8-12

Today is Thursday, and we didn’t have any appointments until the evening. We had moved our Thursday appointments to Wednesday in order to speed things up a bit. And luckily Carmen’s ankle was doing better, which means we were able to have some fun. First off, we headed downtown to check email and Skype, then Wendy and I headed off to see about a rental car for Friday and Saturday. We ended up at Dar’s, where we tried on some clothes just for fun.

The real fun began around 10:30AM. We taxied down to the end of Rita and walked across to the next few islands. When the tide is out in Majuro, it is possible to walk across the coral, as you can see from this picture. It was actually pretty fun. We met a few Marshallese groups doing the same. Some were walking to Majuro, and some were walking out to the little islands like we were.

The first island was super small, the second one was about the same size and had a big antenna on it in a fenced off area. The next two were bigger and had some houses, and even a school. We walked across the ocean side of the island, so we came at it from the back. Before we went swimming, we walked way far out on the coral to where the water was, but there didn’t end up being any shells. Once we walked back toward the lagoon side of the island, we found a little spot under some trees where we left our stuff and where we ate lunch.

Between the island we were on and the next one, there was this deep pool of water where we started snorkeling. It was really great. After a while, we decided to head over to the lagoon. To get there we had to swim through water only a few feet deep, but luckily we made it OK. The snorkeling was really good in the lagoon as well. It was amazing because at one place without coral there was this huge drop where the ocean got very deep very rapidly. I wish I knew more about the different kinds of fish that I saw. You can go watch Finding Nemo if you want to know some of the kinds that we saw. There was also this other kind that looked blue, but then it appeared to change colors to green when the light hit it differently.

The only bad thing about going out there was that we had to get back before the tide came back in. High Tide was around 12:16PM, so we figured we should leave by 2PM at the latest. Next time, I think we’ll leave earlier because the tide was coming in very fast between the 1st and 2nd islands, and the water was strong.

That night we let Carmen and Jared (two of my students) do the testing while Brad (another student) and I went to do some fieldwork with Lanny. On the way home, we picked up a couple of pizzas from Flame Tree restaurant, which in my opinion has the best pizza on Majuro. It was a great end to a great day.