orientation

Today we had our first day of orientation. We met in a lecture room for a campus tour and an information session. There are only a few other international students who are from the US, and the rest are mostly from Japan, Korea, PNG, and Australia.

After all of the information meetings, they gave us a traditional Fijian (not pronounced fee-jan, its pronounced fee-gee-ian) food.

The left third of the plate is obviously watermelon and pineapple. The third of the plate below that is a slice of boiled sweet potato and regular potato, and seaweed with some sort of coconut cream sauce. The top is a plantain, tuna (with small green grapes that were super weird), battered fish, and some dark long vegetable, I’m not sure what it was. While I am here I decided I am going to try eating some fish (yes, breaking my veganism). I hated the tuna, and the battered fish was alright. Not sure if fish is for me, but I gave it a try.

After orientation, we decided to go to the waterfalls. They’re about 15 minutes away (a $17 FJD taxi), and it costs $5 FJD to get in. So the cost for each of my three roommates and I individually for both the taxi ride and entrance to the waterfall park was $6.30 American dollars. Doing anything here is insanely cheap. We met up with some of the Australian exchange students at the waterfalls, and we all hiked around and got in the pools.

All of the waterfalls we saw were super small, but still really beautiful. There was a rope swing at one of the pools, but I didn’t get any good pictures or videos of it.

I have also noted some random things about living here you may want to know:

1. We have a maid, Hannah, who come everyday to clean our house. This is so crazy to me because we don’t have anything like this at US colleges, definitely not at Lake Forest College. She is super sweet and cleans our rooms, bathrooms, and kitchen every afternoon.
2. They fill chip bags and pasta boxes all the way to the top. Not half way full like in the US. Insane.
3. The hard liquor here is insanely expensive. It is all imported, so the cheapest bottle you can buy is about $80 USD. Whats crazy Smirnoff is one of the most expensive in Fiji and is soooo cheap in the US. We were all shocked the first time we went to the liquor store. I still can’t believe its that expensive, though it makes sense logistically. In these pictures, all of the labels are the prices in FJD, and they’re about half that price in USD.

Since the hard alcohol is so expensive, we drink Fiji Gold haha.

I am not sure if anyone is really interested in hearing about what I have been eating in Fiji. But, since I am already putting in the effort of writing a blog, I am going to tell you at the end of my posts.

Tonight all three of my roommates and I made stir fry with rice, broccoli, carrots, onions, and soy sauce. Talia and I added avocado on top, and Maria and Walker made scrambled eggs.

For snacks earlier today we got pea crisps (one of the only healthy Whole Foods-esq snacks they have imported from the US) and bananas with peanut butter.

Talia and I are still in shock of how cheap and huge the avocados are. This is literally 60 American cents. As you may have guessed, we are going to be eating avocados everyday.