The Day After Yesterday

We’re entering that zone where the days don’t have names. Like a little old lady blinking at her front door, we can’t always decide whether it’s Tuesday or Wednesday.

Although the days of the week have taken on an old meaning for Kate. She’s working as a voluntary teacher at Samoa College, one of Apia’s secondary schools. Three classes of maths, ninety minutes each, every Monday and Tuesday. Both sides of her classroom have open walls/windows, nevertheless its throat parching work. School starts at eight-thirty in the morning, half-an-hour for lunch, then finishes at two in the afternoon. By then she’s ready for a sasalapa drink and a chocolate muffin at the nearby Pacific Jewellery Cafe. On Tuesdays she returns to school at five for a further two hours of maths tutorials. Hard work, but she’s enjoying it. The kids are good and the teaching very rewarding.

Meanwhile I do battle with the internet. Unlike that Mitsubishi advert, here at our appartments, the Blue Zone hotspot wifi is very very slow. The vouchers to access it aren’t cheap either – seventy Tala for eight elapsed hours – and when you’re waiting five minutes for a screen refresh, twenty minutes for even a moderate file attachment, time rapidly runs out. Last night I discovered it was cheaper (and vastly more satisfying) to grab my computer and walk to the Toana Tusitala down the road. For the price of two Vailima tap beers, I could use the hotel’s much faster WiFi. And today I’m wondering about taking the car and parking as close as I can to the Blue Sky kiosk in Magasalalo market. A Blue Zone hotspot is sited inside the kiosk; it may be more effective to upload/download all internet traffic in one go from a momentary office in a blue car.