3-19 Vila
Vila is a terrifying place. I don’t mean unsafe or crime ridden. I mean that when you’ve been living on an island of a few thousand people and are all of a sudden in a town of 35,000, it is a bit overwhelming. There is traffic. This is weird. There are crowds to dodge on the street. This is weird. There is ice cream. This is good.


Night life in Vila is limited to a few bars, a casino and some night clubs. And the request million kava bars. There are no closing laws which makes for late nights or early mornings depending on how you look at these things. The clubs are unofficially broken up into the “ex-pat,” “tourist,” and “Ni-Van” clubs. The PCVs frequent all three kinds, sometimes in the same night. The casino is a strange place but has a great happy hour. It involves free food, anything that involves free food in Vila is great. The bars almost all have happy hour specials with happy hour ranging from 4pm until about midnight. On Sundays, the town shuts down. I can think of one bar open on Sundays and it closes at 5.
There is a pretty good variety of food. We can get pizza at several places, a few decent and not too expensive burgers, solid “asian” food (it’s a blend of Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese), sushi and a variety of French-esque cuisine. This was a French colony, kind of. Of course, any of the food is incredibly expensive to my poor Peace Corps budget. The going price of most restaurant food in Vila is about what you’d expect from a mid-line restaurant in Minneapolis. Except, you know, in a third-world country in the South Pacific. Jason says the beef here is exceptional, which makes sense since it is all free-range, grass fed and organic just without all the labels. There is a significant lack of local dairy. They let the cows run around and never bother to milk them. It is a sorry state of affairs. It also means real milk is non-existent and cheese, yogurt and shelf-safe box milk are very expensive. Ice cream is still totally worth it.
That is at least an overview of what life is like in Vila and why we always seem to be in shock while we’re there. It is a happy and full of ice cream kind of shock.
I really like this post–gives a good view into what you're seeing and doing (at least in Vila!).