octopus lady, Tonga

I'm a couple weeks into Tonga at this point, sleeping in a large grass hut that was built specifically for our small group of students. We slept in mosquito netting like a cocoon to keep the bugs off. (It didn't always work. One night I woke up to something crawling on my neck and hurled a 5 inch long - 1 inch thick - centipede off my neck. Yes, they are poisonous. *shudder*) 

Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of munch ... munch ... munch ... something seemingly on top of us, loudly chomping, snorting, chewing. Frozen in fear, I eventually discovered that it was the wild Tongan pigs! They were eating our hut.

But one of my most favorite days, I had been sitting at the end of an old worn wooden dock, painting the landscape and palm trees around me. That's really most of what we did on this study abroad ... a few instructional classes, and then tons and tons of personal time to wander where we wanted to go, draw, paint, and immerse in the culture. So I'm all alone in the warm sun, looking out into shallow salt flats that give way into the ocean, when I start to watch a large Tongan woman walking out of the surf. She seems to be heaving something? I watch her curiously, and as she gets closer, I hear a weird, high pitched, quiet, squealing sound. I don't know how else to describe it. Was this woman squealing? What was that sound coming from? And then I see it. She has an octopus  wrapped around her - suctioned to her arms and back - still alive and wriggling. She's smiling. She CAUGHT it. As she slowly walked by me, out of the water, towards the village, she grinned and said the Tongan word for dinner.