week two

This week was really crazy. I spent the whole week trying to figure out how to enroll in new courses, then my laptop broke. This caused quite a few issue for me, and I still haven’t really figured out how to use the new HP I bought, so I’m writing this off my phone.

I definitely felt a lot of culture shock this week. Being an American in Fiji, I stand out in a lot of ways including the way I look, dress, and my accent. People are also very intrigued as to what life in American is like. Fijians will approach my roommates and I out in public to take pictures of us, and ask questions about America. I usually get a lot of questions about Trump, and why I decided to leave America to come study in Fiji.

Class is very weird for me too. All my classes are in huge lectures of around 300 students. At LFC I’m used to classes of about 25 students tops.

My roommates and I have been hanging out with the other exchange students a lot. We went to yoga and out to bars together.

This weekend, we went on a international student excursion to a Fijian village and resort. The village was amazing, I loved getting to see how people really live here. Their lives are very simple and family centric. All of their houses are one room, painted a bright color, and have tin roofs.

The villagers were very persistent on all of us drinking multiple bowls of kava. Kava is a traditional Fijian drink. They put the kava, which looks like a brown powder, in a bag and smush it around in a giant bowl of water. It looks literally like dirt mixed with water. It also kind of tastes like dirt mixed with water.

When drinking kava, a Fijian village member comes up to you with a wooden bowl full of it, and hands it to you (it’s very rude to turn down kava). You then have to say “Bula” and chug it. Once you chug, your whole mouth goes numb. After drinking a few bowls, it gets you super high. It’s quite the experience. I drank three huge bowls at 10am, and was high until about 1pm.

After we left the village, we went to a resort. They made us play team building games on a turf field that was about 100 degrees. That sucked, but then we went to the beach and it was absolutely amazing. This resort was called Uprising, and is about 1.5 hours from Suva.