Got to play with this baby tree opossum, record breaking cuteness levels!

Then I ate its mother.

Here I am in the middle of the New Guinean bush and what do I hear emanating from someone's stereo, but Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Wtf.

In other news, yesterday I heard this guy cooing to a baby in Chini and he said to it, "Yes yes! Sleep! Yes! Where's the soup?"

Last time I was here I told some people that I didn't want to bathe in the river because I was afraid a crocodile would eat me, and they told me, "It won't eat you! They don't like human meat. It will crush you in its jaw and drown you and leave your body in an underwater hole." They appeared to think they had responded to my concern.

So this time I framed my concern by saying I was afraid of being attacked by a crocodile as I bathed. "It won't attack you while you bathe! It will wait until you're heading back up to the shore!"

Back in good ole Akapmɨnggɨ after a 2-day journey, complete with a capsized canoe, ruined cargo, and the near break-out of a fight between members of the two Chini villages.

Anyways, downriver canoe trips make for great opportunities to figure out the semantics of directional verbs. If you want to say, "I'm leaving/going" in Chini, you have to know which of at least 7 possible verbs to use, depending on where you're heading. It's also even more complicated than that, since they don't all take the same tense-aspect-realis morphology. It's basically a linguist's dream, though I suppose mind-numbingly boring for everyone else!