Hello!
It's Monday afternoon, and I arrived in Sydney early this morning. Marcy and I had an AMAZING time in Fiji - it was a nice little "vacation". We arrived in Nadi, Fiji last Monday and started our tour that morning. That day we went to the market, one of the top 5 rated beaches in the world, a village and sandboarding. Sandboarding is SO awesome, but what a hike up the sand dunes! my legs were killing me. For every step you took you slid back 3/4s of a step. THe hostle we stayed at that evening was pretty active and had a fun staff. One fella in paticular called Crazy. So we stayed an extra day there - mostly to catch up on jetleg. Crazy wasn't a fan of us just napping on lounge charis though. Made sure we at least got a game of beach volley ball in. On Wednesday we joined a different group to continue the tour and went on a treck throught the rainforest, tubing down a river and for a long boat ride. It was SO beautiful! Exactly how you imagine Fiji to look like. even got to swim at the base of a waterfall. You should have seen the wicked sandals marcy and i bought for the treck. i'll be posting pictures soon. We stayed with the same group for 3 days. Met some really great people. A couple from England (Steph and Doug) and a guy and girl from Germany (Melina and Valentin) were who we hung out with most and will appear in most pictures. the next day (wednesday) we went billi billi rafting (bamboo rafts) had Kava (pepper root mixed with water that's kind of like alcohol) and went to a school. Kava is NOT good! it looks and tastes like muddy water. but it's custom and an insult not to have it as a welcome to guests, so we had it 3 times, 2 bowls each time. yuck! the kids speak great english and LOVED having their pictures taken, especially since they could look at them directly after. We had a lot of rain that day, but went out for supper in Suva (city) and out to a nightclub. HILARIOUS! the fijians sure know how to dance. moved on to raki raki where we spent an extra night and enjoyed the beach. our last day we went to hot pools and mud baths in natural settings. we were covered in mud -face, body, hair -everything! it's great for the skin and my hair has never felt so soft. We then were taken back to Nadi and dropped off at our hostel. Marcy and i got up at 6am to go to the airport only to have our flight CANCELLED (due to mechanical problems)!! after 1/2 hour on the runway and an hour in the departure area, they moved us on back through immigration which took forever (2 hours) and the put us up in a REALLY nice hotel (had our own private room with A/C and our own double bed) and fed us all our meals (including buffet! mmmm). So, really we were kind of happy with the whole deal. Extra day by a pool and no big rush to arrive in sydney. The only downer was we had to wake up at 1am to get to the airport so we didnt' have much sleep! Loved fiji, but haded the massive ammounts of misquitos. i look like i'm wearing poka-dotted socks! The weather was 50-50 with beautiful sunny skies and rain, but always HOT. very very humid over there.
we have finally made it to sydeny this morning and landed at 8:30 am. Our transfrer to the hostle was amusing! the driver of the shuttle forgot to drop us off so we had a tour around teh city and then he got pulled over by a cop for "over taking" (passing) on a solid line. But we did arrive safely and have started to walk around and check out the city. I'm still getting used to some of the different lingo. Chips being french fries and not potato chips, biscuits being cookies and not bread like eaten with jam. Small things like that keep me on my toes and sometimes confused. We have our SWAP orientation on wednesday and will know more of a plan then, but as of right now it looks like we're only going to be in sydney a few days and will head north up the east coast and work our way back down.
I know this is long, but there was a lot to catch up on. I'm going to try to post pictures soon. Miss you all and want to hear from you soon!!! Hope everything is going well up in Canada.
xoxox
