This week was our first week back from break. Ryan was a champ and ended up teaching most of the week solo as I got sick as a dog in Fiji. He did an awesome job and when I returned the kids reported that "Ryan is a fun teacher!"
The weather this week was so strange. Every day we went from crazy rain and cold wind to full sun and beautiful weather. I have never seen weather just switch back and forth from completely overcast to completely clear and back to overcast quite so many times in one day. The result is many people/ kids in our village ended up as sick as I was. Not so fun. One afternoon I awoke from a nap to see this lying in our house:
After giving Ryan the "why the hell is the dog in the house like that" speech, Ryan just looked at me and said, "He was cold, so I made him a little bed inside." Note: that was NOT mud. It was mostly pig crap. A lovely way to scent our house. Stupid boys and their dogs.
I returned to school on Thursday because Ryan came home super excited Wednesday night telling me our students had finally filled their "Good Things Jar." The Good Things Jar is an incentive we use in our classes to encourage students to work collaboratively and try to push their comfort zone with English. It took awhile for them to really latch on to this, but once they hit the halfway point, they really got amped. They have been doing so great trying lots of new things in class. When they fill up a jar, they earn a special gift. Our students had no idea what the gift was, but they found out on Thursday it was a brand new bag made by my Aunt Nina, Aunt Jean, and cousin Lexi. (Emily, I did not include your name because I heard all you did was drink coffee and watch. No credit for you sister dearest!) My aunt Nina had simply made these to give to our students, most of whom do not own anything they can call their own. She had no idea we would milk three months of good behavior out of the kids before they got 'em! Thank-you so much Nina, the bags are truly amazing!
In the bags were large notebooks, candy, pencils and pens, and mini-notebooks. Our students LOVE school supplies and they LOVE being able to have their own stuff. Needless to say, the day they received their gift was incredible. We had so much fun chatting with the kids and watching them revel in their hard work. Here are some pictures from the day!
When you are sick and tired of Polynesia, where do you go to get away from it all? Melanesia of course!
The first day of our travels, Ryan and I were so excited to actually be leaving our island. Upon our arrival at the international airport in Tonga, we realized for the first time how un-citified we are. We spent a good chunk of money buying a bunch of big waters for the trip. When we went to board the plane, we were astounded to see a security checkpoint. They promptly told us we could not take any of the waters with us. Duh. We were just so used to flying our Tongan airline where they write your name on a piece of paper and tell you to go get on the plane. Liquids and food are actually encouraged. After taking our waters, the man directed me to walk through the metal detector. I walked through and it went off like crazy. The man just stared at me open mouthed and said, "Miss, you are supposed to take the metal off BEFORE you walk through." Oops. I know these things, but it just didn't register.
We spent the first day of our trip in the capital city of Suva. Our Country Director met us and gave us a tour of the South Pacific Peace Corps headquarters building. It was really fun to have some time to just sit and chat with him. We had only really met him once before because he was named Country Director of Tonga after our training. After that, Ryan and I hit the streets of Suva. It was so wonderful to be in a city again! So many people, so much noise, so much happening on the street. It was great. Once again, we came face to face with our uncitified-ness. We passed a man who stopped to say hello to us. We chatted with him a bit and he told us he wanted to show us a really neat local craft vendor. Not thinking anything of this, I said "Great!" and we followed him. Within the span of five minutes, we realized we were in a back alley and he had slyly written our names on a craft. So, now he needed to be paid. He started to get really worked up when we said we didn't ask for that, so we just decided to swallow our pride and let ourselves be swindled. After paying for our "hand crafted artifact," we hit the streets feeling violated, but lesson learned. Later, a much nicer Fijian man stopped to chat with us while we were looking at the bus schedule. He warned us of these street vendors who pull tourists into corners and con them into buying something. He told us how to walk and greet people so this would not happen to us. He was so excited to help us I didn't have the heart to tell him we had already learned this lesson the hard way. But, he restored our faith in humanity.
We enjoyed our city day very much. We were able to amble along main street Suva and just enjoy seeing take-away food places, shops, and the ocean. We went to the botanical gardens and Suva museum which was really cool. We learned a lot about the history of the Pacific. After that, we treated ourselves to an awesome lunch of McDonald's. French fries and chicken nuggets never tasted so good. After that, it was on to the movie theater. We saw World War Z in 3D. The best part? Movie tickets, a large popcorn, medium soda, and 2 bags of m&m's was only $25 FJD, which is like $17 American dollars! Righteous. It was wonderful to just sit back and get lost in the world of a movie again. We also realized how much our blood has thinned. We shivered through the whole movie. Air conditioning was more than we could handle. After our movie, we stumbled upon a pub. We stopped in to have a drink. 8 beers, two glasses of wine, and a pizza later, we stumbled out of the pub. It was half off drink and pizza night. The bar was busy, the food was awesome, the music was great. So, we indulged. Total cost: $45 FJD. Not too shabby!
The next day we jumped into a van to trek out to our resort. The resort lies about 2 hours west of Suva. The van ride was really cool. We got to see a lot of the countryside and the small villages. Fiji is really beautiful. The mountains, the greenery, the rivers. Gorgeous. We spent the first 2 hours at the resort lying on the beach. We burned so badly. We forgot that certain body parts of ours had not seen sun in about ten months. Yikes. Spent the night drinking with some huge rugby fanatics from Australia. They were pre- drinking to prepare for a big game. We made it through pre-drinking and dinner, but were in no shape to go watch the game. We had a great time with them and the family who owns the resort.
During our morning breakfast the next day, Juta, a Fijian from the village closest to the resort, came over and asked the group we were chatting with if we all wanted to go for a jungle hike to a waterfall. We all eagerly agreed. We had an AWESOME time trekking with Juta, two Swiss travelers and two German travelers. The jungle floor of Fiji is pure clay. It was interesting trying to scramble up bits that Juta made look so easy. Many times, we all landed in a pit of mud/clay up to our knees because of one misstep. Luckily, we tramped through various rivers throughout the hike, so we had many an opportunity to clean the mud out of our shoes. All in all, this was one of the highlights of our trip.
The picture above on the left shows a PVC pipe that a village runs all the way through the jungle to the waterfall. This is one of the ways they get water into their village. So industrious!
We spent the next few days laying on the beach, having cocktails with various traveling groups, and gorging on local fare. The weather was incredible... cool in the mornings, sunny all afternoon, and cold at night. We enjoyed walks on the beach, lazing in beach hammocks, and hot showers. It was a wonderful, and much needed, vacation.
Some pictures of our resort:
Low tide was so cool. We could walk all the way out to the break! This was a neat way to see some of the creatures lurking at the bottom of the sea :) Creepy and fun all at the same time.
A shot of our resort from the ocean at low tide and a sea snake.
