Moorea, French Polynesia

View from the overwater bungalow.

Tom and I arrived in Tahiti yesterday without any major problems. Our little overwater bungalow is lovely. We have everything we could want here-- incuding a private balcony and a ladder straight down to the water in the lagoon. Last night the water was so still and clear you could clearly see all the colourful fish swimming around. There is also a glass portion of the floor so we can see the water and fish going by beneathe us.

We sat with a chatty older lady on our flight to LA, and had lots of time before we caught our flight to Papeete, Tahiti. Air Tahiti Nui is a pretty awesome airline! We got a little package as the flight was taking off that contained ear phones, socks, sleeping eye-masks and stickers indicating whether we should be left alone to sleep, or woken up for meals.

The weirdest thing for me was adjusting to hearing French all the time. When the flight took off from LAX, the staff immediately switched to French as their primary language. All around us people were speaking French. I think that is my first time being immersed in a different language. Since I am primarily a visual learner, I've always found learning languages to be difficult. I found it a bit unsettling to hear an unfamiliar conversations going on around us. I soon realized that this wasn't a major problem. All the flight attendants were bilingual, and so far everyone we've encountered has been as well.

During our flight to Tahiti, I looked a little closer at our flight informaion. I realized that our flight home was booked wrong. I blame this entirely on the wedding. If I had not been overwhelmed in wedding planning for the last three months, perhaps I would have noticed that our flight from Papeete to LA leave at 11:30pm on October 8, and arrives in LA at 10:45am on OCTOBER 9th. Perhaps we wouldn't have booked our flight from LA to Calgary on October 8-- a day too early! We've e-mailed our travel agent, so hopefully she'll be able to rectify our bad planning!

You might be wondering why I am blogging on our honeymoon. You know... Don't I have better things to do?

Heh, this is the wonderful thing about relaxing. I can do whatever I want!

This morning we woke up at 6:30am (10:30am home-time, we are four hours behind here). At that time the sun was out so Tom read on the balcony, and I read in bed. Then we went for a swim, ate breakfast at the restaurant, went snorkeling, and have gone back to relaxing. My efforts at snorkeling were short lived. It is overcast, and VERY windy right now. The water was incredibly choppy, and all my inefficient flailing (i.e. attempts to swim) tired me out. In fact, it is so windy right now that every once in a while you can feel the slight swaying of the bungalow.

We will surely have eaten our body weight in pineapple and coconut by the time we leave. I never get tired of how delicious and fresh the fruit is out in the tropics!

Hopefully the sun will come out tomorrow. If not, we will make the best of it!