Incandescence

Today we spent most of the day over on the North Shore. It would have been great, except it was overcast and sprinkling most of the time. But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Seventeen of our group decided to go skydiving, and since we had nothing better to do, the other 10 or so of us not skydiving decided to go over there as well. On the way we stopped at the Dole Plantation for pineapple ice cream, which was amazing! Ok, it wasn't the best ice cream I have ever had, but I would have it again if given the opportunity. Apparently the skydiving was amazing, and everybody loved it. But I'm really glad I didn't go. I enjoyed walking around the nearby town with friends and bumming it on the beach. Tomorrow we will have some time to spend down on the beach near the conference center, my last chance to soak up as much sunshine as possible before going back to the not-so-green state of Alaska.

I really didn't do much today. I enjoyed vegging on the beach for a couple hours, though I did get a little burned. Then I got to Skype with my roomie from college! It was epic. I miss that girl. This trip is fast coming to an end. Tomorrow (Thursday) is our last full day. I'm glad I have some time here on Friday as well. It's nice that we won't have to leave really early in the morning. Tomorrow we will probably do some last-minute excursions. There is a group of students going skydiving tomorrow--crazy people! I like to keep my feet firmly planted on Terra firma. I figure that if I don't want to jump off of a 50 foot cliff into a pool I probably wouldn't enjoy a 60 second free-fall out of an airplane. Heights are not my friend. On Monday some of us had the opportunity to try surfing at this gorgeous beach. There was hardly anyone there. It wasn't great for swimming, and the waves weren't quite big enough for surfing, but it was still enjoyable. ...

As I said, I posted a little late for Tuesday! I think part of it was not having class today, it just kind of mixed me up. Yesterday I went back to Pearl Harbor with a couple of the people here, there were only five of us that went. We went out and walked around on the USS Missouri and the USS Bowfin. I really enjoyed learning more about the history of the USS Missouri--it was the ship that the Japanese surrendered on. We walked around one of the lower levels and saw the mess halls, and the bunks, control rooms, offices. That ship was huge! It was large enough that it could fit about 3,000 people. Not comfortably, but it could. They told us some of the statistics about the ships guns--they could shoot 23 miles, and send 27 missiles in 90 seconds. To really savor the experience, a couple from our group went and watched Battleship, which features the USS Missouri. I didn't know they were going until they had already left, or I probably would have watched it.  The USS Bowfin was als...

Sad but true. Our time here is almost over. Three weeks flies by so quickly.  Anyway, on to business. Today we talked about Networking. Not the kind of networking you may be thinking of, however, where you make contacts within your profession. This kind of networking involves seeing the relationships between people, determining who to go to for trustworthy information, credibility, and also homophily (love of similarity). So here in Hawaii, if I was going to go to someone for inside information, I would probably not want to go to someone who had only been here for a year or two, they would probably have a more monomorphic knowledge (they know a lot about one thing/you go to that person for information about one specific area of information). On the other hand, someone who has lived in Hawaii for a long time is probably going to have a more polymorphic knowledge (knowledgeable about multiple areas/bodies of knowledge). We have seen networking play out here even today, when we go...

I try to avoid conflict if possible. Sometimes I'll get worked up about something, but I unhealthily tend to stew about it and vent to unsuspecting people who ask me how I'm doing (only close friends of course!). I've learned that that's how us introverts roll, though. We vent, extroverts stew. Usually. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, there are usually exceptions to every rule. But overall, if there is conflict that I cannot avoid, I will face it. I am very thankful that I have very rarely had to deal with conflict, or when I have, I did not have to deal with it alone. Having somebody with you, a support system, especially when it is a fairly serious conflict, is very helpful (at least in my experience). I don't think I really want to get into gory details about the kinds of conflicts that I have encountered, but like most things in life, many of them stemmed from miscommunication or misunderstandings. How much simpler life would be if nothing was eve...

I never really thought about culture shock, because I haven't needed to. When I went to Europe I was with family and friends. When I went to Ecuador, I was with friends. I didn't have to fend for myself. I don't think I have ever really experienced culture shock. I have always had a support system when I go out of the country or even out of the state. I think I might have experience some culture shock my freshmen year of college than I have leaving the country. It was such a completely new, 'foreign' thing for me. I went from a school of 35 kids in K--12 to a university of 3,500. I realize that that is actually a relatively small university. But for me it was a huge change. I had some acute homesickness, feelings of loneliness, and stress/anxiety. It wasn't quite the same as moving to a new country, but it definitely did affect me. It's not a fun feeling. I did not enjoy feeling that way. I was glad to be home. But now I am going to be sad to leave Cedarvi...

Today we talked about nonverbal communication. I think this has been my favorite topic so far. I want to hone my observation skills. We learned about oculesics (what the eyes communicate), posture, gestures, and facial expressions. I learned that there are six main facial expressions that are universal--sadness, happiness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Every culture has different rules, different social mores and taboos. So today when we went to Waikiki, I was watching people's non-verbal communication. I saw a homeless woman yell at someone, storekeepers get right up next to me to try and sell me things, a man change under a towel on the beach even though there was a restroom right down the beach. We got to talk with a local guy at Roxy about our trip (he worked there, it wasn't a totally random person), and watched a storekeeper get rather anxious as someone tried on necklaces before purchasing one. We sat at the beach for a while, then walked down to the Internatio...

It's been almost two weeks. How has the time gone so quickly? I thought three weeks would be nice and long, but really, it does not seem long enough. I need more time! There is so much to do here, and there is only so much that you can do in a day. Between class and excursions out around the island the days are flying. Today we talked about language rules and nonverbal communication. Now I want to go out and people watch somewhere and see the kinds of non-verbal communication that goes on. I don't always pick up on that kind of stuff right away. It depends. Some people are easier to read than others. Today we went on a hike in the rainforest over on the Northern side of the island. I really enjoyed the hike up, and as an added bonus, there was some cliff jumping that you could do into a pool of bacteria infested water. No kidding. I didn't jump. Not only do I not like heights, or being submerged underwater, I also do not like the idea of possibly being taken over by bac...

Today we took the day off. No class. But I still learned today--we went to the Pearl Harbor memorial. It's one thing to learn about it in a classroom, its another thing to actually be there, to see the ship in the water, still leaking. To remember the men still entombed in the ship. They showed us a video, it was a sobering reminder that our country has seen warfare. Some of my friends and I got into a discussion of how the Japanese feel--do they have a memorial for the people killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This really gets you into a can of worms--because then you could argue that we were at war, and we were. I do not want to take a stand one way or another. After we left Pearl Harbor, the people in the car I was riding in wondered if Japanese people come to the Pearl Harbor memorial. There are probably some that do. If they do--I would love to know what they are thinking, to see how this turning point in our world's history affects them today. There w...

Today was a very relaxed day. We had class in the morning as usual, but halfway through we decided that we should go down to Starbucks so we could have better internet to do some of the online classwork. How awesome is Intercultural Communication?! Very awesome! :) We talked about Information Processing today, which I found really interesting. We learned, for example, that there are what are called thresholds during the perception process--sensory and perceptual thresholds. They basically mean what they sound like--sensory, through the senses, perceptual, through perceptions. They are, of course, influenced by the culture they are being perceived through. One of the other big things we discussed today was attribution, and some of the different attribution errors that people make, such as egocentric bias, fundamental attribution errors, ego protective bias, premature closure, principle of negativity, and ultimate attribution error. A lot of them deal with premature judgments and bia...

Today we had a short class. We talked a little bit about the value orientation of cultures and then drove to the North side of the island to the Polynesian Cultural Center. It was started in the 1960's, and there are six different cultures represented--Samoa, Tahiti, Togo, Fiji, Marquesas, and the Aotearoa (Maouri). We walked around the center, and at each place there were presentations showing different aspects of their culture--at the Samoan presentation, they showed us how they used to start a fire, and how they opened a coconut. The Aetearoa did a lot of music, starting with their traditional music and progressing through the changes that were made as foreign influences entered into the picture. The Fiji gave us a historical background on their islands, and also did a music/dance presentation, with audience interaction. All of the presentations had audience interaction. You could see some of their values through the different things they did--the dancing, the rituals. What I...

It's true, I did get sunburned today. After breakfast, the Intercultural Class went to the Swap Market in the stadium here on the island. It reminded me of Ecuador a little, the different cultures, the walking around in a market atmosphere. There were lots of trinkets and t-shirts to look at. I finally got to try shaved ice. I played it safe and got strawberry, which was really good. But we were out in the sun for a couple of hours and I burned (but not too bad!) There were a lot of different cultures present at the market--Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean. My friend R-- pointed out that there were little gold cat statues outside of the Chinese tents. Some of the market tents And, to complete our cultural experience, we stopped at a restaurant (Hannara, I believe) for lunch. They had American, Hawaiian, and Korean food. I ordered Korean. I tried to surreptitiously take a picture of my food with my phone. Here is some kimchi (it was too spicy, I couldn't eat it all),...

Again, my post is a bit late. Saturday was just to epic to really have time to blog. We started the day with a service project here at the Pu'u Kahea Conference Center--weeding the flower garden, or picking up trash. I helped in the garden. After lunch most of the group went to a beach down the road a little ways. I stayed at the conference center with some friends for a while, but on a Saturday, who wants to sit around when there is a beach not more than a five minute walk down the road? We enjoyed relaxing on the beach for a while--I even got in the water. We also enjoyed some McDonalds. I got their very yummy mocha frappe. And--the best part of the day--I got to see The Avengers!! Most of us went in the evening. It was really good, I was really glad I got to see it, I didn't think I would be able to until it came out on DVD. Some of the beaches here really filled up this weekend--apparently a lot of the families come to the beaches on the weekend and camp out in tents,...

Yes, I did in fact go to the beach today ( I realize that this post is a day late, but I'm gonna pretend it's not). But not before I took all sorts of pictures of the pig that was going to be our dinner. Oh yes, we had a luau last night. But, they started cooking the pig at 7am. So, some of us headed up there to see how the whole burying-the-pig-in-a-pit-in-the-ground thing works. It's quite interesting. Putting hot stones in the pig Covering it with leaves They have this really interesting process--build a fire (with stones that get really hot).  After about two hours, they take the stones and put them inside the pig.  Then they put the pig in a wire cage kind of thing to protect it, and stick it in the fire. Put some leaves on it, cover it with plastic, and call it good for five hours. And voila! You're pig is roasted. But that wasn't all that we did yesterday--we also went to Turtle Beach.  Where, sadly, I did not see any turtles. But I did get to en...

After class this morning a group of us went to Honolulu and visited ' Iolani Palace . It was definitely reminiscent of European castles. We also visited the  Mission Houses Museum . I really enjoyed both of the tours. I wish we could have taken pictures. I really liked seeing the difference between the two buildings--the Palace was European, there really wasn't much Hawaiian decoration.  The Mission houses were old, much older, and were definitely less grand! It reminded me of a farm house that you might see in America. But again, there wasn't really any Hawaiian influence on the decoration or design of the house. But this brings me to an interesting, and still somewhat touchy subject for some people I suppose--how the missionary culture worked its way into Hawaiian culture. It's been interesting to learn more about Hawaii--I was actually surprised at the history that was review for me. I think I am starting to get used to Hawaii--at least somewhat. It rained tod...

Today we went to the  Bishop Museum  and got to see some of the different artifacts of the Hawaiian culture.  There were some really neat displays. I really liked this painting: And as you might have guessed from the title of this post, I am trying to decipher who I am.  Here are some thoughts: I'm a graphic designing, engineer translating, document designing, Alaska grown girl. I cook. Play the piano. Occasionally mow lawns, hike. Watch TV. I am a graduate of Cedarville University with a Bachelor of Arts in Technical and Professional Communication. An American. The daughter of M. and S. Beachy. A granddaughter. A cousin. A sibling. I like sunsets, but don't like sunrises, because that means I am up way too early. I like ice cream. I don't like tomatoes or mushrooms. So what do all of these things mean? How do they make me who I am? This is all a learning process for me, so I am thinking as I write. I guess it just means that I am influenced by many ...

Today we had the opportunity to volunteer at Surf the Nations--handing out food, breaking down boxes, or doing whatever else needed to be done. I wasn't sure what to expect or how I would react--I'm not always good with uncertainty. I think that these next few weeks will help me develop some uncertainty tolerance! I'm glad that I went today and did something that stretched me even just a little. I have to say, it felt like I was in another country. The area we are staying at reminds me of Ecuador--the nicer part of Ecuador, at least. We aren't in a fancy or upscale area of Oahu. It really feels like I am in a different country at times, between the completely different landscape--the tropical, flowering trees, the scents.  The ocean. I think that I am becoming more self-aware of things that I take for granted about myself, about the culture that I grew up in. I think that this class will be useful to me as a professional.  In the Technical Writing field, one of ...

Fact one: I like Hawaii. Fact two: I do not think I would want to live here permanently. Of course, these observations are made after less than twenty-four hours here. I’ve barely done more than dip my toes into the ocean.  I still have a lot to learn about the culture and the island. I like that everything is so relaxed here—I could get used to the less formal lifestyle. Now why would I not want to live in Hawaii? you may be wondering. And here’s why—I think Oahu is beautiful—I love that there are mountains here. However, much like back home, it is easy to forget the beauty that is around you when it surrounds you all the time. As for the culture—there is a difference here, and I am looking forward to finding out more. So, until I learn more—here is the beach just down the road from where we are staying.  And the sunset.  Lots more pictures and updates to come in the next couple of weeks! Unfortunately, my camera decided to focus on the grass...