Day One - LA / Tahiti

December 10, 2004 - So we flew out of LAX on Friday (USA day) and landed in Tahiti that evening. On walking off of the plane, and breaking past the wall of warm humid air, there was a lovely tahitian woman handing out fresh and wonderful smelling flowers to us, and there was a group of people singing traditional music to welcome us. It was a really great greeting to Tahiti! So we hadn't made any plans ahead of time as to what we were going to do during our 12 hour layover in Tahiti, so on the plane I heard a French speaking woman, and since Papeete (the city we were flying into in Tahiti) is a French speaking town I ventured the guess that she was from Papeete, and she was. So she told us of a decent hotel in town to stay at. So after we made it through customs, we hopped in a cab and went straight to the hotel. Thankfully it ended up being a fairly good hotel. We ended up having dinner at the restaurant at the hotel, which, interestingly enough, was a chinese food restaurant. So there we were, having Chinese food, in Tahiti. It was funny, because our waitress seemed to hardly speak or understand English, something Jamie failed to pick up on, and he asked for her to bring us a pitcher of water (which she was refilling out water out of) and she ended up coming over with a bottle of water. Jamie then proceeded to try and tell her that was not what we wanted, but that we just wanted a pitcher of water (all the while I am trying to throw all sorts of signals - hand, eye, smoke signals - to just leave it alone, because I saw the blank stare on her face that Jamie was so tragically missing). So she took the bottle of water away and after some lengthy waiting, she came back with a wine list. *Sigh* Needless to say that made it pretty clear to Jamie that she wasn't getting it, and completely gave up. After dinner we walked a couple blocks to the port area and listened to some live music, which was very interesting because it had the Pacific Island sound, but sang in French, very interesting. It was cute, because it was held in this central square area, and there were all of these little kids running in circles, and dancing, and riding their scooters in circles. It was really cute. Well that's about all for this day. On to New Zealand...