Hello, Pacific.

Friday night after the Chanukah lights were out (and moments before our roommates had their Christmas Toga Party), we set out for the beach. Colleen had only been to the beach once since we got here, and I’d never been.

It was plenty dark and cold by the time we got there, and all the fire-pits were surrounded by hordes of guitar-playing, tomfoolery-ing, marijuana-smoking hooligan teenagers. We were afraid they’d go ape-crazy and try to eat us (like in that one episode of CSI), but we scrambled away from them fast enough and got to enjoy the waves at night.

Things were going all well and good until we got close enough to the water to actually touch the waves. And this ocean? You may not know this, but it is not just water. It also has sand. And rocks. And seaweed. And little swimmybitey things.

Colleen says those stringy things were just seaweed, but I’m not too convinced that they weren’t poisonous, electrified sea snakes. Sea snakes exist, right? They must, because clearly, we were nearly killed by them. Fortunately, we escaped relatively unscathed. Shaken, but alive to tell about it.

The shifty eyes in the photo above only reflect a fraction of the … shiftiness … of the moment. Behind us? Deadly sea snakes. In front of us? The cannibalistic teenagers. Dinner and a movie were the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was only our resolve to see an animated film about penguins, thousands and thousands of penguins, and maybe also the dulling effect of marijuana on the senses of those teenagers, that helped us get out alive. Next Chanukah, toga party or no, we are staying home.