Breaking the blog silence

I have been blog silent for a few months, which have been fairly eventful and productive. In early March I attended two meetings back on Tahiti. The first was a summary workshop for the NSF-funded French Polynesia Terrestrial Arthropod Survey, of which our lab here at Berkeley has been a major part. This was followed by the Pacific Science Inter-Congress, a major, interdisciplinary international conference that was a bit disorganized (hey, it's French Polynesia!) but was an excellent opportunity to network with people from New Caledonia and other places where I would like to do fieldwork in the future. A number of "field friends"--Erica, Carol, Nick, Mat, Rava, Jean-Yves, Jenny, Jada, Adrian--from my time living on Mo'orea were also in attendance, so that the conference had the effect of feeling a little like a reunion. The impression I got was that for a small country like French Polynesia, hosting a large international conference was a little like hosting the Olympics. (The local press was full of articles about how everyone was rising to the occasion so that the conference would be a success.) As part of this, we had receptions both at the French High Commission and at the French Polynesian Presidency, which had ample alcohol, although not very much food.

After the conference, I spent a couple days with my friends the Faraires in Taravao. I spent a few hours one evening watching Glochidion flowers and got great photos of Epicephala moths. I visited an elementary school where Jacqueline teaches to talk about insects to fifth-graders. I drove to Papeete to get my three hundred plant specimens from 2007-08 "phytosanitized" with methyl bromide at the Ministry of Agriculture so that I could carry them back into the US. I spent an evening talking with a Wallisian (a Polynesian from the French territory of Wallis and Futuna, near Fiji) veteran of the French Army about his experiences in Africa, Afghanistan, and French Guyana. I went to Mo'orea for a day and saw Jimmy and Les, then went to the beach at Temae with Jada, Tiare, and the kids, and was struck by really how beautiful a place it was that I had been lucky enough to live for a year. Somehow you don't appreciate it that much when you're actually there.