Wrap a Nui

I have about four hours till I get taken to the airport to wait three more hours for my flight to Papeete.

Despite some early problems, I think this week has been a good start to my foreign adventures. I managed to get by in the most isolated place on Earth without knowing the language. If I can do that, I can probably do anything. I do need to take some time and learn more local phrases. My proficiency in Spanish is really sad. I’m going to buy a small French/English dictionary tomorrow in Papeete and hold on to it. My grasp of French seems better than Spanish, but its something I need to get in the habit of doing.

I also need to start booking a bit farther ahead for reservations. Thankfully, this is not the busy tourist season in the Pacific, but it would help greatly if I didn’t wait as long to get tickets.

I have about 3.5gb of photos and about 35min of video from the week. I’m shooting my photos in RAW, so each photo is about 15mb in size. I figure it’s best to shoot everything in RAW, burn to DVD and ship it home, that way I have the originals of everything. I’m just picking the best dozen or so from each site and putting them on Flickr. I was going to edit video today, but I had to check out of my room at noon. The time and facilities to edit video are turning out to be the biggest sticking point so far.

The weather today is probably the worst I’ve seen since I’ve been here. The waves are huge, the wind is strong, and there is a constant drizzle. In the future, I’m not going to wait for perfect weather when shooting video. I’ll take reasonably good weather and maybe shoot another if conditions improve considerably.

I’ll see you next time from French Polynesia!