hatters’ Tea Party where we served our guests jungle juice punch from tea pots.

This is me and Lissi. She totally got her groove thang on.

Russell, a bloke I work with, and his band had us dancing into the night.

Romain on the other hand has been filling his time with far more worthy escapades up in East Timor – conquering mountains .....

and watching Timorese military type people do stuff.

And fighting floods!

On his birthday there was a massive deluge that flooded out Dili – including Romain’s new share house on the second floor of a building. Unlucky! But he says it was quite fun.

The most recent bit of excitement back in Port Vila has been the arrival of Bella the Dawg who has come to live with us for the next couple of years.

She is really cute but not a very vicious guard dog. Her and the chooks have arrived at some kind of truce and aside from the occasional bark and squawk, things are ok. Oh, and one of our chooks carked it the other week – Chook Blong Vanuatu, the really fat one. I think she died because she was fat-fat tumas. Either that, or Nifnif, Nafnaf and Nufnuf have been plotting her murder under my nose all these months and have just got away with the perfect crime.......

And that brings us pretty up much up to speed. But there will be more stories again before too long, so do pop in again shortly.

Ta ta!