Tore Up From The Floor Up. :(

I'm Going to Join a Leper Colony.

AND THIS IS WHY.

Just float me away on a raft of reeds.

After a whole day of constant suffering and itching and pain and fear of scarring and epic gross-out at my own feet and wanting to just cut them off, I have survived, but with the will to be a leper. Im also sick, hating my most recent group project, way out of food, and extremely itchy still, but I'll live.

First things first though:

Woke up this morning itching. I was itching in my sleep and woke up to it at 6 am. Went back to sleep until 745 and jumped out of bed to our morning meeting. Apparently I haven't noticed that they don't make breakfast for us on Monday mornings. I was counting on snagging muffins or something, but that didn't work out, and we're completely out of almost all food, since we're at the end of our shipement. And when I mean out, I mean, we've been eating hotdog buns as toast, bagels, garlic bread, and hamburger buns for days now. ALL WE WANT ARE SOME FREAKIN BAGELS! But enough of that. For now. I itched all through the first 3 classes and kept leaving the room every 30 minutes to make more tea and milk & honey concoctions to soothe my sore throat. I napped after lunch and got up around 3:30 for my coral ID session. We have less coral to learn than fish, but its more confusing because more of them are very similar. Like, you have to look at the shape of their pores or how deep the grooves are to tell some of them apart. Coral are easier, in a way, because they're stationary and you can swim up to them for an indefinite amount of time. However, they're much harder to identify just by pointing at them. And their names are even more convoluted than fish. Oy. The ID session was neat though, back at HDL, and there were so many cool coral to see. I was itchy, as my booties covered every single damned bite I have, but the salt was nice - it dried the bites out so it was bearable being on land again.

Just before dinner, an announcement came in that another tiger shark had been caught, this one bigger than the last. However, by the time we got there, it was almost completely cut into indeterminable pieces. A few of us stuck around a little more, and then headed in for dinner. More uprisings about the lack of bagels, and we finally made it through to dinner, with more hotdog bun garlic breads, but some good tomato soup that felt amazing to my throat. I was on kitchen crew again, but we were cranking through the dishes like nobody's business. We were in and out of the kitchen in 20 minutes, an unheard of time, and we felt good about it. 7 o clock came around and it was time for the group project from hell. Somehow, the description of the project in class vs. the description of it online were different, and once our group reconvened to write the paper and the presentation, we were not on the same page. What should've been a 1 hour divide-and-conquer task, turned into 4 hours of bickering, storming off, arguing, dilly dallying and all kinds of behaviors that were not condusive to good grades. Turns out, we were not the only ones. Every group had trials and tribulations and was finishing between 11 and 1, having started at 7 pm. Horrible edits, skit formations, fighting, blowing off steam, cursing and eye rolls ensued throughout the whole evening. About 10 cups of tea and 2 cups of hot cocoa later, death threats and hate looks finally ceased and our group packed up for the night. Never again. It was way unproductive, I felt like I had nothing to do for hours at a time, and our cohesion was just not solidifying. UGH.

Fun facts:

1. Crickets here jump towards you. WHAT??!!!

2. Apples here cost $2.00 each. WHAT??!!!

3. I have found at least 8 new ways to tie sarongs. Go figure. I'm slowly turning into an islander, I won't know how to dress for winter when I come back. Scarf? Whats a scarf? It looks like a sarong.

Town.

And my feet still itch. Cool.