Monday 10th September, First Day at work.

92 days to go.

Well, The first night crew met in the foyer of the cell block hotel. We all made our way to the Lime Lounge for breakfast. 0800 in the morning 28deg and 100% humidity.

This is a very good place to be, air conditioned and serves decent tea and coffee as well as a breakfast. I go for the fruit salad with yoghurt. The others a variety of dishes from omelette to BLTs.

What a way to start the day, the rest of the 92 days will fly by. We head to the Office, well we do have an office, it is shared by 8 of us, all 4 desks and 3 office chairs supplemented by 5 plastic garden chairs. The two visiting banana benders, Mrs Brady and Ana, being in possession of a weeks knowledge, stake the remaining desk not occupied by Duke and Nemo (the permanent staffers) and leave the rest of us to fight over the one desk, chair and computer connection.

As I have yet to get a laptop or phone or ID or anything I graciously let the Gimp and Austin have first go at plugging in their laptops. Then it is downstairs, yes folks, I think I am resident in one of the few multi-storey offices in the area, we meet the IT consultant in charge of the integration of the system Stats has produced for the SI Govt. Baby Nemo. She has worked all over the world, but is a little distracted as her parents then boyfriend are due on the scene.

Straight into work with them as Tweety is given the roll of doing the commercial work. I will be doing enforcement. We spend the rest of the morning discussing Stats system and what we expect of it. Then off to lunch to the shopping centre. This is the only real shopping mall here. It is huge, I counted at least 8 shops and the food hall had 3 food outlets! I go with Nemo and Mrs Brady and Ana. Ana s conversation over lunch is where to go to dinner and how many minutes that is away.

Back to the Office, then out to the Aid Missions admin place. They are on the top (fourth) floor of the tallest building in town. Oh, by the way, no lifts, elevators or escalators in Honiara. I get my mobile, my laptop and am officially here. I will get my security briefing tomorrow. We meet the advisor at 1000.

Back to Stats and Baby Nemo for the rest of the afternoon. We meet up with all the people mentioned above and arrange to meet in the foyer of the Mendana Cell block at 1830 for pre dinner drinks.

Gimp, Austin, Mrs Brady, Ana and I head out to a new Sri Lankan -Indian Restaurant. We are joined a little later by Nemo. Baby Nemo has gone home to get things ready for her visitors, Duke has gone home, he is still bothered by the failure of Adelaide's football teams and needs some quiet time. Stats and Tweety are off to join the Hash walk/run this evening.

Well we drive out to the Taj, looks impressive, so does the restaurant. Clean and they have sport on a big plasma on one wall and news on another. Ana does not do "Hot" so we choose carefully a range of flavours and vegetables. The food overall was good, however I was eating the Curried beef, when I pulled out a piece of meat with a bone in it and started removing said meat from bone I noticed that it was a very white meat. I do not think I shall be returning to that establishment.

Ah well another day over and work awaits in the morning, we decamp to the well used foyer and catch up with Tweety and Stats for an after dinner drink and arrange to meet in the same place at 0800 for a trip to the Lime Lounge for breakfast, upon which Ana informs us is 9 hours away.