Monday

Like the rest of the world, normally I hate Mondays, but today was a really good day because the staff were here and I was able to begin getting set up. I now have a desk in the Morphology Lab, and an Internet account, can use the vehicles, and was able to pester former labmate Elin for all kinds of advice on getting settled in here. This afternoon I drove around the northern part of the island, to convert money, buy groceries, and start looking for housing ads. A few kilometers from the station I picked up a hitchhiker, who turned out to be a somewhat bookish and quiet French grad student from Paris, studying social anthropology in the Marquesas Islands (three hours to the northeast of Tahiti). This was pretty exciting, since I myself am leaving for the Marquesas on Sunday, but I quickly realized that having a conversation in French and operating a manual simultaneously was a bit more than my brain could handle. I was glad to get rid of her, and the car drove noticeably smoother after that. I found a couple housing ads at the Are supermarket on Cook's Bay, but they all seem to be for houses, rather than rooms (or single-room bungalows). I called two of them this afternoon, and they had both been taken. Hopefully this means turnover is relatively fast and there will be new ads up tomorrow. It looks like I can't take care of a lot of other things (like opening a bank account, getting a cell phone, and getting a carte de séjour) until I have a residential address.

Also, I learned today that one of the staff here is doing free Tahitian lessons, explained in English, every weekday evening for Gump Station people. This is exciting, because I had wanted to learn Tahitian, but it was low on my list of priorities because I didn't know how best to go about doing it. I have missed the first few weeks of class, and I was completely confused by the first 10 minutes, but I am pretty sure I will be able to catch up. Today we covered names of household items, days of the week, and months, the latter of which (Tenuare, Fepuare, Māti, Eperera, etc.) are clearly of English origin but transliterated into Tahitian sounds in a manner that is reminiscent of Japanese katakana. Our lesson was completely G-rated, but another student lent me his notes from previous lessons, which include all kinds of useful vocabulary like tarihua (male genitals) and titoi te ure (masturbate) and sentences like "E 'āpā vau ia 'oe" (I'm going to kiss you). The Berkeley undergrads are going to love these lessons when they repeat them in the fall.