Bula!

So far everything here from Fiji has been great! On our first day we visited the Fiji Museum here in Suva, where we had a short assignment to analyze one particular exhibit. My group was assigned to the rather pathetic Indo-Fijian exhibit. We kind of ripped it apart as much of it just related to simply India rather than the community’s place in Fiji and their interaction with indigenous Fijians. The next day we got to explore the markets in a really fun assignment. We had a whole set of questions to ask vendors about their goods and history. We also had to attempt different bargaining techniques for our econ part of the assignment. Everyone is so friendly and willing to talk here that research should be no problem at all. I really can’t wait to move into my host family. I get to meet them this Saturday. Today we had a really fun day. We took a bus ride further into the island where we visited a small village. We got to have a miniature ceremony, where we all got to try kava for the first time. It was not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. We were told beforehand to expect it to be like muddy water, but I thought it was more like water with a bit of an herbal taste. It did kind of numb my mouth for a few minutes afterwards though. While this tour was clearly designed for tourists, we presented kava to the chief of the village to ask permission to use “his” river for kayaking. We then preceded down for a really fun day of kayaking down a huge river. I was kind of horrible at it at first, but caught on after lunch… until I somehow had an unfortunate encounter with a bamboo tree. I somehow got entangled in the sharp twigs and just flipped out of my kayak to avoid getting cut up any more than I already was. I have a ton of reading to do, but luckily tomorrow we just have a class at 4 and that’s it!

~ by roamingnome on August 28, 2008.