5 day weekend over

Due to some potential natural disasters they were predicting could happen last week, I ended up with a very long weekend. All classes were cancelled on Thursday and Friday, and I never have classes on Mondays. Thursday really did need to be cancelled; all day the rain was torrential and the thunder really meant business. I loved it though. I always really miss thunderstorms during the winter, and stormy days instead of classes are just so relaxing. The sky Wednesday night before it stormed was just crazy too. Close to sunset, the entire sky turned an ominous orange, then purple, then cotton candy pink.

Friday, though, classes certainly didn't need to be cancelled. The worst was over and it probably rained a total of 25 minutes all day, which is typical for Suva anyway. But hey, I'll take it.

Nobody really went anywhere special this weekend, since so many people went on our Beachouse vacation last weekend and we can't afford to do that every weekend. Mostly it was just hanging around campus and downtown Suva. During the day on Saturday I went shopping with Taylor and Matt, and we finally hit up the handicrafts market. I didn't actually intend to buy anything, I just wanted to look, but that seemed to work to my advantage. Because it was apparently a slow day there and they were about to close for the day, the vendors all seemed pretty desperate to make a sale and were pushy. I kept telling them no, I just want to check it out, but each time I told them no, they would offer me a better deal on something. Eventually I got one of them down to $5 FJD on a handmade turtle necklace that admittedly I did like, so I broke down and bought it. It's pretty cute though.

Also, I finally got my Fiji Bitter tank. I feel local.

Sunday was hot and sunny, so I decided it was a good day to go to the pool. As a pleasant surprise to me, a whole bunch of my friends here had the same thought, so there ended up being a whole big group of us there. One of them, Malcolm, got permission from the pool guy to set up a slackline across the pool. If you don't know, slacklining is basically like tightrope walking, so you can imagine how much fun we had with that. 

Yesterday was another day spent at the pool, because why not. Having an outdoor pool on campus is one of the greatest things and I plan to take advantage of that. Later on in the night, I went over to the apartments across campus where some of the other international students from other programs live. I don't know them as well as my UWP family, but they're all really cool people. We spent most of the night playing Canastas, which is a long card game meant for bigger groups of people like we had. All of us except for the two teaching us were completely lost for a while, but once we got it, it turned out to be pretty fun. I just realized as I typed that how much cards I play here. Cheap and easy entertainment, plus the power goes out at least on a weekly basis.

I finally took some campus pictures today too! It really is like a jungle. I suppose it is.

This is the walkway to 10th hall, where I live.