Celebrity Solstice - day 8 - Suva, Fiji

We had a relatively short journey overnight to the port at Suva, Fiji. Suva is the capital of Fiji, and its largest city.

We saw an interesting ship outside our window on Wednesday morning -- lots of communication tools on that one!

The Marine Traffic website indicated it as a Chinese "Research/Survey Vessel" -- of course it is!

A view of Suva from the top deck...

... and another with the market in the foreground.

When we got back to our room, we found the crew exercising the lifeboats outside our room -- a video of one of the lifeboats being lowered: https://youtu.be/2CK9Of_5dsg

We had decided to walk in to town to visit some markets...

The ship provides information in the elevators about where we could get off the ship - just show up at the elevator and press the appropriate floor button.

We started in the open market... coconuts...

... some vendors had their wares on the pavement outside the market...

... inside, lots of vendors...

... lots of vegetables...

... taro roots.

Like the market in Lautoka, it seemed that there were more vendors and product than there were shoppers. 

Outside, we saw a lot of open-air busses...

You can see Celebrity Solstice behind the bus -- does that bus make our ship look small?

Another open-air bus

Looking down one of the streets in Suva

Some "Suva-neers" in a department store in Suva.

One of the things we saw shopping were sulus (skirts) available for men to purchase. We saw about 10% of the men wearing them (the person on the left is a man, there were a couple of women ahead of him on the right). The men's sulu is a very straight wrap-around skirt. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulu_(skirt))

Carl took this picture for his son, Scott, to see that there is a Scott Street in Suva. We were heading down Usher to get back to the port.

Information about our schedule -- note that some dates are in bold, indicating that we are supposed to dress up a little more for dinner. Other dates have a little arrow next to them -- those are the evenings when we are supposed to set our clocks forward one hour so we will be on the right time for the next port that we will be visiting.

The captain had told us that there was a pilot from Suva on the ship who would be assisting with navigating the ship out of the harbor, and that he would be picked up once we got past whatever point needed... we had seen a pilot boat motoring along behind ...

... all of a sudden, the pilot boat came roaring up alongside... disappeared out of the view from our balcony...

... and in very short order, sped away from the ship with new people on the front of it (presumably the pilot and another person) -- he was taking a video as we were taking his picture.

Not long after the pilot left, we saw some vessels who possibly could have made use of a pilot...

... multiple wrecks on what seemed to be a sandbar. Our captain carefully avoided that area!

In the evening, there was a performance by a comedian (he was "ok" but not great).

After the theater show, we went to a dance venue where there was a "Silent Disco" going on...

... you may be able to see that people are wearing headphones and they have different colors displaying -- each person could select the music they wanted to listen and dance to -- but there were 3 different options. So, for example, at one point, the "blue" lit headphones were playing "YMCA" and the folks who had tuned to that channel were doing all the arm motions and singing along, while the others were grooving to a different beat. It was funny to take your headphones off for a moment and hear the un-melodious sound of people singing loudly off-key to whatever music they were listening to!

Here I am in my blue-lit headphones -- that channel had mostly music I had heard before. There was no country/western or classical channel, unfortunately!

Here is Carl dancing to the music on the blue channel!

We are able to stay up a bit later (well, we're losing an hour every few days so we're probably going to bed about the same time, but the clock says it is later!).