Just hear those sleighbells ringaling, Please turn off the Christmas Music.

The Christmas season is in full force on our little island home. I like Christmas as much as the next guy but there is just something not quite right about an 85 degree December. All the businesses have their halls decked with holly, the Nativity on top of Ace Hardware is massive and impressive, and Trieste saw a shirtless black Santa in board shorts as a decoration. Ho Ho Ho, I love it all. But I don't like Christmas music, call me a Grinch, but it's irritating. All those years of working retail probably. Oh well three weeks to go.

So we had our first Micronesian thanksgiving, or I should say our first Thanksgiving in Micronesia, because this is not a Micronesian Holiday as lot's of people pointed out to me. Even if the College Campus on Chuuk got the day off, I'm not bitter because we went to TWO Thanksgivings, one on Thursday and one the following Saturday. We had all the standards, Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, because apparently you can import just about anything. After the Saturday Thanksgiving we went to a variety show. Our People we know here did a lot of crazy and silly things and it was fun, more or less. I didn't do anything because my talent for annoying Trieste doesn't really translate to a audience situation, even if my art is superb.

I feel like I have more to say, but that's it.
jp

I heart Kitti.

Yes, we moved. For a month we'd been whining to anyone who would listen about how badly we wanted to move, but what it took was saying, just once, that we wanted to move somewhere not by other mehn wai (that's you, whitey). As soon as that flag was dropped, the most beautiful house was just handed to us, and we got the world's greatest neighbors along with it. (Don't think we didn't try looking ourselves--we did--but the thing is is that the only folks who are advertising housing are trying to reach mehn wai, and therefore were no good to us. But we tried.) Since we don't have addresses on this little island, our new house is "the Pink House, in Dien," and people usually know what we're talking about. The commute to Kolonia seems long to locals (it's 7 miles). We had to buy a car to do it--let me tell you about our car. It was made in 1995--think about how old that is, how many days that car's been driving. Now. It has 60,000 miles on it. That is why 7 miles seems like a far distance. Also, our car has a racing wheel and three nifty (gigantic) decals (I won't spoil the surprise--someday I'll have a connection that will allow me to post photos of it). Also, the steering wheel's on the wrong side of the car. This makes it hard (impossible) to see around corners (which, the circular island road, on which we live, is made only out of corners) and all the corners invariably have children/drunken teenagers/sakau-lo'd old guys/dogs/giant rats/crazy school children flailing around in the road at the end of them. Almost all the cars on the island have steering wheels on the wrong side. I vote we just start driving on the left side of the road, for the love of god.

Our immediate neighbors are a really beautiful family. They sure bailed us out with that gigantic pig thing, and also it seems like every time we're feeling too tired and down to take care of ourselves, someone comes over bearing a giant plate of food for us. They bring us food a lot, and we try to reciprocate. In desperation, once I'd accumulated more of their dishes and platters than we owned ourselves, I sent over a platter of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I cut them into little triangles! It was the best I could do. That night they sent over a beautifully prepared whole fish, filleted on a bed of rice and topped with a long thing that was either a giant clam or the tongue of a possibly mythical beast. It didn't look like a clam part.

On the other side of our house is a sakau market that makes the strongest sakau I've ever tasted--instant numbness of the lips, tongue, and throat. The regulars are a hilarious and super sweet bunch of people, and Jonathan and I are always trying to make time to go sit with them.

Behind our house is a creek, and across the road from our house is...nothing. It's wonderful.

I could go on and on about our new neighborhood. We love it. I was reading one of the letters left for us by last year's volunteers, and one piece of advice given especially to College of Micronesia-Pohnpei volunteers was: "At COM and Kolonia you will be daily exposed to the worst the culture of Pohnpei has to offer. Get away from the college, spend time out of Kolonia, or you will end up hating Micronesia." I have to say, after a month in the boonies, we are so much more relaxed about living here, and I can easily see staying longer than this year. Our new house is just up the road from COM-National, at which I am teaching a Chemistry class (lecture and lab!) next semester. I. Am. So. Excited. I saw my new office/workspace/classroom the other day, and it is all wonderful...chemicals, computers, books boooks booooooooks, and the students are the absolute best that Micronesia has to offer. I'll still be teaching full time at COM-Pophnpei, but hey, I live in Kitti now. I can handle a little extra workload. Especially if it means teaching college chemistry.

Here's what else is good about Pohnpei: gecko noises (they growl!), skinks (are beautiful), giant bats, kittens all over the place, food growing outside your windows, green green crazy green vines-trees-mountains-grass-moss everywhere, "water features," random volcano remnants, snorkeling, the reef, atolls on the reef, flowers year-round, and the sky. Pardon my french, but what the hell is up with the sky here? Even on my home-sickiest days, the sky is always the prettiest thing I've ever seen. What happens to the sky? Is it the equator? The island? What the hell?

Anyway, I'll sign off now before I say anything else optimistic. You know I hate that.
Love,
Trieste

A few weeks ago we went to a giant feast for the Nahmwarki, which is like our State, Kitti's, cheif. They killed something like 15 pigs, people brought hundreds of pounds of yams, tons of sakau (that narcotic drink). There were speeches and then the Nahmwarki handed out portions of the pigs and food and stuff. For some reason someone handed me a quarter of a pig. The back ribs and the hind leg. We had to put it on an inflatable raft in the trunk of my car for a long time before the party was over. Then everyone starts dancing and ladies come by and rub coconut oil on your arms and neck, give out gifts to everyone, I got a a towel and some Che Guvarra flip flops, Trieste got a hair thing that we think might be chicken feathers and a skirt with designs from Tonga or Fiji on it.

I won't even pretend to understand all the things that happened, but it was one of the best things we've been able to do here.

OH, then I had to have my neighbor show me how to carve a pig with a machete. It was awesome. Unfortunately, my years of school never told me that I was cutting out the bacon...we lost the bacon ;( But we ate pork like it was going out of style for a week, Ballin out of control.

jp

Adventurers and Adventuresses

Kolonia, Kolonia, God shed his grace on thee. But we had to leave that little harping magpie of a city for fairer pastures in that great municipality of Kitti. In case you were wondering our village is called Dioan and nobody's sure if it's in Sokehs or Kitti because the Nahmwarki's disagree about the boundary lines. As Saxon so eloquently stated, however, nobody knows what the hell we're talking about...so there you go.

But like I said we moved, we love our new house, and it's my idea of perfection. The house has a water catchment system that collects rainfall from the roof a puts it in a 2000 gallon container. We have zero water pressure because they put the tank only slightly higher than the plumbing. I thought everyone new that you have to have some elevation in order to have high pressure, but you can never count on anyone knowing anything. That might be one of Coglan's laws. Due to the water pressure issue, we have to take bucket baths and flush the toilet with a bucket (not at the same time). Both of these things takes practice but I'm definitely getting the hang of it.

We also don't have a stove, which doesn't bother Trieste but I'm finding it kind of difficult. I do have two portable butane burners which so far is really all I need, but I really want a toaster oven to round out the mix of appliances.

Also, some of the lights don't work. Only the lights in the bedrooms and the bathroom. I'm not sure why, so far I don't care, but I wish that I'd taken better notes when I was an Electrician for NASA.

Also, we have several fruit trees near the house, lime, three kinds of coconut, breadfruit, banana, papaya, giant swamp taro, a kind of mango that's crunchy and peppery. We are just waiting for things to get ripe.

So long,
JP

When you know you're doing a great job

I've been teaching remedial English for three months now. It's been a challenge but I feel like I'm doing a good job. And then I get this for a one paragraph essay on health...

"What are some ways that people stay in shape?

The people can write the shape of your face and color of the shape. Shape is what you like or what is the beautiful in your eyes. The color in your eyes is beautiful. Shape for something beautiful. The Shape of the house. The shape of the earth and the globle warming. The something you buy the shape you looked first. Then you liked it. The shape look like a square or a blue sky."

Actually, now that I've read this paragraph a few times, I am starting to see some sort of logic in it. It's like a secret code. This student is trying to tell me something, and I'm too stupid to figure it out. The shape of the house. The color of the shape. The shape of a blue sky. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

When it rains...and other cliches.

So I guess that Trieste and I are on the same wavelength about the blog situation and how it's been a long time. My only contention with what Trieste posted was the caption next to Kolonia. Kolonia is that small and beautiful and if you come and visit us we will take you to our lagoon side villa where we have a Dolphin for a butler and Sea turtles will sing you to sleep.

Actually we as in I have taken to calling Pohnpei Temptation Island but not for the reasons you may think and not for reasons that I'm going to go into right now. Mysterious enough for you?

ON TO THE NEWS:
News item number one: We think the trade winds have started up but we've thought that every few weeks because it'll cool off to 80 degrees and seem like it'll snow any second and the next day it'll be one hundred with humidity.

News item number two: A few nights ago we went to see our host family for the first time in a long time and we got to watch a disney channel show which took me an hour to figure out. Here's what I learned... teenagers are awkward and gross and Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana but with a wig or something. Floyd "Oh my god I forgot" Doses who is our host brother quoted both episodes of this strange show from beginning to end. Every time I looked away he hit me and told me to watch. That guy is a riot.

News item number three:
Stop what your doing, stop reading this and wasting time on the computer. Get in your hot little hot rod and drive to the nearest dairy. Ask to speak with the owner of the dairy and make sure it's a mom and pop operation and not some weird multinational conglomerate of dairy cattle owners who live in France or some bullshit. So ask to speak with the dairy farmer and when he comes up, kiss him or her right on the mouth and say "thank you for making cheese and milk and sour cream and butter that isn't expired." Because when it all goes to shit and we don't have fresh heavy whipping cream year round, you will wish that you had. That being said our saintly friend Mike brought us Tillamook Sharp Cheddar cheese and sour cream from Guam! I don't know how that happened...and frankly I don't care. Was it sustainable?...hell no... but I ate a cheese sandwich and put sour cream on my lentils so I'm all good.

Well...that's it.
jp

Some photos of things we did a long time ago

A while ago we mentioned that Lenard, our favorite baby, turned one. And we loved his party. We had "Phillipino style pig," which means we ate a whole pig, and all the youngest kids (and Jonathan and Trieste) got a big kick out of the creepy face, which was thus:

Don't feel bad if you look at that and don't immediately think "food," or if you think other things also. It's not that you're not cosmopolitan or culturally sensitive enough. We all loved the pig head. AJ got entertained by his mom for awhile by getting whirled in near the pig face and then pulled, screaming and laughing, back away from it. That might have been my favorite part. Anyway, shrieky pigs' heads can be entertainment AND food, is what I'm saying, as long as you're not trying to be cool and culturally sensitive. Obviously, Jonathan and I took photos of the food and shrieked along with AJ, so we were being neither.


I keep trying to upload a close-up, but the Internet and/or Photoshop won't let me. So you'll have to Photoshop it yourself. We should have a contest! Who can do the most creative/creepy thing with a close-up photo of a pig's head? The winner gets 10% of my daily salary and blog glory. And maybe a special spot in heaven for entertaining me while I'm this bored.

Here is Lenard playing with the toy we got him for his first birthday. It's tradition, we found out, to give kids clothes on their first birthdays, so we committed a mild faux pas by bringing him a Strawberry Shortcake jingly ball. But the ball was fun.

Oops! No photo of Lenard for you! It won't upload.

A while ago, Jonathan and I also took a boat trip along the length of the island. Here is Kolonia from the lagoon:






Kolonia is bigger and dirtier than it looks from the lagoon, but not much bigger.

Here is what we look like at the end of a day on a boat:

I am not trying to do anything, by wearing a towel on my head, other than keep the damn sun off my exposed skin. The sun is just so much background info until you come to the equator.

I will try to upload one more photo. This is Sokehs Rock, the "Diamond Head of Pohnpei." Pohnpei draws lots of comparisons to Hawaii, which is awesome. Anyhow, Sokehs Rock is really pretty and you can see if from EVERYwhere, and everyone loves it, just like Diamond Head:

I don't think the photo will upload...Maybe from school, maybe next time.

This past weekend Jonathan and I went with a few friends to a fresh water waterfall...It was a double waterfall, with a 20-foot waterfall falling into an almost perfectly round pool that was ideal for swimming in (and jumping 20 feet into), and then from there it fell another 35 or 40 feet to another pool that was ALSO great for swimming. The best thing about these waterfalls is that they are within walking distance of our house. I'd show you pictures but 1) our friend lost his waterproof camera in the lower waterfall, and 2) they wouldn't upload anyway. But it was a good day. We invented a new game, called "Throw a Rock at a Rock and Try to Make it Hit Another Rock." We played it for a long time. We also played, "See What Trash You Can Find at the Bottom of the Pool." We found a car battery and a lawn mower motor; that was also fun. Too bad we couldn't find the camera.

The last few days since the waterfalls have been a struggle between life and death...When we first moved here, our Field Director told us that there was "a lot of life." This means, really, there's also a lot of death. Two days ago a dead cockroach fell out of my coffee pot first thing in the morning. Yesterday a gecko caught a cockroach and left its parts all over the living room. This morning a swarm of ants managed to kill a roach and they're still dismantling it in the hallway (far be it from me to interfere!), and this afternoon Jonathan accidentally shut another gecko in the back door. It crawled to the window, stuck itself to the sill, and then it died, still sticking to the window. Awesome. Also! The constant flood in our kitchen and hallway (did I tell you about that? Our hallway and kitchen are constantly flooded--I mean, they splash. It's because our fridge sucks, but our landlord insists it's because I don't stay home and clean enough) has proven to be an ideal place for mosquitos to lay eggs. We are now tormented, all night, every night. Tormented. I've bleached the floors twice in two days, and it's helped moderately. Any advice?

That's it! I've been trying to upload this blog for three days. That's why it's so long.

Love,Trieste

Bloggy blog

I taught my students BINGO. You cannot throw a rock in Kolonia without hitting a freaking BINGO hut, so I was not expecting to have to teach my students BINGO. But it took TWO DAYS. They kept saying they got it, and then an hour would go by without anyone getting a BINGO, and then I'd explain the rules again, and then again they'd say they understood, and then another whole. class. period. would go by. With no BINGO. Did I ever tell you that it's culturally taboo to say "no" in Pohnpei? To say "no" to anything. This didn't seem like a big deal before we came, but it's becoming more so. Like, when you ask certain questions, you really want to know the real answer, even if it's "no." Like: "It's Sunday afternoon and I'm in an outer municipality. Please send a taxi?" (Even the taxi companies. They'll say yes, but only because they can't say no, and then you'll spend hours waiting for a taxi that was never even dispatched, because the business is closed, and the lady at the other end just uses the business cell phone for her personal phone so she'll always answer the phone and tell you yes, even when they're closed, or something.) Or, "we have an exam tomorrow. Do you understand?" Or: "I have spent the last 60 minutes calling out BINGO letters and numbers, and no one has gotten a BINGO, even though you must be able to cover your entire card by now. Are you SURE you know how to play BINGO?" You have to rephrase everything so that they can answer "yes." Like, instead of 'do you understand?' you can ask 'do you want me to explain that again?' But I did. I did. I explained BINGO a dozen times.

I finally got my best student (who is also the shyest), who also speaks the best English (coincidence?) to explain it in whispered Ponapean to my most gregarious student, who then explained it in Ponapean to the whole class. Who spent the next ten minutes laughing hysterically and arguing with each other. And then we played. And someone got a BINGO inside of five minutes after that. Two days.

Anyway, what's with all the BINGO huts? Phillipinos only? Are all my students Protestant? Are Protestants against BINGO?

But! One of my students just emailed me to ask if we were going to play again today (we are not). Got their attention, anyway. I had cash as one of the prizes. It was $4. It got them really excited--one girl screamed like Alicia would when I threw it down on the table.

Also, because I can't stop thinking about this stuff, I'm going to try and puke it out: Cheese, microbrew, cute boots, shoes in general, wool skirts, FALL FASHION, clothes in general, real pork chops, a haircut, cheese cheese cheese, cheeseburgers, pine needles, cold rain, hot showers, deciduous trees, talking about science, doing scientific research, arguing about science, teaching science, learning something new, hugs from Joni, Toby (yes, Toby), walking into my lab, hot tea/whiskey/wine/coffee on a cold day, espresso, 16-hour work days and how they make you feel (tired and hard core. I never feel tired and hard core anymore. Lethargic and sickly is the closest I come.), friends. A circle of friends. being near my family, sour cream, sweater tights, a quilt, the bathroom heater, talking to Justine five times a day, my books, daydreaming that my brother is going to surprise me by showing up at campus with Lauren and Carver (I seriously used to have this daydream every other day, especially when I was so lonely during the thesis-writing months, and I don't ever have it here, because the chances of my brother showing up to College of Micronesia Pohnpei Campus with Lauren and Carver are about 1 in seven thousand, which is how many dollars it would take for him to come here and surprise me with them).

Spear Fishing, Chicken Pox, and an Update on Captian Crocodile

Menseng Mwao,

This weekend I went on a men's only camping this trip. Except one guy brought his wife and Trieste was going to come but she got sick at the last minute. Like a good husband I selflessly went on the camping trip anyway to give her time to recuperate and take care of herself.

The canoe was an outrigger, which means that it has a stabilizing side bar to prevent capsizing. Traditional canoes are very narrow because they are usually made from dug out tree trunks and thus need a little more stability. These things are extremely complicated to operate, and although I've done a my fare share of canoeing and kayaking I still couldn't make the damn thing do what I wanted it to. Plus you can only reasonably hold three people plus luggage and if there is a third person the paddlers are very angry at that person for getting a free ride. We had six people which meant that three of us had to swim.

We got to Joy Island which is a coral islet that's on the barrier reef of Pohnpei at about 1:00 or 2:00 and met Herbert and Rambo, the guy and his dog who live on Joy island. You heard me, one guy and his dog live on this stunningly beautiful island off a stunningly beautiful island in the middle of the pacific. We made camp and swam a half mile back to the area where we could start spear fishing.

Spear fishing is hard. Spear fishing is very hard. Spear fishing is also dangerous. I will only say that on my 20th attempt I got one fish that was too small to eat and I had to bite it's head and send it to Davy Jones. You have to bite their heads or they attract sharks. Spear fishing is hard.

We made a shelter out of fallen limbs and palm fronds, which in hind sight is laughable and had it not been 80 degrees outside one of us surely would have gotten hypothermia or succumbed to exposure. I say this because we live in the rainiest place on earth and of course it rained all night and into the morning. At one point at about 5:00 in the morning Tony and I just laid in the ocean because it was warmer than the rain.

The important thing is that I slept on the beach and got chicken pox, or what I thought was chicken pox for three days until I went to the doctor and she told me that it was either sand flea bites or scabies. I'm still not sure which it is.

Finally the crocodile has caused enough of a stir that people have closed all the swimming holes in Nett including our favorite, Awak Pah. So far I haven't caught the croc, but I'm not giving up now. I've got a load of dynamite coming full steam from Chuuk, and I'm not going to let that croc get away next time.

Later days, better ways,
jp

swim, swam, flim flam

Yup,

It was Trieste and I's one year anniversary on Sunday. But actually you all will be celebrating it on Monday because the dateline screws everything up and we still can't understand it no matter how much we try. In addition we are still trying to figure out exactly where we are in relation to fixed areas like Australia and Japan. The truth is that maps are inaccurate and no one in a major country really gives a shit about this place so it will probably remain a mystery. Trieste may be right that the dateline was put here because nobody lives here, and nobody who does live here cares anything about dates or time.

Whoa, heady.

But we had a great day anyway. We happened to get invited to join an excursion to the the southern tip of the island and swim and snorkel and generally just relax and have fun on a boat. We saw a bunch of dolphins and it was surreal and incredible. I saw a stingray bury itself in the sand and that really freaked me out because it completely disappeared. I tried using a paddle board which is a big surf board that you stand on and use a paddle to move around. Trieste was really good at this, I could not stay on this thing for more than a few seconds. We had sandwiches and got bizzaro sunburns from being outside so much.

We ate a nice dinner at a hotel with the captain of the boat, we shared a pork chop and fish teriyaki dinners. It was delicious and much needed after so much exercise. Since we had to be at school on Monday we just watched a movie and went to bed.

I hope everyone is doing well.

jp

I'm on my way to Nahlap resort Island.

We're pulling in to Nahlap. I did the best snorkeling ever past the reef in the open ocean. WHEE!

Trieste took this picture of a stingray at Awak Pah. It was much bigger than it looks. The pictures of the mating sea cucumbers didn't come out, but the memory lives on.

This is a picture Trieste took at Awak Pah Marine Park, our favorite place to go swimming.

A quick note about Crocodiles

The most exciting news that I've ever heard in my entire life is that there may or may not be a salt water crocodile on Pohnpei. I say may or may not because no one seems to know for sure if it is indeed a crocodile or a giant fish in the mangrove swamps in U. U is the name of the municipality next to ours. According to lore, and by lore I mean Barry the Australian ex-pat who we talked to last night, as long as there are plenty of dogs and plenty of pigs around there won't be any immediate threat to humans. Plus crocodiles are extremely rare on Pohnpei, they have not naturally occurred here for a long time if ever. They tend to stick south of the equator, and the only island in Micronesia that is known to have "salties" is Palau; which as you all know is 1000's of miles away. But if these extremely territorial animals are somehow forced to look for a new territory, they can spend months swimming in the open ocean until they find land. They only need to eat every few months. And if they can't find land in a reasonable amount of time, or if they just get too hungry, they use their magic to teleport to the nearest island or atoll.

In other news I will pick up my spear gun on Wednesday that Wilfred, this dude we know, ordered for me. In addition he is going to lend us his canoe so that we can go out and try to spear fish in the lagoon near Madolenihmw. Wish me luck as I track down and kill the crocodile that took my leg.

Also, as promised, here are some pictures. Enjoy, Mouseketeers!

JP

Things I Have Learned in the Last Month:

1. Do not buy more than one or two rolls of toilet paper at a time. Soggy toilet paper is gross, and there is no way to keep it dry.

2. Horizon-to-horizon black clouds do not mean that you can spend more than ten minutes outside with no sunscreen.

3. Organic coconut oil sold in old Corona bottles at the gas station is not fit for human consumption. (This is obvious in retrospect, however, we make $300 a month and that oil only costs like $1.50. But it tastes like an allergic reaction, which is not tasty.)

4. Do not remove your glasses, if you are blind, before thoroughly checking the bath tub, bathroom walls, bathroom sink, and toilet for giant, evil, flying cockroaches. If you are not completely assured that your bathroom is giant, evil, flying cockroach-free, you will never be able to relax with your blindness. And I am setting a goal for Lasik by 2012, so that I never have to worry about this stuff again. (My sense of dignity is the only thing that keeps me from begging Jonathan to sit in the bathroom while I take my blind showers--that way he could warn me if a big terrible roach comes out of the pits of hell where they live.)

5. If you don't take at LEAST two showers a day, you will end up hating yourself. Take three showers if you leave the air-conditioned comfort of the college for more than an hour.

Also, I finally got around to cleaning out our spare bedroom, and I found a dessicated lizard and two full lizard skeletons (minus the skulls). I feel like there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Oh, and 6! We have discovered two areas of Kolonia that require a handful of rocks for peace of mind. If you fill your hand with rocks BEFORE reaching these areas, you have the luxury of scaring the horrible dogs while they're still far away. Scrambling around for rocks while one or three dogs are running at you with their teeth bared is not. cool. Relatedly, 7. It's always a good idea to make sure one hand is free for rock-throwing. Jonathan's hands were once full of grocery bags, and it was rough.

Other than learning our lessons (but not making any progress at Pohnpeian), we're doing fine. We spent part of the weekend at Nahlap and tonight we're going to our host family's for dinner. I promise we'll have photos up soon!

Love,
Trieste

Nature Freak Cinema

The natural world is wondrous and mysterious. I've been watching Nature Freak Cinema all my life and yet I find myself ill prepared for everything I learned last night.

Item 1: Cockroaches can fly and sprint. Trieste and I were playing dominoes at the Rusty Anchor, the expat bar, when we say a giant dragonfly buzzing around. Just as I was about to win yet another round, the dragonfly transformed into a giant cockroach and sprinted across our table. We were little prepared for such a crazy happening.

Item 2: Geckos do not make good doorstops. Actually this is story is gross; nevermind.

Item 3: Mosquitos, the bane of my existence, are quite tiny and much more powerful, than their continental cousins. Just one good bite from these invisible jerks will give you a goose egg.

Later Days,

jp

Fish fry at the Applebottom's

So I ventured into my first foray into local cooking. I'd bought a breadfruit (ridiculous I know because they grow everywhere), a local squash, and a pound of reef fish from the fish market. Total cost $3.50. The picture to the left is the type of fish I bought; for reference sake a striped surgeon fish.

This meal was a comedy of errors. When you buy a breadfruit you'd better eat it right away or it starts to ferment. I didn't eat it right away so I ended up throwing it at the bulldozer that's been abandoned by our apartment. Trieste doesn't like squash. I don't know how to cook reef fish.

As anyone who has known me for a while will know, I had a traumatic experience with a flopping fish when I was a child so luckily these had already met their maker. But their maker did not gut and clean them for me so I had to take care of this myself. The whole process of cleaning, scaling, cooking, and recooking, took about two hours. Many lessons were learned, few tears were shed.

Cutthroat Island!

If any of you have not seen this Gina Davis classic, do yourselves a favor and put it right at the top of your little Netflix list...NOW!

Greetings from Pohnpei. Trieste and I had a great weekend with our new friend and fellow volunteer, Tyler, mweimweit and palapalap. That means hanging out and swimming. Our favorite place to go swimming is at the Awak Pah Marine park in Nett Municipality. It's about 15 minutes from Kolonia and costs a couple of dollars each in cab fare. Both Saturday and Sunday we were joined by other islanders and were fed well by the generous Pohnpeians. Tyler and I get along like clams. We both like to snorkel and ended up snorkeling for many hours on Saturday. And I saw a stingray which I have to say was very exciting. The Pohnpeian word for Stingray is Nohno which is the same word for mother. Pohnpeians are supposedly not afraid of sharks but deathly afraid of stingrays. What I noticed most about swimming with the locals was how afraid of the water they were. They never ventured out much farther than a few feet beyond the edge of the pier.

More on that later.

Jonathan

Now I'm updating!

Hi! I'm at the Village, too, which is an amazing hotel made out of...huts? On stilts. But they're hut-mansions, and they're on a hillside with a view of the lagoon. It's a lagoon and not the ocean because the giant coral reef surrounding the island makes it that way. It's much saltier and darker-colored than the regular ocean. It's good for infections and cooling off.

We have the most amazing host family and we love them. I'll miss them when we move to our apartment. It's a strange thing, living with another family like this. We spend many evenings just staring at them while they chatter and go about being Pohnpeian. It's funny, the things that you can understand, even when you don't speak the language--one kid taunting another (that "nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah nyah" voice is universal), a mom telling a kid to knock it the hell off or she'll knock him around (not that our family would EVER be mean to a kid. Parenting here is so huggy and kissy and every mom has a dozen kids and every kid has a dozen moms--we all look like mean parents back in the states.); there's also universal language for "don't touch that!" and "time to eat."

I am excited to move into our place, though. It's not the hut that I envisioned (and hoped for, despite my being told from the beginning that we'd be given an apartment), but an apartment that's actually nicer than my last one. Although, if you've ever seen our Portland apartment you know that my standards are depressingly low. Our new apartment has shelf space and isn't a free-standing fire hazard, so we feel like royalty. We may have to think creatively to keep from roasting to death in there, but we're up for it.

My new challenge is making it out of here with all my toes! On my first full day in Pohnpei some staph AND strep set up shop in my toe. Jonathan and I got to play around with home remedies (think: a sewing needle, a lighter, and hydrogen peroxide) before we finally broke down and went to a doctor. Who was silly, and prescribed passe amoxicillin and...arthritis medicine. Which didn't help, naturally, so we tried another doctor a few days later. Who gave me powerful medicine and good advice--spend the day in bed, don't wash too often with soap, spend more time in the sun, eat more fruit. He also laughed a lot and I liked him tons. Between the two of us I fully expect to leave FSM with all my digits. Not that a wooden toe wouldn't be super cool. Plus I've been spending some downtime imagining all the prosthetic-toe-accessories I could build (like "Swiss Army Knife Toe," "Machine Gun Toe," "Calculator Toe" and ooo! "Spear-fishing Toe!").

I gave a practice lesson in Algebra to the other volunteers, who were pretending to be students to set the proper tone. They essentially spent 45 minutes falling asleep in class and cowering under my death glare. I discovered that teaching math bores me to death, so I'm currently, desperately, trying to think of ways to make it more interesting and less pointless. All I can think of is that if you study math a lot, science gets more powerful. Hee, and I keep thinking of what one advisor said, at my defense, when a committee member asked me something about math. Essentially: "Trieste is great working with genetic statistics, but hopeless at regular math." I guess one good reason to work on math is so that no one has to say that about you! Mitch, if you're reading this, I promise I'll be better at civilian math by the end of the year.

We still don't have photos up because we forget a camera every time we go anywhere. Even if we remember a camera, we forget to use it. Eventually, we'll get it together.

Love,
Trieste

It's always sunny in Kolonia.

Kaselehlie Maingko,

My super special nice friends and family wish list is for a reusable coffee cup and reusable water bottle, so that I can stop using Styrofoam and plastic everyday.

We’ve been here almost two weeks and so much has happened already. Things have been very busy with our language and teacher trainings. Pohnpeian language is next to impossible! You’d think that by the middle of two weeks of language class you’d be able to at least count to ten but you’d be dead wrong. Before you just start counting willy nilly, you’d better ask yourself if you are going to be counting people, animals, long things, plants, days, etc… There are about 55 different counting systems depending on what needs to be counted. Today we learned the seven different places for suffixes! That’s right! You can have seven different suffixes. “What would that look like,” you might be asking? Well say that you wanted to say come with me and let’s go over there. No need for separate words, just say lusungkiniedhlahngirailehr. I’m not kidding.

Trieste and I are moving into our apartment on Monday which is very exciting. The apartment is really cool, very spacious with a nice balcony. It’s close to everything in Kolonia and my only complaint is that we won’t have land to garden on, but I’m working on coopting the other Kolonia kids’ yard to grow veggies. To be a good Pohnpeian I need three things; pigs, yams, and sakau.

Sakau is the root of a pepper bush that you pound with a stone and mix with water. Then you strain it through the bark of a hibiscus tree and drink copiously. Sakau is weird. It makes you feel very peaceful and relaxed. No important meeting or celebration is complete without drinking sakau, it’s one of the most important customs of the island. But like I said it’s weird. It looks like chocolate milk, tastes like mud, makes your lips and mouth numb, and is the consistency of thick phlegm.

More later. The view from The Village is too beautiful.

Across the grapevine to LA

I've been on a whirlwind tour of California in the last week. Oakland, SF, Pacifica, LA! California is crazy. My friends and family have really gone above and beyond to be nice and show me all the things that make these areas awesome. I loved Oakland. Amy and I went to The Trappist and had delicious beers. Then we went to Jack London square, which was very strange. The highlight, however, well aside from visiting my good friend, was Burma Superstar. If you ever get the chance to have Burmese food do yourself a favor and eat a lot of it. I got to see Kelly and Jordan at a Karaoke bar in SF and watched Jordan blow everyone out of the water. Everyone wanted to ride the Pony!

My tour of Pacifica was really cool as we got to see dolphins swimming off the coast. Hiking was great and I got to see all my lovely family in one place.

Whoa, LA!

So I realized that in the last 2 weeks I've been to 7 different airports! But I've made it to sunny LA. I guess I had really low expectations about being here, but the last two days have been fun and interesting. I went to the Getty art museum and saw an amazing photography exhibit, swam on Venice Beach, drove past a thousand people in Hollywood, and have seen more people than I will see in an entire year. LA is huge and congested with traffic, and I don't know how anyone can drive here, but our good friend Zac did a great job of showing us some hot spots all over the city.

We will only be in the contiguous states for a few more hours really, and it feels a little alien. I've been trying to keep things in perspective, but it seems so strange to end my last few days in a place like this. I guess that's just how things are sometimes. I've had moments of freaking out, but I think I've been handling things pretty well. I'm definitely looking forward to having a a day in Honolulu to chill out. We'll be traveling from LA to Honolulu, and then we'll spend a day island hopping till we get to Pohnpei. I should say that we'll spend a day island hopping if everything goes according to plan, but there is no guarantee that it will be so painless. There have been people who have taken days to get where we're going. Once again, I guess that's just the way it is. Anyway, it'll all be different and crazy and weird, and I'm excited and nervous. That's all I can think of to say.

It makes a mountain peak seem little when it's not.

Can I just say that I have the worst luck possible with air travel. Trieste has already decided that she wants to steer clear of whatever voodoo is responsible for my terrible luck. I can't recall a time where my three hour layover hasn't turned into five for six hour layovers. My most recent bout with air travel was going to OK for the fourth of July, one last hello and goodbye before Trieste and I leave town. I got delayed in Denver leaving and returning. On my return trip a storm in Denver delayed a planed going to Tulsa delaying my plane back to Denver which caused me to be two seconds late for my connecting flight. Although I took it much better than the other guy in that situation. I bet he's still yelling at the wall in Denver.

But most importantly, has anyone else seen those crazy murals they have in Denver! They're nuts. Just google Murals in DIA and you'll get many hits dedicated to these bizarre pieces of public art. I mean it goes without saying that I love them, I just can't believe they are in the main entrance to the airport.

Well I leave for SF tomorrow morning. I can't believe that in one week I'll be on my way to Pohnpei.

Cutting Edge

I'm creating this blog to keep my friends and family up to date with my travels to Pohnpei, FSM this year.  FSM are the Federated States of Micronesia, of which Pohnpei is one.  Pohnpei is technically located in the Northern Pacific ocean just a few in latitude about the equator.  It's hot, tropical and extremely rainy.  Pohnpei doesn't have any beaches of which to speak; most of the island is surrounded by mangrove swamps.  There are the ancient ruins of Nan Madol, which are haunted and we will probably get cursed by going there. 

Trieste and I are leaving sometime in July for the following year to be teachers at the College of Micronesia.  I'll be teaching english and she'll be teaching math.  Our plan is to teach for a year with the possibility of staying longer, or coming back to the states to start school again.  

For the most part we are now just scurrying around to get everything wrapped up, passports updated, banking and cell phones cleared up, hugging the cat... but everyday we learn new things about the island and just get excited.  Well that's about it for now, but there will be more things as we get closer to our leave date.