Volleyball and Tahitian dancing...oh yeah, and some work too.

We are definitely doing a great job of integrating with the community...or they're doing a really good job of including us.
Maria, one of our students, played volleyball for Cal, and was thus recruited to play on the local women's team here (they practice on our front lawn). So last night was the game between Maria's team and Irma's team. Irma is the woman who cleans the dorms...she can be pretty fierce, which definitely showed throughout the game. It ended up being a ton of fun: the game took place in the school gym of Papetoai, a village on Moorea, and we were the only non-locals there. Children ran around everywhere, tossing balls around with us during the breaks, and the locals were selling lamb heart on sticks. Some of our class painted their bodies with the letters in G-O M-A-R-I-A and would occasionally rearrange to I-R-M-A to make sure we still got clean sheets. Maria's team ended up smashing Irma's team, so hopefully Irma won't hold too much of a grudge against her.
Today was Brent's last day, so we made a farewell brunch to thank him for all his help, good humor, and fatherliness. Pat is leaving on Friday, and then we'll have George Roderick, another professor, for a few weeks. Besides that I worked all day, and then at 4:00 pm, we were summoned to our front lawn for Tahitian dance lessons! It was so much fun, the woman taught us how to tie pareos around our waist as skirts, and then we learned the three parts of a dance. It was actually pretty hard -- our thighs are going to be really sore tomorrow from keeping our knees bent for so long! It was great though, a little band played guitar, ukelele, and drums, and we actually got a little better with time.
And now for the best part: Hinano just came in and announced that we are invited to perform!!! Those of us who are interested will have the option of practicing Tahitian dancing every day and performing at the Opening Ceremony of the Atattia Center, a Polynesian culture center on our property! Apparently we'll even learn how to make the skirts from Te leaves and everything! So that's pretty exciting :)
Besides that, work on projects is going well. I spent the last two days trying to learn all the different species of coral that I will be identifying for my project, quite a difficult task. I had a meeting with Brent this morning and he is super excited about what I want to do, so that's reassuring. It's definitely nice to hear some encouraging words when it feels like we're advancing blindly with no one telling us exactly what to do.
All right, dinner time! And then an evening lecture on Moorea's insects.