On Tahiti!

((Just a quick word- these updates, at least right now, are about two days behind "real life". For instance, right now I'm on Moorea even though this entry about Tahiti is the most recent. The entry describing today's events will probably go up tomorrow night. Just thought you should know)).

Half our class took the same flight and arrived at Faa Airport, Tahiti at 6:00 in the evening. The airplane itself was this cute, french-ish hold back from the days when airlines weren't required to have large seats, but the flight was curiously empty. Our group moved and milled about or stretched out over entire rows, passed out through the entire eight hour flight.

We landed in the airport, stepped out onto the tarmac, and were greeted by the sound of the three-man Tahitian band. Then a 45 minute wait in passport control followed by what was literally a walk-through and nod-at-the-officials customs line. At the end of that line and during an evening rainstorm, we met our CourchSurfing host, Natalie.

She kissed each of us twice on the cheek and gave us leis that her mother had made for us before carting us off to her parents' house, a couple of minutes away. She was extremely pleasant and provided us with food (despite being overstuffed from airplane food and sitting around doing nothing for eight hours) and air mattresses that we promptly crashed onto.

Through those last moments of consciousness before sleep, it was still too difficult to fully appreciate that I was in Tahiti. Yes, I was somewhere different, somewhere that wasn't home, but I couldn't specify where. I could have been in another part of California for all I knew- albeit a slightly warmer, stickier part of California, but those exist too.

The view from Natalie's backyard

I think it was when the roosters woke me up at 5:00 in the morning that I truly appreciated my position. Those caws invaded my dreams and I cound't recognize them as roosters at first- there were so many of them shouting that they sounded like a herd of some other, much fouler creature. This all sounds terrible, but the early rise means that, two days later when I'm writing this entry, I'm still able to wake up at six in the morning fairly non-homicidal.

Natalie had made plans for us that day. She and her fellow group of school teachers had planned for a day spent on a giant outrigger canoe eating Tahitian food, drinking, snorkling, and sunbathing. But it rained. And unlike the half-hour thunderstorm I would have expected, it poured from six til ten in the morning, when her group finally decided to cancel the day.

It was far from a complete lost- the seven of us shrugged it off and broke out our instruments and started jamming along, the rest of us wrote our families and practiced French with her adorable parents who giggled at us constantly. Around noon, it stopped pouring and downgraded to drizzle and we decided to walk down to Papeete, the main city of Tahiti, and of all of French Polynesia as well. In our fancy REI footwear and rain jackets, we stood out pretty well. Cat-calling and waving was frequent, but not too annoying as I doubt that any of the guys would have the balls to do it if they had been on our side of the street and not in their cars or twenty yards away. Eventually, we reached Papeete, which was something of a downfall. We had been warned of this by our professors and various travel guides, but Papeete isn't much more than your standard port town- overcrowded, seedy, and not too interesting. Not to mention most of the places were closed.

After getting yelled at for stepping in a canoe in the aquatic park (it was on the sand!) and exploring a combination pearl museum/gallery (there were wax figures! From all over the world! Oooh. Aaah.) we headed the 4 km back to our host family. So we sat around, played with her dogs, chilled out, and contemplated our trip to Moorea the next day.

The following morning, we returned to the market, which was a gigantic crowd of people milling around stalls and generally being like people at a municipal market in any town. There was haggling, people shouting, saying hello, chatting with our host (who taught many of their children), and generally being friendly if a little bit frantically charged. I bought a gigantic pile of pork that had been bbq'd in a variety of ways, all of it eventually hacked under the same cleaver. There was coconut milks and baguettes and various strange fruits I had never seen nor tasted, and we gorged ourselves during breakfast. Our last foray from our host's house found all of us packed into her pickup truck with our luggage precariously packed in the back. Eventually, we boarded the ferry for Moorea.