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..
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