Telesa : The Covenant Keeper

Last week Lani Wendt Young was here in Samoa to launch her new teeanage fantasy/romantic fiction novel Telesa : The Covenant Keeper. I have been reading this as my first ever e-book on my Galaxy Tab and I have to say it's ............ brilliant!! The story flows so well it's hard to pick a spot to put the book down. Hence a number of after midnight late nights recently. It's a magical, spiritual Samoan story weaving contemporary Samoan life with an old legend of the Telesa who were women with elemental powers of earth, air and sea. The love interest is Daniel, who is portrayed by Ezra Taylor one of the Manu players (and not at all based on Daniel Carter as Lani informs me!)


Anyway we were invited to two launch events. A pre-launch at Plantation House which was a small and personal affair where we were treated to a speach by Dr Emma Kruse Vaai, launch of a new jewellry range by Beau Rassmussen and delectable delights by Marita Wendt herself. On Thursday 17th November was the offical launch of the book at the Millennia hotel fale. This was a combination of speeches, multimedia interviews and live shows of song and dance. Great entertainment.


In the end though the most important thing is that this book is fantastic and is the first Young Adult fiction authored by a local Samoan Author. It is the first in a trilolgy and we now can't wait for the second part due out early next year. The e-book is very reasonably priced at US $5.99 and can be purchased here http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/82460 or http://www.amazon.com/Telesa-The-Covenant-Keeper-ebook/dp/B005I3WD8Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1315609616&sr=1-1


I recommend you all buy it and read it!


I spoke to a real live teenage boy who read the book in 24 hours, thought it was awesome (especially the powers - maybe not so much the mushy bits) so this is a great recommendation!!

Well done Lani.

Sunday To'onai

Angela's prize for 'Most Committed' at the recent netball tournament was a Sunday Lunch (for 2) at the Orator Hotel. So, last weekend we got dressed up in our finest Samoan clothes and enjoyed our Samoan Sunday lunch. There were all the favourites - umu cooked pig, fish, taro, palusami and fresh oka (raw fish cocktail) along with more palagi style dishes - salads, pasta etc. All finished off with some chocolate cake and ice cream. Yummy!

This was the first time I had been to this hotel and I was impressed. The surroundings are very pleasant and the food and service were excellent. We had to have a bit of a laugh though - even in an upmarket hotel we were still served by a waitress in barefeet!

G'Day Samoa Fun Run

This Saturday morning I managed to drag Angela out of bed to take part in the G’day Samoa Fun Run. As you might have guessed from the name, the event has been organised by the Australian High Commission.

Despite the heavy rain on Friday night there was a big turnout for the event. The local paper reported a crowd of 800, but I am not sure how reliable that number is. Anyway, there were heaps of kids doing the 3km route and plenty of familiar faces from netball and work tackling the 5km run.

They organised the event really well, there was crew taking us through a Zumba warmup before the run started. I think some people were there more for the Zumba than the run. I decided to save my energy for the run rather than embarrassing myself trying to Zumba. After the run there was a bit of food and some prizes handed out.

This is part of a healthy lifestyles programme and will be held every month until July 2012. They have promised an even bigger and better event next month, with the contestants from the Miss South Pacific Pageant attending.

LAS Fundraising Dinner

The other night the Apia Community Group organised a fundraising dinner for the Library Association of Samoa at the APTC (Australia-Pacific Technical College) restaurant, Visions. This is a training restaurant that is staffed by the Polytech students of the tourism and hospitality courses. We have eaten there before and have been impressed by standard of the food and service delivered by the students.

This dinner was something a bit different for us – a Degustation Dinner. For those of you that don’t know (and yes, I had to look it up in the dictionary) degustation is that act of tasting or savouring.

In this case we were served 7 courses, each with a wine matched to the course. We were even given instructions on how best to enjoy the experience – thoroughly chew the food, then take a sip of wine just before you swallow. I am not sure if these instructions were followed at our table and I know that as the evening went on a few of the food-wine matchings were a bit mixed up by those that couldn’t keep pace or those that decided that they didn’t want a red with the next course and would just have another glass of the yummy Riesling!

Anyway, a good time was had by all and the food was great. Certainly a step up from our usual options for dinner out here in Apia. Once again the students did a wonderful job with preparation and service of the food and drinks.

As far as we can remember the menu was something like the list below, some of the details are a bit hazy, but For the wine buffs out there, sorry they didn’t give us any details of the wines, other than the variety and why it had been matched to that particular course.

• Aperitif – Campari, sweet vermouth, gin and soda


• Prawn mousse tarts with chilli and mango salsa


• Oysters with sesame oil and lime - Sparkling Cuvee


• Caramelised Onion Tart - Merlot


• Reef Fish on rice noodles - Riesling


• Chicken with mushrooms – Sauvignon Blanc


• Chocolate fudge cake with Cabernet Sauvignon


• Cheese platter and tawny port

Netball

It has been a few posts since we mentioned netball, but last weekend there was a one-day tournament organized by the SCOPA netball club. It was a full on day of netball. We got down to the courts around 8.30 am and over the course of the day Angela played 9 games and umpired another 8. Meanwhile I manned the BBQ where we sold about 300 sausages throughout the day.

For the record the Hyundai team came third and Angela won a prize for being The Most Committed.

We Count

Recently there have been a number of ads on the TV that seem to be about the upcoming national population census, but because they have all been in Samoan we haven’t really been sure what it is all about.

Then, a few weeks ago some stickers appeared on our gate post, which we figured must have been related to the census, but again we didn’t really know what was happening.

Unlike in NZ there didn’t seem to be any forms being distributed to be filled in, just ads saying that the census would be carried out from 1^st – 10^th November. We figured that maybe we would miss out on being counted because we didn’t know what we were supposed to do to get our forms.

Then last Sunday afternoon a strange car pulled up at our gate and a woman armed with her census ID and booklets got out. It turns out that they do things a little differently in Samoa. Here the census officer comes to you and fills in the questionnaire for you. Well actually, she noted the answers in a separate notebook, and was going to transcribe the answers to the proper forms later when she went home. Talk about doing things the hard way!

So, we sat down and went through the questions. Most of them were the usual sort of things – age, level of education, do you rent or own your home, jobs, etc etc. But there were a few that I haven’t seen on a census form in New Zealand, including ‘Do you have a sewing machine?’ She seemed quite pleased when we said, yes we do have a sewing machine! There was a whole range of questions about which household appliances we have - washing machineü, fridgeü, air conü, dishwasher û. They also wanted to know if our kitchen was inside the house or outside. There were also the expected questions about religion and children (everyone here seems to ask those questions). The children one seemed to come up several times, and each time we got a very sympathetic ‘how sad’ when we answered that we have no children.

Anyway, we can now rest happily knowing that we have been counted.

Guavas Galore

When we first moved in here we didn’t realize that there was a guava tree on the property, and for the last three years it hasn’t produced any fruit. Earlier this year it was starting to flower, but then much to our dismay the lawnmower gang gave it a severe ‘pruning’, chopping off most of the main branches. Anyway, the tree not only survived this brutal attack, but has flourished and is now producing lots of nice, big guavas.

We now have more guavas than we can eat, and the house is full of the sweet smell of ripe guavas, so we decided to make some guava jam. Neither of us have made jam before, and didn’t really know what we were doing, but we hade a couple of recipes to follow, so decided to have a go.

We completely underestimated how much fruit we had and therefore how much sugar we would need, but after a morning of preparing the fruit, a quick trip to the shop for another bag of sugar then boiling up our brew we had a pot full of guava jam. We weren’t sure if it was quite ready, it didn’t seem to be meeting the ‘set test’ as described in the cook book, but it smelt and tasted pretty good, so we decided it was ready.

The other challenge for us was trying to find jars or some type of container for our jam. After searching all the local shops all we could find were plain drinking glasses that were about the right size, but of course these have no lids. These were all we could find, so we decided we would have to make do. After searching the internet we read about various ways of sealing jam jars without screw on lids, including wax, silicon, waxed paper, cellophane etc. None of these things we could get here in Samoa, so we figured we would put our jam into our glasses, let it cool, and then cover it with glad wrap.

We are happy to report that not only does the jam taste great, but the glad wrap seems to be working ok. I don’t think that this is a very good solution if you want to keep your jam for a long time, but somehow I don’t think that this jam will last too long anyway!