Onion rationing and other festive past-times on Rurutu!

The festive season has kept us busy enough, though my plans to take lots of pics was scuppered by the disappearance of my camera! I rather stupidly left it on the car hood, and Viriamu drove off with it, fortunately and somewhat bizarely it must have dropped off the car after Viriamu had rounded the corner and was picked up by my sister-in-law's boyfriend, she brought the camera to grandma's house a week or two afterwards, and hawk-eyed Matotea recognised it......so it's finally back with us, but not in time for me to get any shots of the marriage or Christmas.

Here is a shot I borrowed of one of the couples at the church on the wedding day, the 22nd of december, exactly 6 years after ours.

Then there was the wedding feast, with around 600 guests and a little too much fruit punch for many of the locals, sadly a lot of us can't hold our drink and these kind of celebrations are the time of year when we get road accidents, this time there was a write-off when someone drove into the fence around the airport and a drunken scooter got into an accident with a car, fortunately no-one was seriously hurt.

Then it was Christmas, this year I refused to have the usual BBQ at ours, just feeling too pregnant, so it was all super low key, the girls were wound up to fever pitch, but we ended up shipping them to grandma's with all the rest of the cousins and family, Viriamu and I ended up sharing a quiet meal for two, some green-lipped mussels in an excellent thai coconut milk sauce, complete with kaffir lime leaves, which turn out to be growing in our backyard, just by another name here (combava)! It's a citrus tree that grows here, the weird wrinkly fruits are great for washing your hair and body with, they're super zesty, though not good for juice, and now I find out  that the leaves are just an excellent addition to coconut-milk curries and lots of other dishes, giving a distinctly thai flavor to dishes.

Somewhat reminiscent of last years' Christmas celebrations, there are continuing boat issues. We are once more rationing diesel, petrol and gas, and you guessed it, granny and grandpa's Christmas parcels were sitting on the boat on Christmas day, at least this year the beer had arrived in time! But the locals were none too amused to spend Christmas and Boxing day waiting at the quay! The run up to Christmas saw us with no onions to speak of, making Christmas menus quite difficult to realise - I'm really going to have to get serious about planting some!