Every night we sat in the common room and drank Fiji Bitter or Fiji Gold. I preferred Fiji Gold, which tasted like a cheap yellow American beer, while Fiji Bitter tasted like goat vomit. You can see Alex in the back; she is from England and had quite a few stories to share about Laos and Africa. The four travelers in the foreground are from Denmark and Sweden. I mostly made friends with the travelers from Sweden, who all happened to attend the same university but who hadn't met each other before Fiji -- very coincidental for them.
Nessie, not the sea serpent, organized nightly activities for us. He and his cohorts performed a fire dancing show, in which one dropped a burning poker near a traveler from Holland and then burnt his own hand, which was comforting. Anyway, they did their best to entertain us, and the Fijians have such open and warm hearts; it's as if each one of them is Mother Theresa embodied. They haven't been ingesting Mother Theresa, though, because cannibalism was a custom in their old religion, before missionary influence. Here we are dancing during the Card Game. A sign for each suit was placed in each corner of the dance floor (the floor being just sand), and when the music stopped (nearly always that "shake your ass, girl" song from the "About a Boy" film) we all scrambled to a corner so as to indicate our suit choice. Nessie would choose a card--clubs, spades, diamonds, or hearts. And, if our card was picked, we had to leave the dance floor. The winner and runner-up won a bottle of free beer.
Every day there was a volleyball game, including tourists, villagers, and sailors. (At any given time, two or three sailboats would anchor off the island. They'd come ashore to drink beer with us. One was from California, one from France, and one from Holland. One admitted to be living on a boat for eight years. Also, whenever they dropped anchor, they had to get permission from the village chief. They'd have to offer kava as a gift and then drink loads of kava with him.)
