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..