Mifela stap lo Port Vila nao.

Our group got back a couple of days ago from our last trip to the outer islands. We'll now be in the capital, Port Vila, until we return to the US in 8 days. (What! 8 days! Where has the time gone!)

Returning to Vila after field work in the outer islands is a little bit like coming home. We stay in the same hotels each time in Vila, and we're all relatively familiar with the town now, so Vila comes with a degree of comfort that we often don't get in the outer islands.

Here are some of the things we look forward to on our return to Vanuatu's capital city:

• showers
• warm showers
• beds
• not having to sleep under mosquito nets to keep the mosquitos, bugs, geckos, and rodents away from your sleeping body
• wearing shorts (it's a little risqué for women to show their thighs in Vanuatu, but Vila is highly modernized and full of tourists anyway, so it's not as big a deal)
• mirrors (have you ever not looked at yourself for 2 weeks?)
• running water
• FLUSHING TOILETS
• internet
• not going to bed at 7:30 PM because what else can you do? (sun sets around 5:30 PM here)
• not having the roosters on the other side of the wall wake you at 5 AM
• food that does not contain starch

Now that we're back in our plush, comfortable, modernized city* with all our desired amenities, we're going to spend the rest of the week entering all of the data we've collected from our surveys into the computers and starting to crunch some numbers. I entered 3 of the 5 sections on about 40 surveys today; this took 4-5 hours. We've done nearly 2000 surveys over the course of the trip.

Wish us luck!

* The term "city", in this case, should be interpreted rather loosely.