Survival Guide To Tahiti

I am now back home where I am enjoying my holidays, I will none the less take the time to give you a few pointers on life in Tahiti in case one of you is considering going there. As I have a lot of information to give about Polynesia this post will have different parts: today I will talk about service.



As soon as you step out of the plane you have a nice sight: hostesses give you the traditional tiare flower to put on your ear and a band is playing Polynesian music with a ukulele. Everything is done to create this postcard atmosphere even though you will soon see that it doesn’t really exist anymore.



French Polynesia is quite disturbing for the average tourist that expects a certain quality of service. When ordering something in a restaurant or a bar it is quite common to see the waiter/waitress coming back 5 minutes later to confirm your order even though he/she wrote it on a notepad. It is frequent not to get what you ordered because the information was not passed on to the bartender or to the cook or because the waiter forgot to bring back what you ordered. In other cases you will get something totally different than what you ordered...



There is absolutely no need to get pissed of by this kind of behaviour, you are not the first one and you surely won’t be the last one; service is something that doesn’t exist in the local culture, if one order is forgotten well shit happens. You will sometime see restaurant managers shouting at one employee for forgetting a part of the order but they all know how difficult it is to find employees who do not succumb to the fiu (this will be explained later).



The fiu is the condition that will plague an employee and preventing him from going to work for a few days, you could translate fiu to fed up: I am fiu = I am fed up; hard to run a restaurant or a hotel in those conditions. Polynesia has a high level of unemployed youth, the authorities are offering internships in tourism but as those are paid internships many young ones apply to those just to get the pay check at the end of the month even though they are interested in tourism. Thus tourists are met by a trained staff that is not motivated at all by the work, those employees will either get fired or stop coming to work forcing the managers to hire and train new employees.



Those things are hard to understand when you come to Tahiti for the first time, as this was my sixth trip I hope I gave relevant information to those who think about going there without scaring some of you. As you might have seen on my previous posts Polynesia is a unique place. Tomorrow I will talk about hotels.