Hilo, Hawaii

Hi!

Since I heard of 3 people that complained of me not writing in my blog, I decided it was time to write a blog! Plus, since I'm stealing internet from some sort of cafe, I can post some pictures (but I guess not of the boat, because I can't find them! whoops, I hope I didn't delete them... they may be on my external hard drive though)

First of all... the boat. I like it, but it is really small. I can get from my room, which is on the 2nd floor on one end to the dining hall, which is on the seventh deck on the other end in a minute and twenty seconds (without the elevator... I really want to go in it one time, but the only guy I've seen use it is the one on crutches, so I feel as if its off bounds) Oh, and I'm not allowed to be calling it a Boat. It's a ship. Oh well, they'll never read this.

My roommate's name is Gen. She's from MA and goes to Bridgewater State. I'm her first roommate ever, so I hope I don't scare her off forever.

Not too much happens on the boat. There are random activities every night, but nothing too exciting to write out. And classes are good. I ended up dropping photography and taking Religion and Politics instead, so that's the only thing to report.

Then onto port:

Day 1 in Hilo:

I woke up at 5am to watch the final pull into port. I'm glad I did. It was really pretty to watch the sunrise, especially when the light hit Mauna Kea. It was crazy because I couldn't tell that there was even a mountain.

We also had to go through customs, since officially we were in Mexico. It took all of two seconds. I grabbed my passport from an LLC (living learning coordinator... kind of an RA), showed it to the official, and handed it off to the lady from the purser. It only took a couple of minutes, so then I ate breakfast before meeting a group to walk into port.
I didn't have anything planned so I went with a group to downtown Hilo. We decided to walk, one of the few groups that did and it was a nice, although hot walk. I'm just not used to wearing a tshirt outside and still sweating whatever. It was about two miles away and we made a few stops on the way to take pictures.

The first thing that I did was go to a coffee shop because everyone else wanted to go online and check their facebooks and whatever. I didn't want to carry around my laptop, so I just sat there. When we arrived, there was a group of people having the owner put something on their tongueswith an eyedropper. I just ignored them until the owner asked us if we wanted to try kava. There was a system that started with him serving everyone in our group a coconut shell of this grey looking water. Before we were allowed to drink we threw water on the ground for the earth, water over our shoulder for the gods, and then all clapped together once before basically chugging the drink. When each of us finished we had to clap twice. To describe the taste, I can only say to think of the taste of plain iceberg lettuce and then make it into a drink. Yeah, quite interesting. A little later I decided to try the eyedropper thing, which was concentrated Kava and almost threw up. I would never try it again. What it is used for is a slight pain reliever and to give you a euphoric high. Apparently they used to sell it in Germany and all of these people died. (He said they made it wrong?) But I'm still alive 2 days later so it must be okay!

Jill and I walked around after that and then met up with the group again to go to the arch enemy of Brittany- Walmart. I don't care if it is evil... I'm just happy because I bought a watch and a pillow. So I now know the time and sleep better at night.

Later in the day we had a Lu'au! It was really cool. But the food was completely disgusting. I couldn't eat a single thing. There was poi (google it... it tastes like playdoh), pig, squid, salmon, yucky macaroni and cheese with mayonnaise in it and cold, plain white rice, and chicken with rice noodles. And edamame was the salad. I only tried a bite of each thing. I felt bad but it was just too disgusting, especially the poi.

We also made what they called leis but I call them ropes. They were made from tea leaves and we had to twist them. The picture below is of me and Marissa but my lei making partner's name was Julianne (It made me miss you Junit!)
Me, Jill, and Marissa at the lu'au.
The dancing at the Lu'au was really cool too. There were three different groups that performed, and each one was unique. My favorite one was the one where they perform with bamboo sticks (I feel like I should know the real name of them but I don't) The picture below is of that.


Day 2 in Hilo:


Today I went to Volcanoes National Park. The pictures kind of speak for themselves so I'm not going to write about all of them. It was really cool though. I just wish I could have seen lava. I wasn't able to because you could only see it at night and since it was during the day we didn't even go down to the coast. There was also one of the cool craters where we stood on top and there were people walking at the bottom. They were so far down... it takes 40 minutes to walk down so I couldn't imagine trying to walk up. The two pictures following are of exactly that. The second picture has 24x zoom, so just imagine what it looked like.
After the trip got back I just walked around the port for a little bit to get pop to take back on the boat and then went inside to call Brittany for almost 3 hours. It's crazy we won't be able to really talk again until May! I guess we could call for a couple minutes while I'm in the other countries but its just not the same.

To get to Honolulu, we had to all be on the ship. It was only overnight so I just played cards with some people and tried to write in my journal... it didn't work too well, but I'll catch up soon.