(I wrote some of this post last night and some early this morning, so be tolerant of any verb inconsistencies!)
Once again, nature here decided to foil our plans to go to the beach, since Monday featured torrential downpours until the late afternoon. I spent the day inside reading and feeling homesick, but once the sky cleared a little I went for a run and felt a lot better. Since today was a national holiday I couldn't get out to get more food for myself, so I had a couple meals of chow noodles (they're like ramen...but different). Monday night was spent hanging out in some apartments playing games and just chilling, which is always good.
Classes resumed today, not much to say about that other than I have to catch a shuttle from the lower campus (where I have marine biology) to upper campus (to make the second half of my Fijian class since I skip the first half to go to marine bio), and of course the shuttle was 15 minutes late so I missed just about all of my Fijian lesson for the day. We have a test Friday, and I really have no idea what could be on it...our professor's method for teaching us seems like giving us random vocabulary words and repeating things out of a Fijian phrasebook, which really isn't teaching much about grammar or structure or anything else that you typically learn in a beginner language course. We haven't been taught numbers, but I know that "drua" is 2 because you use it when addressing 2 people...ugh. I think this could be frustrating. Also, more scheduling fun: we have a lot of 3-day weekends, and for all of them we have a Monday schedule when we get back on Tuesday, and Tuesdays just get dropped. I have a lab on Tuesday mornings, so does this mean that I just miss labs that week? I wouldn't be surprised.
I spent this morning making a LOT of different trips around the area to gather up food supplies (I went to 2 different grocery stores, a butcher shop, and the market), so I'm feeling very content with the amount of things I have right now. I did a lot of traveling downtown and on the buses by myself, which felt good because I'm a capable and independent young woman, damnit! I went to the upstairs portion of the market, which sells spices, yaqona (kava) roots, and rice and lentils. I got a lot of indian spices (I could never find them back home when I wanted to make indian food, but they're sold by the kilogram here) and lentils and some other things, so I'm excited to cook. Nichole also told me about a butcher shop that sells beef, so I have a package of chopped steak for stir fry, which is very exciting as well.
Everyone went to go see Valentine's Day in the movie theater early tonight, but since I'm not too into chick flicks and I was planning on running I opted out of that one. I went for another run down by the ocean - I'm happy I'm getting back into the habit of working out, I feel much better already. During my run I crossed the street and found a little hermit crab in the middle of the road. I picked it up to move it to the shore by a boat ramp about a hundred feet away, figuring this wouldn't be a problem. The thing curled up into its shell when I first picked it up, but as I ran with it it started to creep out again, flailing its legs and claws around and trying to pinch at my fingers...you'd think that a creature like that wouldn't be so feisty while it's floating in air and being shaken around, but this one was having none of it. So, I start sprinting to drop this thing off before it attacks me successfully, and as I'm setting it down on the boat ramp it nipped me a little. Funny hermit crab.
Mmmm...tasty.
I was getting ready to go to bed when Kirsten popped in my room and asked if I wanted to go drink kava at one of the apartments - since I haven't had kava yet, I joined. For those of you that don't know, kava is a drink made by soaking the dried, ground up roots of a kava plant (in Fiji they call the plant yaqona; it's a member of the pepper family of plants) in water. In my chemistry class this fall we learned that kava contains kavalactones, which kind of act like valium. Basically when you drink kava your mouth and lips get numb and it acts as a muscle relaxant. Another side effect is vivid dreams, which would explain why I woke up at 4am last night thinking I was covered in ants and running up to take a shower to get the hallucinated bugs off of me. It would also explain why I woke up a few times during the night convinced that my pet parrot Chili was in the room squawking to wake me up. Weird stuff. As you can see, kava looks like muddy water - and for the most part, tastes like it too. Muddy water blended with plain tea. It would be fine for a few sips, but the way you drink kava is by passing around a bowl for everyone to drink from, and you have to chug the liquid down (no breaks!), and you have to drink a lot of it to feel any effects. My stomach hated me when I was trying to sleep last night, since it was full of mud water. But, it was a fun experience - you just sit around in a circle with your friends an chill out. You feel very relaxed (I kept thinking distinctly that I was melting into the rug) but your head is still clear and coherent, so it was pretty interesting. Drinking kava is a big component of social life in villages, so if I get to visit a village (hopefully, I'm working on it) I'll have the chance to have a bunch of people laugh at me for sucking at chugging, except this time not my friends at Williams. I think it'd be a valuable experience.
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