Moorea.

Ahhh!!! I'm here!

The rest of the trip was ok after the Spirit of Delta. The flight to Tahiti was ungodly long. The only movies that were shown were ones I had never heard of (Martian Child, anyone?), or just other random choices. I saw Elizabeth (the second one) and Bee Movie, suprisingly cute and scientific. Anyways FINALLY into Tahiti at 11 PM their time, 5 AM Florida time. The first smells of Tahiti were Tahitian gardenia (same smell as ours in Florida, but much smaller), humidiity (I realize this isn't a smell, but it was a lot to handle), and burning things (apparently they burn a lot of trash in French Polynesia because their few trash dumps are quickly running out of space). I ran into Jada in the lobby, and was happy to see a familiar face. I waited forever at the baggage claim, and my bags never came (I had checked them in Tallahassee all the way to Tahiti, which was probably a bad idea). When the crowds finally cleared though, I saw my luggage in the corner of the room. Turns out, it made it onto the earlier Tahiti Nui flight that day. Anyways, I broke the cardinal rule of customs on the way out, and made eye contact with the official, so he stopped me and asked me a bunch of questions. Arghhh...

Finally got out of the airport, and headed to Chez Fifi, this pension across the street from the airport, because we couldn't get to Moorea that late in the night. Nothing remarkable to write about here, except that sleeping was tough because it started pouring, and there was tons of noise from that, then the roosters started crowing at the break of dawn. There are sooooo many chickens here. I don't know what's up with that. The only other thing I can remark about this pension is that there were two turtles in a bucket there, and I pointed them out to Jada, and she speculated that they were for eating. Yuck.

This morning we took the plane to Moorea. It was literally, a ten minute flight. In other words, my sort of flight! The island is sooo beautiful. I will post pictures later. We are at Gump now. As it turns out, there is a huge undergraduate class here now, taking all of the rooms in the dorm, so Jada and I got an awesome bungalow on the hill all to ourselves. It is super luxe, but Jada reminds me that it is not usually like this. Whatever, I will enjoy it while I can.

Mainly, today we unpacked our stuff, research supplies, set up all of our dive equipment in a locker, and just got things settled. At the end of the day, we went for a quick swim. It was just incredible. All of the corals I've only seen in the museum collections were all there, living next to one another with anemones and sea cucumbers there too. And where we swum was apparently the bad spot to see corals! It is so incredible to see them in their native habitat.

So now I'm exhausted (jet lag is not that bad this time, but bad enough), so I will write more later.

Love to all!