merry christmas!

i hope you all have had a lovely holiday. judging from the pictures i've seen, it looks like the east coast is enjoying a white christmas. you can imagine that the weather here is quite different - please enjoy the snow for me!

i'm trying to hop on a cargo ship that is travelling to a few outer islands this weekend. if all goes according to plan, i'll have a chance to visit some of the most isolated places on earth - i'm excited!

as promised, some photos to sum up the first half of my year here:

1. the street where i live - part of my walk to and from school every day.

2. my every-day-of-the-week class from fall semester.

3. my office staff.

4. a traditional yapese dance in progress, celebrating christmas.

5. some boys playing on an old japanese radar array.

6. the star of a pig roast birthday celebration.

7. telecom decked out for the holidays.

the more things change...

the more they stay the same. actually, in pohnpei, things pretty much just stay the same. i've been watching the facebook pictures of east coast snow come rolling in with great jealousy! its hard to believe its december (mid-december!) already. pohnpei is drowning in the rainy season, but temperatures and appearances are otherwise exactly the same as when i arrived in july.

well, not exactly. its headed into mango season again, and we're thankfully through breadfruit season. breadfruit doesn't fall from the tree until its past-ripe, and so my walk to school had been filled with fallen, rotten breadfruit all-too-popular with the flies. haven't tasted breadfruit? you're not missing much, at least in my opinion. its great if you're going for starchy calories, and a good local food choice, but i'm not dying to mix it in with my fruit salad.

its also christmas, and i think you would be able to tell that here even blind, deaf, or braindead. there are decorations EVERYWHERE, and christmas carols to drive even the biggest xmas fan insane. the partying has already begun, and looks to continue full-tilt until january. oh, my.

rainy season is nothing to sneeze at, either. our tuesday night ultimate frisbee game is almost always played in a total swamp, and i've lost my shoe more than once in the mud. its good fun, though, and we're ignoring the very real possibility of serious injury and enjoying dramatic slips and slides through the muck.

otherwise, the flowers are still blooming, the parrots still flying, the geckos still chirping, and the bananas still growing all over the place. coconuts continue to fall in dramatic fashion, and the sun keeps beating down. zero chance of a white christmas for me!

that said, i hope the holidays are treating you well! i'm hoping for a white christmas for all of you, and thinking of you often. more pictures soon, once finals are over at the end of this week. :)

a bat cave, a rainbow, and black coral

a few weeks ago, i hiked up to a bat cave. it was a nice, steep hike, and ended in a very surreal location. the cave is built into a ledge under a waterfall. because of the way that the cliff hangs, the wall is incredibly dry and strikingly lacking in plant life. pohnpei is known as the garden island, for good reason - its nothing if not green. the hike was fun, if unfortunately high in bat guano content. here's a shot of the cliff - notice how plant-free it is!

last weekend, i camped on an island close to pohnpei called black coral. it was wonderful - words don't do it justice. the island is very small (perhaps the size of a football field), and lies very close to another island. the channel between the two islands drops pretty low and has a sandy bottom - which makes for the bright blue line you can see in the photo below.

it was super-relaxing. lots of eating, lots of reading, lots of incredible snorkeling, and lots of cards.

we also got a nice view of pohnpei from a distance - its always nice to be reminded that pohnpei is, in fact, an island. sometime routine takes over and its easy to forget that its a small place.

we had two days on black coral, making for a nice long weekend away. its hard to believe, but i'll be done with this semester in less than two weeks now. winter vacation doesn't have any concrete plans, but i'm sure it will fly by and spring semester will be upon us very soon. we're looking forward to having many visitors in december - many volunteers have family coming, and some of the worldteach kosrae volunteers are coming for a week to see pohnpei. speaking of seeing pohnpei, how's this for an image of sokeh's rock?

thanksgiving isn't celebrated here, but we're having an american thanksgiving on saturday, to be followed by a 'variety show' of incredible performers. i'm looking forward to the weekend and planning to make mashed potatoes! i hope everyone at home has a wonderful thanksgiving, and jumps quickly into the holiday season... pohnpei started celebrating christmas about a month ago and new years promises to be the event of the year!

a general update

not too much new to report these days. school is going well, though a lot of my students have hit a brick wall in their focus. less than three weeks left of the semester, though, so i'm doing the best i can to keep them motivated until the end. i've been pleased on the whole with my first run, and i'm looking forward to taking the lessons i've learned and doing a better job next semester.

we've got a busy schedule for our weekends until the middle of december - crazy how busy my social calendar has become. we're looking forward to a weekend at black coral, an outer island that is reputed for having some of the best snorkeling around. after that, we're having american thanksgiving - something i am looking forward to, though it will be sad to be away from home!

some photos from snorkeling in nan madol again - thanks mike for the underwater pictures!

scuba and halloween

friends! i am scuba-certified. hooray!

here's a shot of where we did our confined water dives. as there are no swimming pools on pohnpei, we were "forced" to do our dives in the lagoon.





















this weekend was halloween. the expat community here went a little crazy... but it was awesome! i love halloween, so it was a treat to celebrate with so many super-dedicated costume makers. my roommates and i:

i don't want you to be totally jealous of the seasonally-themed spooky paper lantern hanging above my desk, but you probably will be...

its from an incredible surprise package i just got from kara-arlene in richmond. it was the best day ever because i also got a package (with pictures!) from niko in georgia! AND today i got three letters in the mail. i'm completely riding a news-from-home high right now, and loving halloween for it!

people, i love you. letters (and emails, and blog comments) make everyday that much better.

it's almost halloween! i'm working on a robot costume fashioned from boxes. (gotta work the cheap angle wherever you can when you're living on a stipend!)


a couple other pictures, of the shells i collected at ahnd atoll a few weeks ago. i've had them buried in the back yard for a while to clean out the old creepy crawlies, and it was a lot of fun to dig them back up again!

a week

things i have done in the past seven days:

-driven a right-hand-drive car
-gone scuba diving for the first time
-fainted at school
-played ultimate frisbee in monsoon-like conditions
-done laundry in a MACHINE
-used a DRYER and gotten the smell of mold out of my towel


also, for the last seven days, the island has been out of eggs and diet coke. how eggs can be totally unavailable on an island with so many chickens is beyond me, but at least my caffeine addiction is finally wearing thin.