Ta'ui!

Hello!
As of yesterday, I have officially been here for a week! We've done so much in the last few days, though, that it feels like I've been here forever...
I'm beginning to see more and more similarities between France and Tahiti. Thursday we were supposed to go on a hike with a French Polynesian botanist, but he couldn't make it over to Moorea from Tahiti because the ferry people were on strike...hmm, do I see a trend between here and France? So we ended up having free study time in the morning, and in the afternoon we headed over to Mari Mari's house. Mari Mari is a woman of about 65 or 70 whose grandparents got married in Moorea many years ago, and as a wedding gift, received an entire valley (Opunahu Valley). Although the family lost much of the land over the years, she still owns a considerable chunk, and much of it is kept nice and full of native plants. She went to university in the States and has some kind of connection with Pat Kirch, our anthropology professor, so we got to have a tour. The best part about her house is her dog -- she never tires of running after coconuts at bullet speed and bringing them back. Mari Mari is kind enough to offer up her land for us to do research projects on if we choose, so we went clambering up in the hills to see all the vegetation...of course, no one had told us we'd be bush-walking, so we all ended up covered in scratches and mosquito bites.
Ah yes, the mosquitos. I now have...let's see...at least 26 mosquito bites (I just counted) and every day I wake up to find I have more. I have no idea WHERE I get them, though, they just sort of appear. Thankfully I have a bright orange mosquito net on my bed, since otherwise I'd probably have a few hundred more bites.
Anyway, on Friday the more serious work began. We woke up at 4:15 am to pile into the bus to make it out to the reef flats before the tides rolled in. Once out there, we saw a gorgeous sunrise, and then had to work quickly, setting up a transect and little quadrants in an attempt to estimate live and dead coral cover, algae, and animal numbers out on the reef. The hardest part was that the waves were growing larger by the minute, and by the end of the morning everyone was covered in scratches from being thrown into the corals. We then went over to one of the two fresh water streams on the island, and clambered around searching for snails and bugs. The Polynesians who lived next door were looking at us as though we were insane. We then hiked up a bit, following the stream up the mountain and taking new data every once and a while, and eventually reached a gorgeous waterfall. After a nice swim, we headed back down and home. Friday evening we had a delicious enchilada dinner, played a few games of Uno, and then had a spontaneous dance party outside under the Fare Pote, a traditional thatched hut we have on our front lawn.
Saturday was another free study day. Some local Polynesians row a "va'a" off of our dock, a traditional canoe type boat that is paddled with small oars. They offered to take us out for a row, so we joined them. Every time the head rower grunted, everyone else shouted "TA'UI!" ("change") and switched sides with their oars. It was really a fun experience, not to mention absolutely gorgeous, as we were in the bay surrounded on all sides by gorgeous mountains.
After a quick swim and gourmet meal of homemade barbecued pizza (with peach and goat cheese, yum!), some French guys (friends of a few of the students in my class) came on over from Tahiti as they were spending the day in Moorea. This was another interesting experience, since they didn't speak a word of English and most Berkeley people don't speak a word of French, so there was definitely a bit of a communication barrier...I was the interpreter once again.
One thing I've been picking up about the Polynesians: the young people speak pretty good French, as they learn it in school, but the older people speak a strange fusion of French and Tahitian, and have a funny sentence structure -- I couldn't understand a word of what one of the rowers was saying, but I later realized he probably was speaking entirely Tahitian. So I'd better work on my Tahitian...
That's all for now! Today is a lazy Sunday, and our professor Brent invited us over for wine and cheese late in the afternoon. The intensity is definitely rising though, we need to write a full report about the reef transect work we did on Friday, which requires quite a lot of research and calculations, and then by Saturday, we need to have our research proposals done, meaning we need to know exactly what project we will be doing and how we will be doing. I still want to do a comparative study between the Great Barrier Reef and the reef of Moorea, but within that, I have no idea what I want to study -- corals? molluscs? fish? algae? snails? Ahhh the possibilities are endless...I'll figure it out eventually :)