I'd like to be, under the sea...

This weekend was a 3 day weekend because Friday was parent teacher conferences instead of school. I didn't have any angry parents or anything, so that was good. After conferences, we loaded up the boat and headed to Black Coral, an island not far from the main island. This one didn't have much sand and it was TINY, but very relaxing to get away from school and everything for a short while. We sat around all day Sabbath and snorkeled a bit in the channel near the island. This morning we went diving right by the island. I got to use my own BC this time which was nice, and I actually had weights too! I saw about 4 reef sharks (one of which was a baby, very cute) and a sea turtle for a fleeting second. It was down pretty deep and was moving fast so I didn't get a good look at it. Our dive was pretty long and fun, also uneventful, which is generally a good thing when talking about scuba diving. I'm not looking forward to school tomorrow because I'm really tired, but hopefully I'll get a good night's sleep and make up for this weekend. I slept on the hard wood floor of our hut the first night we were there because it was so hot that I was burning up in my hammock without any breeze. The 2nd night was much better as it was raining and windy. I hung my hammock from the low rafters of the hut and slept really good, but I'm still pretty tired from everything. Well, back to school tomorrow, we have Wednesday off because of U.N. day, which will be a nice break in the middle of the week. Our leaky shower got fixed this weekend as well, so now we don't have a permanent puddle on our bathroom floor anymore. So much to be thankful for if you really think about it. Sometimes it's hard to look on the positive side though. One quarter down, three to go!

Things I've learned in Pohnpei:
1. Teachers deserve the utmost respect, they work hard
2. Balance is key to happiness
3. Cabbage salad is salad nonetheless

Sahwertik & Sahwerlap

This weekend was a very busy and fun one! I'm very pwang (tired) from all the festivities. On Sabbath we hiked to two waterfalls down in a gorge. It was a steep but beautiful hike. The first one was super tall, maybe like a few hundred ft and gorgeous. It had a nice deep pool at the base and sheer walls surrounding it. We had to hike up the river to get there too, which proves interesting when your shoes have very little traction. Nothing more than a few more bumps, bruises, and scraped knees to add to the collection though. Saturday night we had a b-day party for one of my roommates which turned out to be a lot of fun also. We even did some salsa dancing. On Sunday we loaded up the boat and headed out to Palikir Pass for some scuba-rama. It was only the 2^nd time I’ve been diving here. I had to use someone else’s BC due to a time constraint and various other issues. The BC was several sizes too large for me and I had nothing but 2 small rocks for weights, but somehow everything ended up working fine and the dive went well. It was kind of scary diving without any instructor, just a dive buddy, but all went well and I even saw 3 reef sharks! After a while Tina (my dive buddy) and I met up with Mr. B and Raymond and they took us down pretty deep to see the sharks. I dove to about 85 ft, which is the deepest I’ve ever gone, but that’s where the sharks were, so that was fun to see. That is pretty much the summation of my weekend. It was a lot of fun and I felt ready to tackle yet another Monday. This week has been going fast luckily. We have Friday semi-off. By that I mean that we don’t have school, but we do have parent teacher conferences since report cards come out on Thursday. After school we are supposed to go camping at Black Coral, nothing is for sure yet though. We caught one of our many resident mice a few days ago, one down, 2 more to go! A new quarter has started this week. It is somewhat of a relief to be able to start fresh, but starting over can also be stressful. The ship with the copier ink still hasn’t come, so we are using the small copier still which means that we can only make copies for certain things. It makes grading papers harder because they mostly do work out of the book, but I have 2 high school graders do most of that, so that is nice. Well I hope you are all doing mwau (good) and I’d love to hear from you! Oh, the pictures are of Karen and I at Sahwertik (a waterfall) and on of me and my TA Eileen. She's awesome.