Weekend on the Coral Coast

Before I start this post, look at the last one - I updated it with pictures from my reef field trip for marine biology! I know you're pumped. Anyways...

This last weekend we went to the Beach House, a backpacker resort on the Coral Coast (the stretch of land to the west of Suva until around Sigatoka). It was really beautiful - at least, at high tide it was. There was a fringing reef right off of the island, so there was a few hundred yards of very flat reef extending out to the breakers. At low tide, this meant that all the sandy beach was exposed, and there was about a foot or two or water covering reef and seagrass from there on out. Some of us had the bright idea of going out through the reef to try to get to the deeper water to go swimming, but we just got stuck for an hour or so picking through the seagrass (where little crabs hid to clamp onto your feet and sea urchins were hidden by the grass), scattered rocks (where you usually kicked a rock or stubbed your toe on a rock or stepped on a rock or otherwise injured yourself on a rock), and crushed dead and live coral (where you cut your feet open on coral and had small stinging creatures sink into your feet). The whole place was pretty much a minefield of small things that didn't let getting stepped on and had painful defenses to prevent you from stepping on them. Our feet got chewed up, but I saw some really cool things - more starfish, some little fish, some really cool seashells, and nudibranchs! Very brightly colored tiny nudibranchs crawling around on the coral. I got very excited for this.

Picking our way around the coral. It was painful and sucked. I got a cut on the bottom of my foot that I didn't notice the day I got it (I was too busy dealing with the sting I got in my other foot that caused it to cramp up a few times so I was a little preoccupied with death concerns), but the next morning I definitely noticed it when I woke up and had a painful swollen cut that was filled with sand grains from the day before. I had to pick out the sand with a shoot of grass. That sucked too. All better now though thanks to antibacterial soap and tons of neosporin.

I stole this picture from my friend Emily - it's of four of us getting out of the water by a big swing that had been set up off of a palm tree. The first day we were there was beautiful and sunny and gave amazing colors to everything like in this picture, but of course I was too lazy to take any pictures until the next day when it was cloudy, so most of my pictures suck in comparison. The dog in the picture is Lucy, the coolest dog ever. Lucy would come out with us when we went out on the reef and would walk around looking at everything under the water. She would go on walks with us along the beach, and when I woke up Sunday morning she was laying outside of the door to our dorm, where she looked up at me, got up, and walked right inside the door to lay down and watch everyone until they woke up.

A boat that was beached a low tide but could be taken out at high tide. I want to ask my Fijian professor what this means!

View of the beach from my spot where I was napping in the trees. Beautiful white sand - I filled up a water bottle with it and brought it home, so now the hermit crabs got an upgrade in their housing from the dark volcanic sand they had before.

Me trying to pry out the coconut meat from a bu (green coconut, although that also means grandmother depending on the context) that one of the staff members already macheted open. I didn't like coconut too much at first, but now I'm started to love it. I think it's because I like working to claw out food from something like a little animal? Maybe? I don't know but I'm started to get obsessed with opening and consuming coconuts (not so much the juice though).

This week sucks. Lab reports, labs, and I need to study a lot so that I'm not screwed for all of the midterms I have next week. People are going a few different places for the long Easter weekend (we get this Friday and the next Monday off, so four day weekend woooo) and I would really like to get out of Suva and take a fun trip somewhere. A couple of us are thinking of going diving on the northern part of the island which would be really sweet. We'll see how work goes, but posts will most likely be pretty sparse over the next week or so.

Octopus and Creepers

Yesterday we went out to a reef on a small island off of Suva for my marine biology lab. We got thrown off of the boat and spent a few hours wading around, laying out a couple of lines and counting and measuring the live coral along each one. We were in knee deep water the whole time...so much for trying to not ruin my sneakers, but it was worth it. I spent the whole time splashing around looking at the many types of fish and animals and other cool things there.

Thanks to my friend that I made in lab that day, Lilly, I now have pictures!

You can't really see the color all that well, but there were a bunch of these deep blue starfish everywhere. I was very excited.

Me being overly excited and a little deranged-looking over a big clam shell that another girl in my group (Muni, she's the one crouched down actually doing work next to me) found. There were also red sea urchins everywhere, and although most of what we were walking on was dead coral, there were some really cool live ones (including a big fanned out sponge that was super sticky when you touched it). There were pockets of tiny brightly colored (mostly blue) fish around the few live corals that we found.

A banded octopus! I saw something moving around and watched it slink over the rocks for a while, changing colors to blend in with everything, and when I stepped closer to it it flashed its banded pattern, so I gave it some room. So cool!

Me, Lilly, and Lilly's friend Mere on the boat ride back from the reef to campus. This was my first trip to a reef in Fiji so I was really happy.

Today we had Fijian, where we spent the first hour pestering our professor with many questions because we didn't really feel like doing actual work. We found out that he speaks all dialects of Fijian (there are over 300), Samoan, Tongan, some languages spoken in the Solomon Islands, French, Russian, and German. So he's pretty much a boss. We also found out that Fijians have a different sense of eating...as in they say that you drink mangos, pineapples, and other juicy fruits. So, if I told someone that I ate a mango, that would be wrong. Also, Fijian ideas on family are very different. You consider all of your cousins your brothers and sisters, and male and female cousins that are related as parallel cousins (if they are related through their mother's sister, or through their father's father), interaction between these two cousins is forbidden. As in, they're not supposed to speak to each other or even be in the same room. Fijian fathers are not typically the ones that raise their own children; instead, discipline is handled by the mother's brother, who serves as the main authority figure in the family. It's very, very different. Our professor made it sound like this was pretty common, especially outside of the cities. Another not so fun thing I learned in class is that we have 2 midterms (a written and an oral exam) the week between Easter and spring break. This doesn't bode well for me, since I already have 3 midterms that week, so now I have 5 exams in 4 days. I guess this is payback for me never really having to do work here? It won't be anything like exam periods at Williams but I still think it's going to suck pretty bad.

Last night I got an email from the international office saying that I got a package in the mail! I knew my mom was sending me some stuff but I didn't think it would be here for a while so I was super excited. I went downtown after class this afternoon and went and picked up my two boxes. I had to open them up in front of customs people so they could see that I wasn't being shipped drugs or guns, and the workers were very interested in what I was doing in Suva alone as a small white girl. My mom sent me many wonderful things, including enough sunscreen to last me a lifetime and cocoa butter and aloe for all the sunburns that I still inevitably get, socks, and American magazines. I was very very happy to get things from home and cried a tiny bit thinking about how these boxes had been in Ashby not too long ago...thanks a lot mom.

Now, with two fairly sized boxes, I had to decide whether to take a taxi (convenient) or a bus (cheap with loud music) home. I figured I'd man up and go with the bus, which was a poor decision this particular afternoon. I had an older Indian man sit behind me, who immediately started asking me where I was from, where I was living in Suva, what I was doing here, etc. I could have dealt with this, but he then started demanding if I was Christian, and upon hearing my answer started trying to recruit me to the 7th Day Adventist church in town, being so helpful as to draw me out a map of where it was, asking me to come with him to services because he was looking for a WIFE, and explaining how my soul will be damned if I don't seek God soon. Of course this was the day that we got stuck in a lane of traffic where a bus right in front of us broke down, so the trip home took an extra 15 minutes as our driver tried to back up our bus into another lane of traffic. I was very pissed because he was ruining my usual happy trip of sitting on a bus with no windows in sunny weather with island hip hop blaring through the speakers. But, I got home in one piece with my wonderful boxes, so I can't be too upset.

We're going away to a beach on the Coral Coast for the weekend, hooray! We'll get back sometime on Sunday and I'll probably have pictures then to split up the obnoxious amounts of text I've been posting lately..

Good Start to the Day

I woke up this morning thinking I was being shot at with a gun by 4 Fijian men arguing in my room. Turns out the outdoor bathroom outside of my room (it's all concrete and creepy so I don't mess around with it) had water leaking under the floor, so a maintenance crew was out here at 7am using a jackhammer (and presumably bickering over how to use the jackhammer) literally right outside of my door. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that no one had running water yesterday, a fact that made me flat out panic after I returned drenched in sweat after my run (luckily the boys' apartment had a trickle of water coming out of their shower so I worked with that). Anyways, they've been hanging out all day in the shade and cracking coconuts open, occasionally chiseling away at the concrete. I brought out a pitcher of cold water as a peace offering, so hopefully they'll leave soon without much more earsplitting noise. Our entire back hill has also been getting mowed for the last two days, because they don't have lawnmowers here (at least, I haven't seen one yet) so the entire thing is done with weedwhackers. These aren't too quiet either. It isn't that annoying though since I'm not hanging out in my room all that much, and I do appreciate people trying to prevent the looming jungle from overtaking our yard.

Nothing too special going on so far this week - lab reports, labs (I think I'm going to a reef tomorrow for marine biology, which would be sweet), classes, etc. I tried changing my blog preferences to Fijian, but unfortunately blogger does not include Fijian in their list of about 50 options. Shocking. I went downtown today and bought a soccer ball, pump, and a pair of cheap cleats, so I'll start playing soon (probably by myself since I don't really see women exercising here, and especially not playing soccer). Maybe I'll weasel my way into some of the pickup games that I see guys playing most afternoons. Anyways getting cleats was kind of funny, the salesman and I spent a lot of time basically trying to figure out which shoe had the smallest size (they only had men's cleats, surprising). So now I have a pair in 4 1/2 mens. The guy selling me everything was looking at me pretty strangely so I'm guessing they don't have too many small white girls popping in and buying a bunch of soccer gear all that often. We're thinking of going to a hostel on the Coral Coast this weekend if the weather holds out. It got back to the regular searing hot sun and humidity yesterday, so hopefully that'll keep up - I was getting sick of torrential downpours all last week.

The Best Form of Procrastination

Last night we had our weekly potluck dinner. It was delicious as always.

Some of our food.

The boys messing around.

Today I woke up early to study more for my Fijian test (for some reason last night studying while having some kava didn't do wonders for my knowledge of the language); it ended up being an open book test so it really wasn't bad at all. Since my invertebrate bio class was cancelled for the day, I had to find a way to spend the afternoon. I sure as hell wasn't going to spend it doing work (why would I do homework in Fiji?) so I decided that today would be the day that I would get myself a pet (or two, or three...) so I went downtown to run errands, one of them buying a plastic cookie jar. Once I got back I went for a run to make sure it was low tide, then went back later with Cliff and Eli to pick up some....I know the suspense is unbearable.

Taa-daa! Hermit crabs! Okay so they're not the coolest things in the world. And they don't do much other than scrabble around trying to climb things and waving their antennae around. But I love hermit crabs and they're everywhere and I had a bunch when I was little and they're low maintenance and I miss having pets. I went down to Suva Point (if you call low tide mudflats with trash washed up everywhere I guess this would qualify as a beach), filled up my cookie jar with sand and shells and coral and picked up 5 hermit crabs. The boys got me a couple, including a teeny tiny one about the size of a grain of rice (I'm calling him Mr. Claw). The other 4 are Pinchy, Scuttlefuzz, Jerry, and Ted, although those names may be subject to change. I would point out which ones are which but that's boring for anyone reading this.

I painted their container. It reads "Hermit Estates", a prestigious community for any hermit crab to live in. There's also a palm tree and an ocean painted to the right of this. My artistic skills are clearly very advanced and I'm also losing my mind a little, I think...I miss having pets. I hope I can keep these guys alive long enough and that they don't try to have hermit crab wars between each other. They've had a tiring day of running around bumping into each other and trying to climb the seaglass and coconut shell bits that I stuck in there, so hopefully they'll be too tired to fight for at least another day.

Pacific Harbour and Bad Weather

On Friday, a couple of the boys and I had planned on going to visit our housekeeper (Marama, but she insists we call her "Mom") in her village about 3 hours north of here. I got super excited! But then we got up Saturday morning and found out that Mom's sister was visiting in Nadi so she had to go there and we would have to wait to go see her village until another weekend.

At this point in the day I was freaking out, because I needed to get out of Suva really bad. The weather report for the day didn't look good, but we decided to pile into a minibus anyways and go out to a resort on the coral coast (Pacific Harbour) where everyone in the program stayed during their pre-orientation trip. Since everybody got to know the staff and stuff there at that point, they were cool with us coming in and hanging out by the pool and the beach for the afternoon. It was a nice beach, nothing special, but still pretty. And it was low tide so sand dollars were scattered all over the beach.

Some of the many shells I picked up at the beach. My shell collection is going to have a really big section for Fiji by the time I get back! We probably grabbed about a hundred sand dollars - I'm keeping a bunch for myself, but the boys want to take some and paint them so that we have chips for playing poker, haha. The large conch shell on the left still had something dead in there I think, because this morning our porch smelled like low tide. Ew. I had checked it thoroughly beforehand - I found a couple other conches on the beach, but they had animals still inside them so I poked them to make sure they were still alive and threw them back in the ocean.

It started raining when we had a couple hours left at the beach, which was a shame. We had the minibus driver come back, pick us up, and take us home, where everybody showered and then we immediately went out to our favorite indian restaurant (Copper Chimney) and had a huge dinner together. I got a tandoori chicken pizza that tasted a whole lot like barbeque chicken pizza back home...so good. We came back to our house and watched movies, while I fingerpainted some decorations for my door:

The little squares say "Annelise's Room". Because people here don't call me Iggy. It's weird. But now I've got a lizard and a bunch of bugs guarding my room. I think it makes it look like an 8 year old boy lives there, but it's much better than my old plain green door.

It rained all night last night, and all morning this morning, so today looks like it'll be spent inside. I've got to do some schoolwork (for the first time in a month)...Fijian test tomorrow and a couple of lab reports this week, so we'll see how all of that goes.

Photo Catch Up

Since I've been lazy with this blog lately, here's some pictures from our time trapped indoors for the hurricane...

Picture of the sky on the night before Tomas was supposed to hit. My little camera didn't quite capture how purple the sky was, it was actually pretty creepy.

One afternoon when we were all feeling stir crazy, a couple of the boys went out and got coconuts and taught me how to open one. My technique consisted of me hacking at the thing for 10 minutes with a machete, but I was eventually successful. Coconut is delicious, which should be a good motivator for me to learn how to get better at doing this.

A fat pot of indian turmeric rice that Arti showed us how to make another afternoon. This stuff is addictive, and I'm making it a lot once I get home.

We moved a bunch of mattresses downstairs in my house to hole up for the week. The space in the middle is where mine used to be (I moved it out on the last day because I needed some space) - our housekeeper came in and made all of these beds, but skipped over mine in my room. She does this a lot, I can't tell if she doesn't like me or something, but it's funny.

Chilis that I bought at the market. I've resolved to use these in anything I cook this week. I came home late after St. Patrick's Day festivities (we hit up the one Irish bar in Suva - O'Reillys - it was an interesting way to spend the holiday) and idiot me tried making noodles with these things, which resulted in me getting pepper juice in my nose and mouth and eyes and having to dunk my face into a bowl of milk to extinguish the fire on my face. Hopefully next time I try cooking with these I'll be a little bit more successful.

Not quite sure what the plans are for the weekend - we wanted to get out and go to a beach, but the weather is looking crummy so that might have to be postponed for another weekend. We'll see. I need to get out of the city though!

Waste of a Week (But at Least We're Alive)

The cyclone ended up jumping east right before reaching Viti Levu, so we didn't get much of anything. All of the islands east of us got totally messed up, sadly, but Suva is fine. We all went stir crazy from being cooped up inside (there was a curfew in effect for a few days so nothing was open and we couldn't leave our apartments) for so long, there were a bunch of branches down, but all we got was a pretty windy and rainy weekend. Classes were cancelled until Thursday, which is messing up a lot of peoples schedules. We've spent the last four days just sitting around, watching movies, playing games, cooking, and talking about how boring it is to be stuck indoors. I pretty much have done nothing for a week now, and I don't feel good about it. I need to catch up on school work and working out tomorrow so I feel better. Hopefully we'll do some fun stuff this weekend if the weather gets back to its normal sunny self, and I'll have more to write about than being bored, although I'm grateful that we didn't get hit as hard as other parts of the country.

Oh, Tomas....

This weekend has been very low key, with everyone hanging out around the apartments waiting for the cyclone to do its thing. It started pouring this morning and I thought that was it, but it stopped after a little while and now we're not supposed to get anything until later tonight. It's super windy - when I went jogging yesterday, the typically flat ocean was pretty choppy and water was splashing up onto the sidewalk, and it's only picked up since then. Apparently this thing is now a category 3 hurricane/cyclone (what's the difference between the two?) at this point. I'm not quite sure how to think about this - I'm generally uneasy though, and went out with Kirsten today to buy a case of water. I also cooked a huge batch of indian veggies, rice and lentils (thanks to Arti being amazing at cooking and teaching me how to make tasty things) so that if we lose power I'll have something to eat other than PBJs and fruit. A lot of the locals seem very worried about this which doesn't help things much - I guess we'll see what happens over the next few days though.

Week Round Up

I know everyone who reads this can't start their day without a new post on this blog, so I apologize for ruining anyone's week.

Highlights from the week:

Finally getting into the routine of working out and it feels great. Running by the beach every afternoon is something that's going to spoil me this semester. Also I didn't have to kill my toad in my physiology lab (which was postponed for an hour and a half because of a random power outage? ridiculous) - I only dealt with the dissection on a leg nerve after it was removed from the body, so thank god for that. People here really don't know what they're doing in lab, which is kind of crazy. We had a report in my marine biology class due this week, and out of the 50 people in the lab, only 23 bothered handing in the report. For my invertebrate lab we spent 3 hours outside chasing after and catching bugs. The last two nights we've spent late out at the bars and it's been a whole lot of fun. We found a hot dog stand that sells amazing hot dogs (They taste american! No lamb!) that's on the street outside all of the bars and is open until 3am, which was a huge find. Tonight we're having a bunch of people over to our house for a party which should be great too. I also made a balsamic reduction with steak tips and it is extremely delicious and I'm probably going to eat it for every meal from now on.

Lowlights:

Pineapple season is over! They've all disappeared from the market within a week. I found a fat one tucked away in a corner and bought it for F$6, which is ridiculous but I figured I would pay about the same back home for a fruit that doesn't taste nearly as good. Maybe I'll just have to get my fix with pineapple fanta, which I'm growing more and more obsessed with - specifically being drank out of a can using a straw. Anyways, passionfruit are also gone. So these are sad things, but on the upside, mango and guava are now in season, so I've found new things to be obsessed with.

We're on a cyclone warning for the weekend, which is a little scary but I don't think it's sinking in fully - kind of like with the tsunami, it just doesn't seem like a real thing to be concerned about. We went out this morning and bought some basic food stuff just in case we lose power, but hopefully it won't come to that. We moved all of our mattresses into our living room last night and had a sleepover, and we'll probably do the same thing tonight if it starts pouring rain with violent wind outside. It's been extra humid for the last couple days (I didn't think it was possible), but other than that it's been bright and clear and sunny outside, which is a little disconcerting given that we're supposed to have a hurricane descend upon us at some point in the next 48 hours. We'll see what happens.

Natadola Beach

Sunday morning we took a minivan from Sigatoka to the nearby Natadola beach. It was the most beautiful beach I've been to.

When we got here in the morning, we were the only people on the beach. All the beaches I've been to before have been overcrowded and loud, so this was a very nice change. It was in a little bit of a lagoon with land stretching out on either side, but the waves were still decent sized. All along the stretch of sand, waves would fall in unison, 1 at a time. It wasn't like the beaches that I'm used to where you have layers of waves, so instead you'd just hear one loud boom as the wave crashed and then it got very quiet in between. It was a little unsettling, but mostly peaceful.

There were larger breakers about a half mile out from shore, so there must have been a coral reef out there. The sand above these rocks was filled with bits of coral and shells and tons of hermit crabs that couldn't get sucked back out into the surf. If anybody's spent time on a beach with me they know I love looking for little creatures and collecting seashells, so I had a ball with this.

So many shells! I picked up a few handfuls of really beautiful ones that are currently cleaned and sitting on my dresser now - I'm glad I've got some decorations in my room now. I've never found pooka or conch shells out on a beach before (mostly I just find scallop or clam shells), but there were lots of each kind here so I collected a bunch.

The boys built us a wall to try and fend off the creeping tide by where we were all laying out.

But unfortunately the sea eventually outsmarted the wall.

Following this side of the beach to the left, we found a really nice resort. We blended in with all of the Australians and New Zealanders vacationing there and walked right in, grabbed lunch (I've never been so happy to have a burger in my life, it was my first one here since I got in the country) and hung out in the very nice infinity pool overlooking the water. This was the first time since I got here that I hadn't felt like a minority, which was pretty weird since I think I've gotten used to sticking out when I'm in public. It was almost like we weren't in Fiji anymore.

Walking up to the point on the other side of the lagoon. I really suck at anything involving water - while trying to get out of the ocean (which is pretty easy considering that you get one wave at a time so it's easy to time when to get out) I got knocked over by one and tumbled around underwater, swallowing a ton of seawater and getting even more up my nose and temporarily losing my bikini bottom. Damn ocean.

On the drive back, going through lots of hilly farmland in the rural parts of the country.

Like I mentioned before, hermit crabs were everywhere on the beach. Since I spent a lot of time playing around with them, I took a few videos. Here are some just chilling out and scuttling around on their daily business. But, I saw a lot more interesting things. Two hermit crabs were fighting one another over a new shell that they both wanted, and neither would let go. I saw another one speed up to an empty shell, where it immediately jumped out of its old one and into the new one and then ran off with that one without a second thought. And then I got a video of these guys:

I want to call this a battle, although that might be a little dramatic of a description, but you can see that things got heated. These two were clinging onto each other and were rolling around and waving claws and legs and antennae around like crazy. I'm not sure what was going on exactly but it looked serious, so we left them to sort out their problems.

We eventually took the minivan back to our apartments (everybody passed out on the ride back), where I was more than happy to shower away salt and sand and cover my entire body in aloe vera (when will I stop getting awful sunburns in this country while using sunscreen?) For my first visit to the beach in Fiji, I was very happy, and I'm excited to go on more weekend trips.

Sigatoka

Saturday we got up nice and early to make the 7:30 bus from Suva to Sigatoka. We had a couple stops on the way where pushy Indian food vendors carried trays of food up to the open windows on the bus yelling at all the passengers to buy things. I tried to nap while listening to music but the creepy Bollywood movie that the driver was blaring couldn't be drowned out, unfortunately. I got out of Suva for the first time since I got here though, and it was very nice to get to see rural Viti Levu for a bit on the drive. The area is really hilly and full of farmland and little villages all along the way, along with many beaches visible from the highway (that term is used loosely - we were on the main road between Nadi and Suva, but it was 1 lane and had speed bumps every few miles). When we got off at Sigatoka we had a few minutes to try and sort out the next bus that would take us to the hostel where we were staying, during which I was half awake at the stop and found myself next to a few large burlap sacks filled with live creatures that were thrashing around trying to get out...I'm guessing crabs? I'm hoping crabs because I don't know what else it would be. No one else seemed fazed by this so I thought I was hallucinating (again) but I'm sure they're used to stranger things than that.

We got on another bus that took us to the hostel, which was pretty much a building with a couple large rooms filled with bunk beds next to a small house. The place was run by a woman who lived with her 3 or 4 sons - it turned out that her husband was pilot that flew for Emirates in the Middle East, but died from some form of cancer a couple of years ago. It was sad, but she was extremely friendly and helpful, and her kids were happy to play with us and share their toys. After getting things sorted out and renting a couple boogie boards and surfboards from the owners, we headed out to the beach, which is framed by a long chain of sand dunes.

Walking out from the house to the dunes. The property next to ours was very large and fenced in a lot of horses and cows that had their run of the beach and some scrubby grassland by the dunes.

Another view of the dunes. These things really were pretty big, and were a mixture of white sand and black volcanic sand, so it kind of looked like salt and pepper. It also made it extremely hot and painful to walk on. Some of the locals in Suva told us that you could sled/ski down the dunes balancing on the rough leaves at the base of a palm tree, but we weren't too eager to try that out given that it would inevitably involve wiping out into rough scalding sand. Danny tried launching himself off the steep side of one on a boogie board, but the board just stuck in place and Danny went flying over the side, so I don't think that can be counted as successful.

I don't think that the beach was considered beautiful by Fiji standards, but I still thought it was nice. The waves were huge and pretty rough, so I didn't mess around with playing in surf too much. We were a little ways away from the end of the beach, which was a sandbar cut off by a river emptying out into the ocean. We talked to some local surfers that were out, who said that the river created a nasty riptide that would shoot you out past the breakers before intersecting with another current bringing you back along the beach so that you could surf in from there. Some of the boys tried messing around with this but I wasn't too keen on it. The river also carried a bunch of debris from the forests upstream, so the beach was littered with tons of weathered old tree limbs, bamboo sticks, and in some cases, whole trees. You can see some of these bits of driftwood in the picture.

The other side of the sandbar enclosed the mouth of the river, which was much calmer and much nicer to swim in. This is a view from the sandbar across the river; you can't see it, but there was a little village on the other side. I floated around on a couple of bamboo sticks for a while in the water, which was relaxing and peaceful.

We spent a long while messing around on the beach, and everything went well. Actually, Eli jumped in to surf with his camera in his pocket and lost it in the sea, and Edgar almost died getting caught in the riptide and losing his boogie board, but if you ignore those minor details it was a good day. I tried watching an episode of 30 rock on my ipod before going to bed, but since the lights were out I got swarmed with moths and other night bugs so that was a failure. It's a lot less humid out in the country than in Suva, so we were a lot more comfortable just existing in general.

Marist 7's

Today we all headed over to the nearby national stadium to go watch the rugby tournament going on there, the Marist 7's. It was kind of an all day ordeal, and there were teams playing in the stadium itself as well as on 4 or 5 fields beside it. We were pretty much surrounded by massive rugby players everywhere. Teams came from New Zealand, Australia, and I'm sure other countries in the South Pacific - apparently one of the New Zealand teams forfeited a match because it was too hot to play. Since we all got sunburnt and sweated a lot just watching I can see the heat being an issue.

Large men hoisting up other large men.

I've never watched rugby before, so I spent the day trying to figure out the rules (pretty much by pestering the boys with questions) and I think I like rugby a lot. Hopefully we'll get to watch more of it over the next few months. Afterwards we went to the student bar and hung out for a while, then I came home and passed out pretty soundly.

The two major Fiji beers that I've had so far - I haven't tried Vonu yet but I'm hoping to soon because it's supposed to be good. So far I think bitter's my favorite, but I need to be adventurous and try some others.

Wanna see something gross?

Alright so we have many geckos in our house that are very cute and like to chatter with each other at night. Stumpy (the one without a tail that has decided to be my new roommate) usually says a little good night to me in the evening. We also have roughly 2 million ants in the house. The ants crawl everywhere and try to eat our food, the spiders eat the ants, the geckos eat the spiders and the ants, and nature takes its course. But every once in a while, something morbid but kind of cool happens. Two of my roommates have had experiences where they find a dead geckos in their room and later find them swarmed with ants and a gecko skeleton is all that's left after a few hours. We came home from dinner at Pizza Hut (I've missed my greasy American food) and I found this craziness, thankfully outside of my room and in the living room. Maybe us hiding all our food in the fridge has driven the ants to murderous ends...not really though. I'm curious as to why these little geckos kind of drop dead for seemingly no reason, but at least they're feeding somebody - ants have got to eat too right? I guess these last couple posts have had to do with sad things concerning animals, hopefully our crazy rugby/beach weekend will provide some happier updates. And sorry mom, I know you wanted a picture of a gecko and sadly this is the first one, but I'll make up for it with a real live one - I've been trying in vain to photograph Stumpy but he's a little camera shy.

Ewww!

Poor Animals

I'll start off this with the high point of my day: I found the perfect breakfast. Oatmeal with fresh pineapple, papaya, banana, passionfruit, and a little brown sugar. So delicious and I'm going to eat it every day.

Now for the bad part of my day: this morning I had my first physiology lab. I'm excited about this class, but there's going to be a lot of issues between me and the way that animals are treated in the lab. Today we had to monitor blood sugar levels in a chicken, by forcing it to drink a bunch of sugar solution and then drawing blood from it every half hour for 2 hours. I think it's bad enough that they give everybody syringes and expect them to take blood from the chicken with no instruction on how to do it (I was fine since working with vets I've learned how to do this, but our chicken was pretty much a pincushion with everyone stabbing into it repeatedly without any technique), but the chickens themselves were pitiful. Their feet were bound tightly with course ribbon so they couldn't stand, and they were skinny and looked sick...it turned out that in order to make sure that our readings were accurate, they hadn't been fed for the last few days. The birds were all just slumped over in their trays, clucking weakly whenever people grouped around it to jab it with needles, and falling asleep otherwise since they weren't able to support their own heads. I took over chicken duty for the length of the lab (pretty much cuddling with the thing and trying to get it to calm down), but it's kind of amazing how little regard is given to animals here - people don't really treat them like living creatures. I got an idea of this by looking at the stray dogs around here (a lot of them look very sick, without much fur), but during lab I appeared to be the only person concerned with the welfare of the live animals that we were dealing with. I was upset enough about this, but we got a handout at the end describing our next lab: dissecting a live toad. I feel conflicted enough with dissecting already dead animals, but I am definitely not following the instructions in my notebook to "render the toad unconscious by banging the head on a hard surface until the animal is stunned" and then opening it up. I explained to my professor that I wouldn't do this for ethical reasons, and he said not to worry about it and we'll figure something out, but I still don't feel comfortable with the situation.

Later in the day I had my invertebrate class, where we spent the entire time discussing the many varieties of spiders here and looking at huge pictures of them on the projector. Interesting, but still not my favorite class. So, today was a bit of a downer, but people are talking about plans for the weekend that sound like a lot of fun. The national stadium for Fiji is right down the road from us (I go jogging by it most days), and this weekend there's a massive rugby tournament, so we'll probably spend most of Friday hanging out on the lawn there watching rugby. Saturday morning we're catching an early bus to Siqatoka, where there are apparently huge sand dunes (that you can surf on?) and a really beautiful beach nearby. So hopefully this weekend will compensate for today.

Rain, Hermit Crabs, and Kava

(I wrote some of this post last night and some early this morning, so be tolerant of any verb inconsistencies!)

Once again, nature here decided to foil our plans to go to the beach, since Monday featured torrential downpours until the late afternoon. I spent the day inside reading and feeling homesick, but once the sky cleared a little I went for a run and felt a lot better. Since today was a national holiday I couldn't get out to get more food for myself, so I had a couple meals of chow noodles (they're like ramen...but different). Monday night was spent hanging out in some apartments playing games and just chilling, which is always good.

Classes resumed today, not much to say about that other than I have to catch a shuttle from the lower campus (where I have marine biology) to upper campus (to make the second half of my Fijian class since I skip the first half to go to marine bio), and of course the shuttle was 15 minutes late so I missed just about all of my Fijian lesson for the day. We have a test Friday, and I really have no idea what could be on it...our professor's method for teaching us seems like giving us random vocabulary words and repeating things out of a Fijian phrasebook, which really isn't teaching much about grammar or structure or anything else that you typically learn in a beginner language course. We haven't been taught numbers, but I know that "drua" is 2 because you use it when addressing 2 people...ugh. I think this could be frustrating. Also, more scheduling fun: we have a lot of 3-day weekends, and for all of them we have a Monday schedule when we get back on Tuesday, and Tuesdays just get dropped. I have a lab on Tuesday mornings, so does this mean that I just miss labs that week? I wouldn't be surprised.

I spent this morning making a LOT of different trips around the area to gather up food supplies (I went to 2 different grocery stores, a butcher shop, and the market), so I'm feeling very content with the amount of things I have right now. I did a lot of traveling downtown and on the buses by myself, which felt good because I'm a capable and independent young woman, damnit! I went to the upstairs portion of the market, which sells spices, yaqona (kava) roots, and rice and lentils. I got a lot of indian spices (I could never find them back home when I wanted to make indian food, but they're sold by the kilogram here) and lentils and some other things, so I'm excited to cook. Nichole also told me about a butcher shop that sells beef, so I have a package of chopped steak for stir fry, which is very exciting as well.

Everyone went to go see Valentine's Day in the movie theater early tonight, but since I'm not too into chick flicks and I was planning on running I opted out of that one. I went for another run down by the ocean - I'm happy I'm getting back into the habit of working out, I feel much better already. During my run I crossed the street and found a little hermit crab in the middle of the road. I picked it up to move it to the shore by a boat ramp about a hundred feet away, figuring this wouldn't be a problem. The thing curled up into its shell when I first picked it up, but as I ran with it it started to creep out again, flailing its legs and claws around and trying to pinch at my fingers...you'd think that a creature like that wouldn't be so feisty while it's floating in air and being shaken around, but this one was having none of it. So, I start sprinting to drop this thing off before it attacks me successfully, and as I'm setting it down on the boat ramp it nipped me a little. Funny hermit crab.

Mmmm...tasty.

I was getting ready to go to bed when Kirsten popped in my room and asked if I wanted to go drink kava at one of the apartments - since I haven't had kava yet, I joined. For those of you that don't know, kava is a drink made by soaking the dried, ground up roots of a kava plant (in Fiji they call the plant yaqona; it's a member of the pepper family of plants) in water. In my chemistry class this fall we learned that kava contains kavalactones, which kind of act like valium. Basically when you drink kava your mouth and lips get numb and it acts as a muscle relaxant. Another side effect is vivid dreams, which would explain why I woke up at 4am last night thinking I was covered in ants and running up to take a shower to get the hallucinated bugs off of me. It would also explain why I woke up a few times during the night convinced that my pet parrot Chili was in the room squawking to wake me up. Weird stuff. As you can see, kava looks like muddy water - and for the most part, tastes like it too. Muddy water blended with plain tea. It would be fine for a few sips, but the way you drink kava is by passing around a bowl for everyone to drink from, and you have to chug the liquid down (no breaks!), and you have to drink a lot of it to feel any effects. My stomach hated me when I was trying to sleep last night, since it was full of mud water. But, it was a fun experience - you just sit around in a circle with your friends an chill out. You feel very relaxed (I kept thinking distinctly that I was melting into the rug) but your head is still clear and coherent, so it was pretty interesting. Drinking kava is a big component of social life in villages, so if I get to visit a village (hopefully, I'm working on it) I'll have the chance to have a bunch of people laugh at me for sucking at chugging, except this time not my friends at Williams. I think it'd be a valuable experience.