We finally got Internet! I have only been here a week now, and I feel like I have so much to talk about its insane. Traveling here was.....long. When I got here it was like I was in a different country, I couldn't say ANYTHING! All of the street names looked like gibberish, and everything i tried to even pronounce was horrible. Good thing I had a nice taxi driver to help me, as well as laugh at me. I am staying in Tohbi Hale for the semester. It is very nice and I get my own room which I am very excited about. My roommate is Ashley! She is great and we have a lot in common which is awesome. So far we have made multiple trips to target and wal-mart to try and buy some essential things we need, as well as try some new food. I haven't really tried the sushi yet...but soon I will. She loves it, and I am still a little up in the air about it.
Even though getting settled into our new place took a lot of time/walking/taxi rides and organizing we still found time to make it to the beach. It has been beautiful weather here lately which is nice. The beaches around here are not the "white sand beaches" everyone thinks about when they think of Hawaii, instead they are black sand beaches. They are beautiful, and there are many many rocks as well, lava rocks..SHARP lava rocks. I will upload some pictures when I get a chance. We saw sea turtles at the beach, so that was really cool. Every night we have been here my roommate and I have been in bed at about 8pm...we are just exhausted and still getting used to the time change. Last night we stayed up until 11 though, so i think we are getting used to it.
On Friday we had our NSE (national student exchange) orientation. We met many other NSE students and Zach, who is in charge of the program here and got to know a lot of people. Of course Minnesota won for who had the most students here for NSE. Zach gave us a lot of information regarding the culture, transportation, what to do and what not to do etc. I have been slowly learning some new words, I have a few down!
Aloha- hello, good-bye
Hale- house
Mahalo- thank you
Ohana- Family
When pronouncing words from here, your best bet is just to pronounce every vowel in the word. so, hale would be like (Hall-E). You learn real fast if you are saying it wrong.
Everyone here has been amazingly nice, I started classes yesterday and my professors are extremely caring. They give out cell-phone numbers and would rather have you call them then e-mail them if you have any questions. They are so relaxed here, which makes it a lot less stressful. I feel like a 100 lb brick was lifted off my shoulders when I finally got settled down here, there is just so much less chaos, stress, and crabby people, I love it.
A few more things I must add are, the Kona coffee is amazing, the pineapple is delicious, and I'm deathly afraid of the wild pigs and the sharks nobody told me about :). Zach told us if we are in the water and someone spots a shark to just slowly get out of the water...I highly doubt that if someone yells shark I will SLOWLY get out of the water...but of course it is extremely rare anyway...but still, it freaks me out. I am sure I will get over my little fears soon.
I know this is kind of a lot of random information in one, so hopefully I can post more frequently now and not try to cram so much information into one post! I miss all my family and friends very much :)
Aloha!
Brittany
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