Bula, na yacaqu o Analaisa, au goneyalewa ni Merika...

Today was the first day of classes. I never thought I'd say it, but I miss the administration at Williams right now because today was a wreck. My first class (plant physiology) was supposed to be at 10am, but when I went to the room that it was supposed to be in there was another class full of Korean people learning English. I found out later in the afternoon that the class had been canceled, although I hadn't received any emails or notifications about it. One of my roommates waited in a class for 40 minutes before the professor showed up. Another had her class remind the professor what time class was later this week. I came back to the same room later to try to take my beginner Fijian class, but the English class was still in there. Since that class was full of other American kids, we got a group together and went to the international office, where our coordinator called the professor, who said that he wasn't aware of the problem and that we should meet at a different room.

So, we had our first language class today (with only 5 of us though since we were the only ones that heard about this phone call). I think Fijian is going to be difficult. There are a lot of rules for pronunciation, like c's are pronounced like "th", g's are pronounced like the "ng" in "sing", q's are like the sound "nguh", v's are pronounced using both of your lips instead of your teeth and your bottom lip, j's are "ch", r's are rolled, and every word seems to contain i's or a's for every other letter, especially in longer words. The meaning of a word can change according to how long or short you pronounce the vowels. Our professor tried to fijian-ize our names, which is best done with a Catholic name to begin with...everyone had a catholic name other than me, unfortunately, but at least there was a fairly common Fijian name that sounds close enough to mine: Analaisa. The title to this means "Hi, my name is Annelise, I'm a girl from America". That's pretty much the extent of what we learned today. Our professor is Irish, and he makes speaking Fijian seem really easy, but we were all stumbling over seemingly simple words. But, it sounds really cool, so hopefully I'll be able to at least do some small talk by the end of the semester.

I had a meeting for my invertebrate biology course this afternoon, and that actually went okay, as in the class was in the place and time where the schedule said it would be. The lecture is large, but I really like the sound of the course - we have 3 field trips, one each to look at invertebrates in terrestrial, marine, and freshwater environments. We have a lot of ID labs in between these too. I'm excited. I have physiology tomorrow morning (hopefully?) so I'll see how that goes.

Tonight we had a huge potluck dinner at our apartment, which worked out really well - our apartment made pasta with tomato sauce and sausage. Hopefully we'll start doing this every week because it's a good way to get everyone together. For now, I need to try to make sure I'm in the lab periods that I need to be in, and try to find a new 4th class...maybe marine biology? Also I've had an issue with ants invading my desk for the last few days, including my laptop. The ants come out if we leave crumbs out in the kitchen for more than like 2 minutes, but I have no idea what they're doing in my room. And I'm getting annoyed with having them crawl out of the keys of my laptop, because that's gross. I'm hoping they'll get bored soon and leave.