I called my dad yesterday to wish him a happy 61st birthday and had to laugh at his attempt to pronounce all the places we have been and are going to. It reminded me of my first few days at Easter Island, thoroughly confused by polynesian's affinity for vowels. I quickly realized that my western mind has been trained to remember consonants and basically ignore the vowels. I remembered reading an article in some magazine discussing typography and the fact that our brains look at shape most of all, so depending on the type-face we will easily look over a misspelling such as "offslnore" and realize we are talking about being out in the ocean, not sleeping loudly with a lisp.
Scott from Beach House helped a lot by explaining that every vowel is pronounced separately, so Toau is pronounced Tow-Ah-oo, which by the way is the next island north of Fakarava. Anyway, that is enough language arts for one blog post....especially for an engineer.
We snorkeled the pass today (not very good vis today so we skipped the dive). We plan to dive tomorrow with the local dive shop as a primer and then be able to dive it ourselves. Tons of sharks, and very pretty coral....can't wait.
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