"a rainy day in moorea is still better than a sunny day at school"

That title quote comes from my dad, who I just got off the phone with, and he's right. It's been a rough week, but when it comes down to it, I just have to look around me and realize how amazing it is that I am here (even though there's barely a week left! ahhh!) and remember to appreciate everything!

So, last time I updated, we were about to have a Tahitian feast. Well, the evening was fun. The staff brought all their families and a lot of people played volleyball, and one lady made tons and tons of traditional Tahitian food for our group. The food included a pig cooked in the ground, various types of poi (which is kind of like a squishy jello stuff made out of coconut milk and whatever you put in it- bread, papaya, pineapple), raw fish salad, cooked taro root, bread fruit, coconut bread and other squishy weird stuff. It was a really nice gesture, but traditional Tahitian food is just not for me. haha. I was polite though and tried a bit of everything, even this nasty fermented fish with fermented coconut sauce. Eww. Later that night, one of the researchers here from CSUN threw a birthday party out on the dock, so we all went and hung out there. It was super fun just to get to hang out with everyone and relax. A few other girls and I grabbed the empty coconut shells from dinner to use as cups and red vines as straws, which were a hit. :) After a while, we all just ended up laying on the dock watching for shooting stars and talking. At one point, a giant thing blazed through the sky right overhead, and we thought it was a meteorite!!! But the next day our teacher said it was probably just a satellite scheduled to burn up. Around midnight, a few of us jumped into the water just since its always (well when its not raining) so peaceful at night!

Then started my rough week. I woke up Sunday morning not feeling so hot, and I assumed something from the Tahitian feast just didn't agree with my Fischer stomach. As the day progressed I got worse, and several other students also were not feeling so hot. It turns out we all caught some sort of very unpleasant stomach virus. So I basically spent all of Sunday in bed, among other places. haha. I still felt pretty bad on Monday, but one of my other group mates caught the brunt of the virus that day, so I had to suck it up and deal since we really needed to put out our experiment. I've felt progressively better throughout the week, and I think I'm back to full stomach health! Not to be a complaining cathy (I just made that up. haha), but I do have a few gripes that I would like to get out somewhere. One thing that has made this week rough is that all of the experiments we put out last week were either ruined by stormy weather or faulty equipment, neither of which are under our control, so we have to redo everything we did during the first week of our group experiment. This is really frustrating and stressful because that makes it like we basically did no work last week and have to do our entire project is just 2 weeks. Another thing that is annoying me is that since we have to push our entire project back a week, the few days off we left ourselves at the end (since our teacher told us to schedule a few days off and we figured better to be safe and put them at the end than in the middle of the time here) have to be filled with work. Now I know I am here for school and that should be my main focus, and I totally agree, but its just really frustrating when other groups have so much free time to go to town or explore or whatnot, and no one in my group has even had time to go to the main town to go shopping even once. And I'm getting really bitter (clearly haha) every time I have to hear other people talking about fun stuff they have planned for their day off, or what they did during the day, since I most likely won't have any time to do that myself.

Ok done griping. Now back to the interesting fun stuff!!!!! On Tuesday, our teacher took us out on a dive to the fore reef. Its been pretty much destroyed by a variety of things, including a large hurricane that hit in February, so the coral was pretty demolished, but there were still a ton of fish. The visibility was really amazing too, probably more than 100 ft!!! Since we are certified as scientific divers under UCLA, and are using school equipment, we are only allowed to go to 30ft, which is kind of lame, but not too bad. I saw two relatively large lemon sharks, some pretty big parrot fish and a bunch of other stuff. Also on Tuesday, it was a girl Michelle's 21st birthday, so we all took about a 40 minute walk to the Hilton and ate dinner in their outdoor restaurant. I got a pina colada (since you have to get at least one tropical drink when you're on an island) and a cheeseburger (which was delicious since we haven't had normal food in ages)! One of the dogs here, Chicken, followed us, well actually she led the way the whole time haha, to the Hilton and even came in with us!! We tried to keep her out, but she seemed to know her way around the place! It was kind of amusing since the place was like super nice and romantic and Chicken is pretty mangy and gross and was running around like a crazy dog. After we got back from the Hilton, everyone enjoyed an evening of 21st-ness with Michelle, though I just partook in the festivities with water since I was still not feeling 100%.

As for my group project, Lindsay, Theo and I have just been doing a lot of benthic and fish surveys and we just pulled in our repeated growth experiment today! While it didn't really look like there was much of a difference between our sites, at least our algae wasn't destroyed like last time! So that's good news!!! We'll just need to analyze our data to see if anything is significant! Tomorrow morning we will be up bright and early collecting algae at 6:30 am in order to put our next experiment out! This is a new experiment that we haven't tried yet, so keep your fingers crossed that everything works out!!! We will be taking different species of algae from the two bays and doing a reciprocal transplant, which means we will be putting the algae from one bay into the other to see how its growth and herbivory rates change.

Well, this was a super long blog post, so I hope you loyal readers enjoy it and aren't too bored!!! I can hardly believe I'm only here for 10 more days! I'll leave you with some island wisdom I've figured out so far: No matter how ratty, mangy, wet or tangly your hair looks, a flower tucked behind your ear always makes you look good! :)