Post five: Hawai'i, and "cooking"

    

view from the parking lot

    It's taken me quite awhile to write this post, probably because I was miserable the first few weeks. Things are better now though, not incredible still but okay. Sometimes I can't believe I'm really here. I don't have a bike and it sucks, I probably maybe could buy one, but I don't know if I should. Hilo is really beautiful.  Exploring has been really fun, walking around town, trying new foods, discovering new plants and animals. There will be some field trips for my geology class, which I'm really looking forward too. I've only been down to the ocean once, but I'd like to take the bus to one of the farther away beach parks someday, it's free. There's a bus that leaves at 5am and goes to the south Kohala resorts, about 2 hours away.

    Right now I'm just taking three classes, chemistry, geology, and calculus. They're going okay. Calculus is hard. It'll get harder. Hopefully it'll be okay. I like my professors. They're all nice people, except maybe the professor who teaches chem lab. I'm still not sure about her. She's not extremely mean or anything though.

    The botanical gardens are pretty close to my dorm, which is awesome. It's a great place to go when you just need to get out of the house. There's a bunch of really rare plants there, some are critically endangered with less than 200 plants out in the wild. The garden is kind of split in two, there's a palm-centric part and a bromeliad-centric part. The bromeliad part has a nice table. I've never seen anyone sit there except me, which is a shame.  It's a little spot I can count on to go and be alone though, which is always nice, especially if that spot is a garden. I've been spending more time introspecting than I normally do.

formatting is hard  

     I haven't seen any endemic birds except the 'io (Hawaiian hawk), which I've seen twice. The first time I saw one it was the dark colored variation, and the second time it was the light colored. This island is the only place in the entire world where the 'io lives, it went extinct on all the other islands, or was never there in the first place. So that was really special. Mostly though, all the birds around me are introduced birds and in order to find the endemics I'll need to go deep into the wilderness, which isn't easy without a car or a bike. 

    Around campus there's tons of zebra doves, which are like the mourning doves native to KS except smaller and with stripes. That's probably the most common bird. There's also lots of waxbills, saffron finches, chickens, and mynas. The mynas are very noisy and gregarious. Java sparrows, house sparrows, and Japanese white eyes are around too. I saw a male Kalij pheasant the other day while on the phone with Joscelyn, that was a really neat bird. I saw it in this little area that's kind of like a woods but it's not very big, which is just across the street. I think I might make a post dedicated to that area sometime later.

Sorry about the finger

    It has a huge cliff at the end, whose depth really doesn't come across on camera at all. There's a well maintained path until said cliff, and then at the bottom there's sort of a trail, but not really, I haven't gone very far past the bottom of the cliff yet, but I will at some point. I want to get some bug spray first.

     Me and my roommate Kalala took the bus to Target on Sunday. I got an electric kettle, and it's really awesome, it heatz water so much faster than a pot on top of the stove does. I bought a bunch of green tea, and some oatmeal. Since I have no fridge it seems like breakfast will be mostly oatmeal until December 17th. That's fine, I like oatmeal. I got raisins and sugar for it too, should've bought molasses. One day I'll get more stuff to add in, when I'm bored of the same flavors every day. 

 

There's my little kettle

    The oatmeal got me thinking a lot about what other things I can cook using just my electric kettle. I could probably heat up some kinds of soups. I could make instant ramen basically the same way I make oatmeal. Mac and Cheese too. 

    My big idea though is beans. I could get some dried beans, soak them overnight in the kettle, then boil the water and they should cook. Adding a stock cube to the water, a little bit of my oats & maybe even chopped up SPAM, along with black pepper and ketchup appropriated from the dining hall could get me a humble bean soup that would probably taste fine. The beans could be swapped for lentils. Or I could do beans with lentils. Another idea I have is dumplings, like the kind that are in chicken & dumplings, but my kettle has an automatic shut off, so I'm not sure I'd be able to boil the dumplings long enough. Maybe if they were small. 

    Anyway, I really don't need to do any of this. Kalala has a microwave I can use as long as he's awake, (Which he usually isn't when I leave for my 9am classes, that's why I can't make my oatmeal in it.) & I have a meal plan which I can use to get all kinds of food that's better than anything I could concoct in the dorm, but I love a good culinary exercise. 

I hate SUVs, goodbye.