under construction

the house. It's... how shall I put it, well, fantastic. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a three bedroom house with an exercise room (kind of), living room, kitchen, two toilets, hot water, a fridge, stove, and a bath tub... thats right, a clean, operational bath tub! As a volunteer my image of living quarters generally involved a non flushing toilet, cold bucket showers, rats running around my bed, etc. - which is what I spent the last ten weeks with.

Anyhow, my room mate moves in when the renovations are finished- oh did I mention, they thought the wrap around porch wasnt up to standard without brand new tile, eehhhmm. She is a jica volunteer (Japanese equivalent to US peace corps, as I understand it) working for the local special education school. She speaks virtually no english. Its actually quite fun. I get to play charades, make up japanese words, and speak broken fijinglish with her. Shes really nice and giggles a lot, aaanndd she works at a special ed. school so she must be cool.

My job is starting off slowly, as I expected it would. The days are spent walking to work, sitting around, schmoozing with the people in my office, going to the library (lautoka has the western regional library- they have a section that offers free internet!), running errands here and there, sitting in the park eating lunch (the view is of the ocean, three humongous yachts, and one of the yasawa islands), and walking home to listen to the BBC on my tiny portable radio. Things are slow now, but next week they have plans to travel- so I'll jump on that like a fat kid on cake.