Tsunamis?

Weekend update! Friday and Saturday nights we went out to smokey shady bars, so nothing new there. Saturday afternoon we went to a barbecue/pool party. It was hosted by a guy that used to live in the US but has grown up in Fiji and is a student at USP - he has class with a couple kids in the Australearn program and he invited us all over, which was real nice. There's a decent amount of Americans here that have relocated for one reason or another, I think that's pretty cool, it's got to be very different growing up here. Afterwards we went to a girl's apartment in Suva to have some snacks and we just hung out playing charades and stuff for a while, which was pretty entertaining.

The tsunami threat scared everyone away!

Today, we had plans to go to the beach, but we instead had the pleasure of waking up to a tsunami warning as a result of the earthquake in Chile. None of us were too freaked out about it (I think because it's something we've never had to consider before, so it just doesn't seem real), but we still decided to scrap our plans to go to the beach today. On our way to the bus stop there were tons of people sitting by the sides of the streets, and we saw a few had suitcases packed up...it was impossible to get a taxi, and the buses were super crowded with everyone trying to move up to higher land, just in case. Our apartments are at the top of a decent sized hill so I wasn't too worried about them, but it was still unsettling. I guess a tsunami hit Tonga and Samoa a few months ago and killed a bunch of people, so the countries in this area are a little on edge about these things. I later found out that some islands in French Polynesia (like Tahiti) had gotten some pretty bad swells from the earthquake, but thankfully by later this afternoon they had lifted the warning on Fiji since no noticeable changes in sea levels had been detected.

The road to the park

We went downtown originally to try to get waffles from a little cafe that some other students had told us about (the thought of American brunch food was very enticing), but because it is Sunday and there was the whole tsunami business, literally nothing was open. It was kind of a ghost town, which was a little eery. We eventually headed out to the Colo-i-Suva national park. We only walked around a little loop for a couple hours, but we stopped at a bunch of different rockpools and waterfalls along the way. The water was nice and cool, and of course the place was beautiful. One of the pools had a big rock with a waterfall that you could jump off of, and another had a rope swing that you could swing out from various ledges into a deep pool - I'm trying to deal with my phobia of heights, so I made myself jump off of these things. I may not have been graceful, but it was a lot of fun. Obviously, I took a ton of pictures to assault you with:

Little bug hanging out on a wild orchid = cute

Massive black spider with equally massive web = NOT CUTE. The vertical pod-like thing...I don't know if it's an egg case or something huge that the spider killed and will slowly eat but these things had webs all along the pathway. Hopefully they stick to the jungles. We had a huge brown spider on our screen door (about the size of my palm) the other day, and I'm still scared of walking through my door.

One of many waterfalls

Steps worn right into the stone beside a waterfall

More nature

And another waterfall...

And another.

Overall it was a really cool little trip to make in the afternoon. Everyone was getting hungry/tired so we headed home after a couple hours of exploring. Tonight was another potluck dinner with everyone at our apartment, which was great again. Eli bought a whole tuna and succeeded in gutting and cleaning it to make something delicious, which makes me want to be courageous and tackle a whole fish sometime soon. We'll see. We have the day off from classes tomorrow, so hopefully we'll go out and find something else to do for a day trip. Unless of course the tsunami decides to show up late and wash everything away..

Video of crazy plants to start off the weekend...

My roommate Kirsten showed these to me while we were walking back from the bookstore today. All the leaves curl up once you touch them!

Finished First Week

It's Friday, and I've now gotten through each of my classes, so I think that my schedule is finally set for the semester. At least, I hope it is, because after today if you drop or add courses they fine you (I think this sucks, since it's their fault they can't schedule things properly in the first place...) My physiology professor has a thick Indian accent so I can't really understand what he's saying, which will most likely be an issue in the future. Also he handed out our lab assignment for next week, where we're monitoring blood glucose levels in a chicken. The procedure suggests that we "use 5-8 students to sufficiently restrain the chicken while taking blood samples from a wing vein", so this should prove to be interesting. Also there are 90 students in the class and only 2 lab sections, which means huge labs. I haven't been in a lab with more than 20 people and I've only worked alone or in pairs, so I think I'll appreciate things at Williams more when I'm through with this. Oh and I have a gecko that's decided to move into my room...he's missing a tail and he's pretty quiet, so maybe he figured he could hide away and recover with me. It's okay, but it freaks me out when he pops out from behind things when I'm getting ready to go to bed.

It's been raining for the past couple of days, which kind of sucks because you get soaked for being outside for more than a few seconds, but at least it breaks the heat. We have a 3 day weekend coming up, so hopefully we'll have nice weather since we're planning to do a few trips around the area. So this post is boring but I should have heaps of pictures from this weekend coming up.

Exploring Downtown

This morning I woke up and decided to go for a run down to the shore and run along a sidewalk by the ocean. It was nice while it was still cloudy, but once the sun came out I thought I was going to die for a little while (sorry if you're reading this Mich and Lacey, but getting back in running shape has been put on hold for a little while I focus on not getting kidnapped/robbed in my new place). There was a nice breeze off of the ocean though, and I made it a few miles before I had had enough. The beaches around Suva aren't much to look at - since a reef breaks the waves way out from land, we get no waves and a lot of mud, which isn't too pretty. But, I was very excited to find out (upon closer inspection of the mud at low tide) that there weren't just lots of little orange flowers in the mud, but actually crabs! Hundreds of tiny crabs were running around, smacking each other with their big orange fighting claws that were about the size of the rest of their body. I scampered down to the mud and tried to get a closer look, but they were all very good and hiding in their tiny burrows in the sand, so I was foiled. I'll try to take pictures of them next time I'm down there.

After running, a few of us made a trip downtown to look around the place. Two of the girls in the group actually wanted to get their noses pierced, but it's a little sketchy here: instead of going to a piercing parlor like in the US, you just go to a jewelry shop and they pierce everything using a gun, which isn't too good for cartilage. Arti went through with it anyways, though, and now she has a pretty little stud in her nose. Hopefully nothing will go wrong with it.

Walking around downtown. Eli is rocking a sulu.

Old monument

After getting that done and spending some time wandering around and looking in shops, we found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that made big portions of various stir fries for super cheap. We bought a few of these for lunch and had a picnic in the park downtown, and it was really nice to get to sit down in the shade and enjoy the breeze off of the sea.

The park downtown

Mmm, huge amounts of delicious cheap food...

By now, it was time for me to get back to school to go to class, so we hopped on a bus and headed home. Walking back from class, Chauncey and I decided to get some breadfruit off of a tree by the walkway. I picked up a stick, and after whacking at one of the spiky melon-looking things I succeeded in knocking one down. We immediately took it home to try to figure out what to do with it, but unfortunately breadfruit tastes like awful mushrooms. It also secretes a sticky white sap that I am currently soaking off of the knife that we used to hack the thing apart. My first experience with smacking oranges off of trees went pretty well, so I guess you can't win them all.

Chauncey with our breadfruit. She looks happy because this is before we found out how gross breadfruit is.

Market Trip

I spent this morning struggling to figure out my schedule (I have to add another class since my plant one got cancelled) for a few hours. I called it quits once I found out that the woman who I was supposed to give a form to was out of the office for the rest of the day... hopefully she'll be back when I go in tomorrow for round 2. Anyways, I used the afternoon to run a bunch of errands. I bought a bag for carrying produce when I go to the market, notebooks for class, some little groceries, and other odds and ends. Then we went to the big fresh market in downtown Suva. I've been there before, but I hadn't brought my camera, so I made sure to document some of it this time. The market is pretty much a ton of tables in a huge covered area (there's a 2nd floor as well) just covered in eggs, spices, fruit, and vegetables. Pineapple, papaya, watermelon, and bananas are all in season and are really cheap and really delicious. Everything here is smaller than the produce that we get in the US, and actually tastes the way it should, which is a nice break from the bland, genetically altered giants that I'm used to back home. Even the prepackaged chicken breast in the normal grocery stores is smaller and better tasting. But, it is a real pain to get things that aren't in season - apples were probably the most expensive fruit in the market.

I'll try to get a better picture to show how big this place is, but you get the idea.

That's my roommate Katie, buying some pineapple. Pineapple here is SO GOOD! Kind of a pain to cut up and everything, but it's worth it.


Loads of fresh chilis everywhere; hopefully I'll become more tolerant of spiciness and be able to actually do something with these by July.

There is also a fish market nearby since Suva is right on the water, but unfortunately most of it was closing up for the day, so we'll have to try to go back again later. We drove by it on Sunday and it looked packed, so hopefully we can make it there in the morning sometime soon. Flies are a huge problem, so all of the fishermen/women sit by the fish and flick flies away with ribbons of plastic attached to the end of a stick. All of the fish are sold whole, so I guess we're going to learn how to clean fish pretty soon. I'm no good at cooking with seafood, but my roommate Nichole says she loves it so hopefully she can teach me how to deal with fish this semester.

Some pretty blue parrotfish... sad that they're dead, but they probably deserve it because they're tasty.

When I got home I decided to chop up all of the fruit that I had bought so that I could stick it in the freezer and have some instant frozen fruit bites! Besides the stuff that I picked up at the market, I attempted to harvest some of the oranges from the tree outside of our house. The oranges are still dark green, but they're very fragrant and we've seen our housekeeper snacking on them. They're pretty tart, but still good to eat.

The chosen tool for whacking oranges off of tree branches: a 20 foot long bamboo shoot. It's heavy and unwieldy, but after some girly efforts at popping up and down while trying to whip that thing around I managed to knock a few down.

Everything prepared for my fruit chopping party. The green lime-looking things are the oranges.

After cooking dinner and hanging out for a little, a bunch of us went to go see Shutter Island at the theater. Movies here are cheap, and movie candy is way cheaper than candy anywhere else here (chocolate is especially expensive unfortunately), and it's a good way to spend a low key night in some air conditioning. I was a little creeped out though, and was not happy about having to retrieve my laundry from the laundry room (which is outside, in the dark, and looks like a room from the blair witch project) after we got home. Sadly, the clothes that I wore on the hike last weekend are officially stained red, which kind of sucks since I only brought a few pairs of shorts and some t-shirts. I'll manage though.

Bula, na yacaqu o Analaisa, au goneyalewa ni Merika...

Today was the first day of classes. I never thought I'd say it, but I miss the administration at Williams right now because today was a wreck. My first class (plant physiology) was supposed to be at 10am, but when I went to the room that it was supposed to be in there was another class full of Korean people learning English. I found out later in the afternoon that the class had been canceled, although I hadn't received any emails or notifications about it. One of my roommates waited in a class for 40 minutes before the professor showed up. Another had her class remind the professor what time class was later this week. I came back to the same room later to try to take my beginner Fijian class, but the English class was still in there. Since that class was full of other American kids, we got a group together and went to the international office, where our coordinator called the professor, who said that he wasn't aware of the problem and that we should meet at a different room.

So, we had our first language class today (with only 5 of us though since we were the only ones that heard about this phone call). I think Fijian is going to be difficult. There are a lot of rules for pronunciation, like c's are pronounced like "th", g's are pronounced like the "ng" in "sing", q's are like the sound "nguh", v's are pronounced using both of your lips instead of your teeth and your bottom lip, j's are "ch", r's are rolled, and every word seems to contain i's or a's for every other letter, especially in longer words. The meaning of a word can change according to how long or short you pronounce the vowels. Our professor tried to fijian-ize our names, which is best done with a Catholic name to begin with...everyone had a catholic name other than me, unfortunately, but at least there was a fairly common Fijian name that sounds close enough to mine: Analaisa. The title to this means "Hi, my name is Annelise, I'm a girl from America". That's pretty much the extent of what we learned today. Our professor is Irish, and he makes speaking Fijian seem really easy, but we were all stumbling over seemingly simple words. But, it sounds really cool, so hopefully I'll be able to at least do some small talk by the end of the semester.

I had a meeting for my invertebrate biology course this afternoon, and that actually went okay, as in the class was in the place and time where the schedule said it would be. The lecture is large, but I really like the sound of the course - we have 3 field trips, one each to look at invertebrates in terrestrial, marine, and freshwater environments. We have a lot of ID labs in between these too. I'm excited. I have physiology tomorrow morning (hopefully?) so I'll see how that goes.

Tonight we had a huge potluck dinner at our apartment, which worked out really well - our apartment made pasta with tomato sauce and sausage. Hopefully we'll start doing this every week because it's a good way to get everyone together. For now, I need to try to make sure I'm in the lab periods that I need to be in, and try to find a new 4th class...maybe marine biology? Also I've had an issue with ants invading my desk for the last few days, including my laptop. The ants come out if we leave crumbs out in the kitchen for more than like 2 minutes, but I have no idea what they're doing in my room. And I'm getting annoyed with having them crawl out of the keys of my laptop, because that's gross. I'm hoping they'll get bored soon and leave.

Hike up Mount Korobaba

Since everything is closed on Sundays and classes start up tomorrow, I wasn't too sure what I was going to end up doing today. That problem was solved though when a group of the Australearn students (all of the kids that live in the apartment complex with me are here with them, so I'm adopted by the program) decided to go for a hike up nearby Mount Korobaba. I had a blast and hopefully we'll get to do a decent amount of hiking throughout the semester. I took a ton of pictures, so here are a few:

Taking the bus to a van station that would then take us to the mountain. We were a little worried when the van dropped us off at a cement factory that looked like the beginning of a bad horror movie, but everything ended up fine once we found the trail.

Starting out on the beginning of the trail. The guide book said that the hike would be about 1-2 hours.

About a half hour into the hike we found a series of waterfalls and pools with this group of 5 Fijian boys swimming around. They would leap off of huge rocks and do flips into the pools - some of the people in our group joined them but I was too scared of heights.

Beautiful view of the river upstream of the pools - fresh water here has a green/blue tinge to it that's very pretty. It was really nice just laying down in the water because it was so hot and humid.


The boys - they decided to join us to show us the way up and down the mountain. They ran up and down the thing extremely fast and had to keep waiting up for us (and taking breaks to laugh at all of us when we fell or tripped). They spoke a little English, enough for us to find out that they lived in a village near the base of the mountain and that they came up here a lot and would sleep on top of the mountain sometimes.


Wild orchids were all over the trail.


And bugs! This guy was frozen with his head sticking straight up. He foamed clear liquid at the mouth when we moved him, so I don't think he enjoyed us playing with him very much.


And a giant millipede. This was about 7 or 8 inches long and we saw a few of them crawling around. Hopefully I'll get to learn more about these things in my invertebrate zoology class.


The view from the top was absolutely beautiful - you can see the entire peninsula that Suva lies on. It was also really breezy and cool which was a very welcome break from the humidity on the way up. It turns out that the guidebook only wanted you to hike up about halfway where there is a campsite, but we went up the entire mountain which took about 3 hours up and an hour and a half back. It was super steep and I was a little scared of falling and breaking my neck at least a few times. Most of the trail was slick with red clay mud and rocks, so we had to be really careful (although we ended up with a few solid wipeouts on the way).


More mountain views. Viti Levu (the main island that Suva is on) has a ton of mountains inland. I don't think you can see the haze or the rainclouds too well, but it poured on us a few times during the hike.

Me being very attractive and sweaty and covered in mud. I think I ruined those shorts. We all ended up hiking up barefoot at some point (I didn't want to ruin my Nikes, those things have to last me all semester). It was okay, except now I have little cuts all over my feet and was picking thorns out of my toes later at night at home.


The boys evidently weren't tired at the end of the hike, as they all climbed up this structure at the very top and were waving the flag around and screaming and singing. These kids were baller.

Busy Weekend

Part of the walk to school

View from outside the economics building (where I've been hiding away to get wireless)

Our apartments from the hill behind them

I've been here for about 4 days now and I'm starting to get settled in. I signed up for classes: beginner fijian, invertebrate zoology (!), comparative animal physiology and plant physiology. Some of these overlap (when you sign up for courses it doesn't tell you what time they meet, so you can't really plan out your schedule), so I still have to figure that out before tomorrow. Classes also don't meet at the same time for a couple days, for example, one of my classes meets at 10am wednesdays and 4pm fridays. So that should make remembering my schedule a bit complicated. I've gone grocery shopping a couple of times and it's becoming apparent that I really can't buy too many imported things because they're hideously expensive. Unfortunately not too much stuff is made here, so maybe I'll just be living off of fruit and vegetables for the rest of the semester. Also I'm sick of eating lamb...it seems like it's the most available source of meat here, and I didn't like it much to begin with, and now that I've had it a few times in the last few days I'm definitely not warming up to it. Blah.

It's been rainy this weekend, which is actually not that bad since it clears out some of the humidity and makes it bearable to walk around outside. I'm still very grateful for our air conditioning in the house, though. There are giant fruit bats that fly around during the daytime and mongoose (mongeese?) that are about as abundant as squirrels are back home. This morning I found cockroaches under the sink. We went to a resort yesterday to hang out by the pool/beach, but it was rainy and cloudy for most of the time which kind of sucked. The sun came out for a little while so I sat out by the pool, and even though I put on sunscreen I know have a painful sunburn that will make me miserable for the next few days. I also saw a hermit crab on the beach, which I got all excited about since I haven't seen a hermit crab before, other than in pet shops.

I've taken a lot of pictures, but I haven't had the chance to upload them to my computer yet, so those will have to wait for a later post. We are supposed to get internet in our apartment tomorrow, which I am excited about because I'm feeling homesick and I'll really enjoy not having to walk to campus in order to check my email...

I made it!

So after way too much time in airports/airplanes/hotels/buses/taxis, I am finally in Fiji. I have a beautiful apartment (nice and big, classy islandy wicker furniture, and most importantly AC in every room) and I have met a few of the other American students that are here. I got in Wednesday afternoon and after getting settled went with a group of people to go check out the downtown Suva area just by wandering around...it's very interesting. The buses are super cheap, have no windows, and play really up to date US pop hits except remixed with reggae beats to make it appropriate for an island. They also only have a few scheduled stops, but mostly just stop for people on the side of the road (wherever you are) and you pull a wire to make the bus stop anywhere you want. Very different.

We have geckos in our apartment that squeak loudly, and so far I've only seen little ground spiders, but my roommates assure me that there are massive ones around here so I'll wait until my first encounter with one of those critters. I woke up this morning to the sound of wild dogs fighting and parrots squawking, which was soothing. Today I registered for classes and got my computer configured to the internet here - I can only get wireless in a few places for now, but starting on Monday (once classes start) we get wireless in our apartment, which is amazing. Lots of students are wandering around campus to get a lot of stuff done before the start of school...I am sure there are a lot of things that I have left to do in the next couple days but for now I'm jet lagged and hot and tired. It is oppressively humid here, but I can't complain given how Massachusetts has been snowed on pretty much constantly for the last month or so. I will take pictures over the next few days and post them, but I've got too much stuff to get settled with classes starting and everything so I might suck at updating for a while. I'm glad I'm here finally.

Finally Fiji-Bound

I was going to go out to lunch and see some of Seoul today with a friend that I made at the hostel that I stayed at while I was in Australia last January (her name is Lucy), but after talking with my mom and dad we figured it would be best if I laid off of the excitement for a little while and just took it easy today before heading to the airport. I'm so glad I'm in this hotel room...even though the lights are controlled by the tv remote and I am expected to take off my shoes at the door and wear little slippers around the place and I got kicked out of an all you can eat breakfast buffet this morning because I ate too much. My flight leaves at 7pm tonight and I arrive in Nadi at 9am tomorrow morning, where I will have to take a shuttle bus (apparently the taxis can be a little dangerous, a nugget of information that was disclosed to my mother by the international student officer at USP this morning that sent my mom into a frenzy of protectiveness) to Suva. It seems strange that I'm finally headed out, all my time in Italy felt like a vacation where I would just head back to Williams, and the past few days have been an odd mixture of airports and hotels with no real concept of time....hopefully everything will go smoothly though. And the next time I write in this thing I will be in Fiji!

Update from Seoul - Dubai Round-up

Just arrived in Seoul, where I now have a 26 hour layover. The airline didn't put me up in a hotel this time so for now it looks like I'm posting up on my little bench corner in front of the check-in desks. This is going to be interesting. And by interesting I mean absolutely miserable.

P.S. Last night I took a 2 hour driving tour of Dubai which was super cool, but I'll wait to post pictures from that at some point where I'm not depending on precious battery power on my laptop.

EDIT: I found a very cheap and very nice hotel here to stay in for the night, and it has free internet as well so it's perfect. Here are a few pictures from Dubai; they're all taken at night and from a moving vehicle so the lighting sucks and my little canon can't really handle photographing grand things blah blah blah, but I'm putting them up anyways, damnit.

Driving down the highway

Me next to the indoor ski slope (it's housed in a giant mall)

Entrance to one of the royal families' palaces. These compounds take up a few streets in the middle of the city and are huge!

The Burj-al Arab, one of 3 7 star hotels in the world. This picture is taken from the beach beside it, where I walked around for a little while and picked up some shells from the Arabian Gulf.

I think it looks like a cockroach from this angle.

A mosque by the center of the city.

The Burj Khalifa is the world's tallest building at 2,717 feet. It was completed this year.

The Atlantis - the Palm hotel, located on the manmade islands that look like a palm tree when viewed from above

View of the massive indoor aquarium from inside the Atlantis hotel

GOD I love traveling

It's been a while due to restricted internet but I wanna keep this thing going! So Friday Tyler and I pretty much just chilled all day, appreciating each others company and such since I was leaving. She had a field trip for some archaeology thing in the morning (she was not happy since the wind stops her blood from flowing correctly haha), and after that we bummed around. She took me to the post office to send some cards back home, and to get me a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice (amazing!). Then we walked to the bus station to see what the schedule was for getting buses to the airport on Saturday mornings for my trip tomorrow. Of course no one was working the ticket booth, but after looking at a few different schedules we concluded that there was indeed one that would work for me. After that we went home and had a brief siesta before going out for coffee in a cafe across the street from the big church (that I put pictures up). We probably sat there for about 2 hours just talking, drinking cappuccino (I never had that before this trip and I'm a little concerned since now I've had about 8 of them), and staring at the church. I also got my first cup of gelato! It was strawberry and still had seeds in it...yum. Tyler also got these little munchkins fried dough bites that were so much better than any doughnut store stuff here. We figured after it got dark that it was time to go home, and everyone else in the program was doing a pot luck dinner but we decided to have a chilled out night and just cooked together for the two of us: pasta with homemade sauce, fresh broccoli and bread and wine. Basic and delicious. We both had a teeny bit too much wine though and headed out to go play beiruit at one kid's apartment with these teeny short cups since they don't sell solo cups here. It seemed like everyone had a really fun time - I know Ty and I were having a ball acting like idiots. I didn't sleep at all for the rest of the night (despite the fact that I was snugging with Jenna on the same twin mattress! I usually sleep like a baby with cuddling but for some reason my body was having none of it). Anyways, Ty woke up with me at 5:15 (what a good friend awwww) and we trudged over the bus stop. It was still pitch black out, and oddly warm, since the wind from the ocean hadn't picked up yet. We waited for a while, then the bus finally showed up, and I said a *little* tearful goodbye to my person.

You would think that walking to the bus stop before sunrise was the worst part of this day, but that would be very very wrong.

So, I had hoped that since I had got my life together to schedule out all of these plane rides around the world and bus stops in between that it should work out fine. At least, that's the impression that I was under. FALSE. My bus arrived just fine, but my plane that was supposed to leave Rome to come to Catania and take me back to Rome (landing in Rome at 10:00am, giving me plenty of time to get my stuff together to catch my layover at 2:30) just....fucked up big time. They delayed it for hour after hour after hour with no representative from the airline explaining anything, until around 11:30 when some guy came up and said that flight had been cancelled. Cancelled? Apparently the thing had been having electrical problems in Rome all morning, but that's unrelated information that passengers don't want to know about....SOOOO in my rage I demand that this man call baggage and get my luggage out of there, and instead of going through the process of filling out claims stuff for lost and found baggage I jumped the barrier to get into the baggage claims rooms with a couple of italian guys yelling at me. I think this was probably the high point of my life. I yanked my suitcase off of the belt and sprinted up to get in line to buy a heinously overpriced ticket on the next flight to Rome, which left at 12:20. An hour long flight...hour in between landing and when I need to be taking off in another plane...I knew this wasn't going to happen but I was faithful. I skipped my drugs on this new plane to Rome (badddd idea in adding to me in an already neurotic state) and hauled myself off the plane, grabbed my suitcase (it was the first one off of the conveyor belt, thank god) and absolutely sprinted to the check in counter for Emirates flight EK096 to Dubai at 2:30, that, subsequently, hooks me up to every other flight I need to get to godforsaken Fiji. This woman is literally closing the counter as I get there. I start screaming "NO NO NO" as I see this (since I'm still running) and she looks at me like I'm a deranged woman and informs me in a pleasant british/italian accent that "this flight is no longer taking passengers, you may look at the ticket counter to purchase another flight to dubai." I'm not an emotional person usually, but I burst out crying hysterically. I don't think I have ever felt that helpless and pathetic and scared and confused and lonely before - ehhh probably at Williams, but I mean in the real world.

After pulling myself together a little (at least to the extent where I didn't have people starting at me alarmingly), I went over to the ticket counter and spent an hour trying to figure out what to do with a pleasant German named Khristian. We settled on me going to Dubai at 8pm that night, and then me having a 22 hours layover once there, getting on a 3am flight to Seoul, having an 18 hour layover there, and then flying to Nadi. So, my 2 days of hellish plane traffic has been magically extended to 4. One slight consolation to this is that Emirates (my new favorite airline) gave me a free voucher to stay at the Emirates hotel location in Dubai, so I'm not just in the airport for my entire layover. I think the guy felt bad for me because I was such a mess. Nice guy. But yeah I'm sitting in a really classy huuuuge hotel room in Dubai for the next 15 hours until I have to take the complimentary bus over to the airport and do this all over again...hopefully successfully this time. I'll post pictures on all of this later but I'm really not in the mood right now, my main priorities at this point are food and sleep.

My hair isn't greasy, I had just gotten out of the shower I swear.

Since school is closed on Friday, this will be the last post I can do before I leave for Fiji. Not quite sure what we're going to do yet in the next couple days, but I've definitely got to re-pack my things for the trip. And eat a lot more delicious italian food. I have to take a bus from Ortigia to Catania, then a plane from Catania to Rome, then to Dubai, then to Seoul, then to Nadi (Fiji), then a taxi from Nadi to Suva. Big adventure! I'll hopefully have some source of steady internet there (praying for it in my apartment, but that seems unlikely). I've loved staying in Italy for the week, and I'm sad to leave - Ty will be the last familiar person that I see until July, which is freaking me out.

Since I couldn't sleep last night, I spent most of the day napping after getting up early with Tyler to go to the market. It was really cool! It was pretty much a street with lots of stands with just about everything - fish, produce, cheese, bread...I'm getting hungry thinking about it. Everything is local and delicious and I'm sad that I don't have something like that year round at home. And they're generous, too - we asked to try a piece of smoked mozzarella, and the cheese guy gave us little mini sandwiches with fresh bread, cheese, and prosciutto. They eat a lot of ham here and it's kind of tough to find other meat (except of course for fish since we're on the coast). It was sunny and beautiful, so I took a bunch of pictures of the area on the walk over to the market. After I finished my nap, I got coffee with Tyler (we got lost on the way and wandered around a lot of the town), and after messing around on the internet at school we went and got pizza. I love pizza here. I just got a basic cheese one and it was super delicious. After dinner we went home to get ready for going out and went to a bar that had been reserved for the night for their program. One of the kids did an acoustic set on the guitar, and then there was lots of drinking and dancing...lots of fun. Hopefully the weather will be nice for the rest of the time that I'm here.

Tyler, me, Cate, and Jenna at the bar

Fish at the market!

Street market full of food...mmm

View of Ortigia along an ocean walkway. Apparently when there are intense storms, the water comes up almost all the way up the wall (which was about 30 feet down).

Walking from the apartment to the ocean