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.