Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Tonga! We'll be spending Christmas Eve and Christmas on Uoleva, the uninhabited island south of us, at Serenity Beaches resort. So most of our time there will be spent sun tanning on the beach, snorkeling or spear fishing, and just hanging out in the hammocks and little fales at the resort. We're going with the 5 new volunteers here and our japanese volunteer neighbor. We'll miss not having a white Christmas for the second year now, but are not missing the cold weather. It doesn't really feel as much like Christmas here - no commercialization of it at least with no big department stores here to decorate and to have Christmas sales, etc. But we have heard Christmas music on the radio, mixed with rap songs. And the Tongan barbeque restaurant has Christmas lights outside. And for some reason, all the kids are running around with fake toy guns now for Christmas, the chinese stores are selling them. For our trip to Uoleva I also did make a few Christmas cookies, with ingredients from a package from home.

A few random updates from this week - last night we had a real Japanese dinner at our neighbor Koichi's house who is a volunteer from Japan. He's going to teach us how to make a few dishes, and real teriyaki sauce. Over the weekend we had a bonfire on our beach with the new volunteers who just moved to Ha'apai last week, and friends in town. Lately we've just been hanging out, enjoying time off now for the holidays. Brett brought one of the new volunteers spear fishing today. More fruit is coming into season now with the hot weather - pineapples, passion fruit, and hopefully soon we'll have mangos, guava and avocado. We always have bananas, I don't think I'll ever be able to eat bananas again after being overloaded with them here. That's about all the updates for now, hope everyone has a Merry Christmas back home!