Arrival on St. Paul

Well our plane took off. Three hours into the flight we were told that it was too foggy to land on St. Paul, so we were going to fly to the other island, St. George. We circled around for a little bit and then went in for the landing. All I could see out the windows was fog and more fog, and then water. I was freaking out at this point, thinking for sure we were landing in the Bering Sea, then out of nowhere we hit land! And it was St. Paul after all! We walked off the plane and through a garage into the airport/hotel/restaurant. There were tons of people there and they all watched us as we walked in. Nikki said a lot of them were my students and they wanted to see the new teachers. We were met by Mr. Mac, the maintenance man, and the principal and her husband. We loaded all our stuff into Mr. Mac's truck and jumped in for a tour of the island. It was a foggy day, but the ground is so green and the island is really pretty. We drove past the school, the store, the post office and Mr. Mac also pointed us who lives in what house. We drove down to the docks to see the Halibut boats and the crab pots. It made me so excited to live here. We stopped at the post office and picked up our first load of our boxes and Mac helped us bring everything back to our houses. Mel and I were super excited to see our new home. It is awesome! I love it! We will post pics as soon as everything is unpacked. While we were starting to put stuff away we could hear little kids giggling outside our door and then our doorbell rang. Mel and I went to answer. There were 4 little kids standing on our porch holding up a couple of bones. When we opened the door they said, "Hi! We found some seal bones for you," and handed them to us. Two more kids came by and joined our little group and they introduced themselves and talked to us for quite awhile. They came by about 8 more times in the next hour. Once they wanted to come in and us our bathroom, a few times they would ring the bell and run and hide and one time they came by with another seal gift. The principle's daughter, Stormy, held out a seal eyeball. I didn't believe that that is what it was, until I could smell it. It was a decaying seal eyeball from the seal harvest they just had! Nasty! But it was so cute to see all the curious kids come by and to meet us. Later we went to Nikki's for pizza and one of the other teachers, Betty came over to say hi. She invited us to her place for a glass of wine. We stayed there until I could barely keep my eyes open any longer. I crawled in bed at 11:30 p.m., while it was still light out.