Boldog Karacsony, Mele Kalikimaka, Feliz Navidad and ...

DONE. OVER. COMPLETE.

And it feels so good. Sweet, sweet freedom is mine. And I am going to sleep the day away.

You know what else feels good? Seeing my grades come in and being quite acceptable. I may have put myself through severe sleep deprivation to do it, but this has been a successful semester.

I'm a survivor, I'm gonna make it.

But right now... I kinda feel like this:

This semester has been a lot of work, and I'm not done yet. The past two nights I've been up past three working on assignments, and still had a seven am final to get up for, directly followed by another final. I then went and collapsed on the floor of my friend's room for a couple hours before working on yet another paper to be turned in today by five. That would be nice if that were it, but I still have lengthy beast of a paper to get turned in by eight tomorrow morning, at which point I plan on sleeping the whole dang day, followed shortly by a Flight of the Conchords season two marathon. These next two and half weeks will be a wonderful break from school related stress, and then it all starts up again!

The photo is one from March, goofing off at the beach with some friends. I plan on actively incorporating the beach into my break plans, because otherwise I may never see it again, what with my seventeen credits and all for this next semester.

It's a small world after all!

Alternate title: I know people who know people. 


A couple weeks ago, I was sitting outside enjoying some sunshine and chatting with one of my classmates before walking into class. She mentioned that she's been trying to find a public health internship in Ghana, but has been having a hard time because she has no experience in the area. I've been spending a pretty good chunk of time with the African Club this semester, and have gotten be friends with a lot of the Africans here. There are nine Ghanians here on campus and I remembered a conversation about the Ghana medical system I'd had with one of them, so I offered to get her in touch with a couple people to see if they could help her out. 


Fast forward to today at the end of our anthropology class: I was just leaving when Rachel, my classmate, told me that she had an internship! Maxwell, the guy from Ghana that she'd been talking to, has a brother who works with the military hospital system over there and said he could help get her an internship and that everything will be final in the next couple of days so she can start working on her visa stuff and all those necessaries. How exciting!


I've probably mentioned it a million times already, but I love my school and how international it is. My english teacher may curse me for saying this but she also taught me to quote my sources... According to wikipedia, BYU-H has a  higher percentage of international students than any other baccalaureate institute in the US. I was looking around my classes today and saw students from Guam, Tonga, Samoa, the Philippines, New Zealand, Mongolia, Japan, Hong Kong, Burundi, Sweden, Wales, Brazil and Mexico, among many others. I work with other students from Taiwan, Macau, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Korea. There are so many opportunities to learn about others cultures and backgrounds and to make connections that will last a lifetime. I'm sure that as I go about my career, I'll have the chance to visit some of those places and to have people I call friends to say hello to, and that is an awesome, awesome thing. 

African Club before our performance at Songfest in October. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

The Christmas lights are up in the plumeria trees and the Aloha Center is all decked out in the season's best, including blow up penguins with cotton batting snow and trees decorated with hula girls. Isn't this what Christmas is like everywhere?

Here's a poor college kid's Christmas count down. I got the package earlier this week, donated the popcorn packing to the birds and decided that I wasn't going to open anything else until Christmas, but I needed a reminder of when that will be. (...also, I kind of broke that goal. I opened one part yesterday and shared with friends who all raved about it. Thanks James!)

Here and there and everywhere.

As I was looking at my old posts, I realized I managed to not make a single post on my trip out to Utah this summer, and at the same time that I don't have any more recent pictures that I really want to post right now. So guess what! You're getting Utah pictures!

Like I mentioned a long time ago, my paternal grandparents are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year (the real date is sometime this month, I think) and so they got a couple of townhouses up in a resort area in northern Utah and all but one of their twenty-nine descendants made it out there to spend the weekend together. It was a little touch and go as to whether or not I would be able to go, but in the end, I did make it and it was a good time for all. 

Some, but not anywhere close to, all of the cousins. 

I'm not really much of a Utah person for a variety of reasons, but even I had to admit that the area we were staying is gorgeous.

We happened to be there the same night as a big hot air balloon festival just down the mountain, so we stopped by for a little bit and watched the balloons. Everyone decided to leave at the same time, so there was a lot of traffic and we were stuck in the car waiting to leave the parking field for a while, but there was one of those moments of absolute perfection where I was sitting with people I love more than anything, singing loudly to Journey, laughing and couldn't have wanted anything else right at that moment. Those are the best. 

What a weekend!

I spent twelve hours camped out at my computer yesterday, working on my paper that got turned in ten minutes before midnight. I am lucky to have such a mean roommate who kept bothering me when I stop typing or start researching things that didn't relate at all to the paper (NBA tattoos, Ipswitch sex worker murders, Navy-Hawaii football scores, etc), if it weren't for her, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have finished the dang paper.

If this looks a little hazy and strange, that's just because my mind melded with the camera for a little while, and my mind was feeling a little hazy and seeing things strangely at the time.

Sometimes, I look at myself and I see my mother.

And that is a scary, scary thing.

Case in point: Today I had planned to spend all day working on my twelve page Public Management paper that is due tomorrow at midnight (You know, one of those assignments you get at the beginning of the semester and don't even begin to think about until two weeks before it is due and even then when you think about it, that thinking only goes so far as to put off planning the session in which you will for realz actually sit down and work on it. yeah. One of those.). I think my dear roommate Dana started washing the dishes or something, and so I pitched in for a bit. And by a bit, I mean I spent two and a half hours scrubbing the cabinets, cleaning the fan, washing screens, sweeping the floor, putting away laundry and straightening my room. After two and a half hours, I realized it was time to go to work, and after getting home from work at 10, there just wasn't any hope for that paper today. Tomorrow is another day, right?

My paper may not be written, but it is so refreshing to be in a nice clean house with screens you can actually see out of and to have a bed that doesn't have piles of laundry on it. Hopefully, tomorrow I will still appreciate those very clean screens as I am about to throw my laptop through one of them out of frustration.

To clarify the title a little bit, my mother is a wonderful, intelligent woman currently working on her PhD in Military Sociology. We have had many, many chats in which we discuss the multiplicity of things we are both not doing that we should be (and how clean our living spaces are!). In the nature vs. nurture argument, I would place almost all the blame completely on nurture for this one. Love you mama!

Here's to hoping tomorrow is a gray, rainy, miserable day.

Da Local Kine Thanksgiving

There had been a few different ideas about what to do for Thanksgiving floating around, including flying out to the Big Island for the weekend, making a lunch at home with friends or joining in on campus activities. In the end, my roommate and I went over to her boyfriend's house to have lunch and hang out for a few hours listening to his family talk story. Of all the things we could have done, I'm glad we ended up with this one. College is fun and all, but it is definitely nice to spend time in a family environment sometimes, even if it isn't your own family. There were kids running around, adults laughing and teenagers sitting apart from everyone, just like there would have been if I'd been home.

We crossed the street and wandered the beach for a little while, before heading back home to not do any of the many papers I have to write. Instead, my roomie and I decided to bake a pie! It ended up being quite the adventure, and I photographically documented the whole thing, but instead of sharing all those, I think I want to leave you all with only one of those photos. It was a completely relevant and very integral part of the pie making process, I promise.

Now, the day is over, and it officially okay to play Christmas music loudly in public areas.

I work so hard!

So, here at BYU-H, as long as you're living in contract housing, which you have to do if you are under 25, your landlord has the right to do cleaning checks however many times a month. We usually have them every other week, but our landlord has been skipping them a lot this semester, so even though it was scheduled for this past Saturday, because we hadn't gotten the paper the night before we assumed (...we all know what assuming does!) that it wouldn't be happening, only to wake up nice and early Saturday morning to find out that it was happening at noon- only a short three and a half hours later! Oh dear! Two of the housemates were gone already, so the three of us that were home hopped to cleaning right away. Among other things, I signed up to sweep and mop the floors, and boy did I sweep! I swept so hard in fact, that I wore the skin right off my thumb!

Luckily, due to my family having a fantastic sense of humor and distributing gifts like gross band-aids, I was able to con my former roommate into taking this gem of a picture for me.

On Sunday, I decided to be a little less gross and just used one of the band-aids with a zipper on it. Still cool, but less likely to elicit gags from those near-by.

Today we had a big regional (Hawaii state) conference for church, and one of the Twelve Apostles of the church, L. Tom Perry, came to speak. I really enjoy speakers who are comfortable expressing their personality along with sharing their messages, and boy, could you tell that he was glad to be in Hawaii and so happy to be sharing his message with us.

At the end of the meeting, all of the congregation stood up and sang Aloha Oe, led by the bearded man at the podium (who happens to be the grandfather of a friend of mine. This community is so small!), and there were more than a few teary eyes in the room.

There is an on going discussion of unity and improving the relationship between the school and the community, and the things said aren't always the most positive, but in situations like this, who is a student and who is community matters a lot less, and that is a very good thing.

These kids are cute.

And I miss them so, so, so much. (Pictures from my trip back this summer.)

Love this kiddo.

She had a pretty intense five and a half hour jaw surgery yesterday. Keeping you in my thoughts and prayers little sister!

Sometimes plans change. Sometimes that is a good thing. Sometimes it is not.

For example, last night when I got home from work at a nice and early 10:15, my plan was to go to bed. Instead, I was up until 1, blogging, looking up random topics including logic puzzles, Aryan Nation parades, news articles on BYUH and trying to create sentences that correctly use the word exonerate.

Not exactly the brightest use of my time, especially considering my 7:30 Public Management class.

Today the plan was to spend the afternoon researching for either one of my two papers that are due in the next couple of weeks. Considering my English class was cancelled due to the professor being at a conference in Philadelphia, it could have been quite the productive afternoon.

Instead, I meandered down to the nearest beach (which just so happens to be a lovely five minute walk away) and brought my lenses out to play. With class and work and spending the weekends trying to catch up on sleep or be social, I have made it to the beach once since the semester started. I've had classmates say that no one should live in Hawaii and not go to the beach everyday. That's when I keep my mouth shut and console myself with the fact that at least I'm doing well in school and won't have skin cancer at age forty.

I was so unbelievably irked when I realized the water line wasn't straight.

Isten, áldd meg a Magyart

There are some pictures that always make me smile. Or that make nostalgia rush through my veins. Sometimes I get both of those reactions in one picture. This is an old shot of the Hungarian Statue of Liberty- Szabadság Szobor. It sits at the top of Gellert Hill and overlooks all of Budapest.

Since it's a little hard to see, it says:

Mindazok emlékére, akik életüket áldozták Magyarország függetlenségéért, szabadságáért és boldogulásáért.

I'll even be nice and translate for those of you who don't happen to speak Hungarian (which is silly, and you should probably considering picking it up, it's quite the handy language!).

"To the memory of all of those who sacrificed their lives for the independence, freedom, and success of Hungary."

There's quite the history behind it, as with most things in Hungary. I only made it up to the top of Gellert's Hill once, with a group of people my age from all over Eastern/Central Europe, as part of a church conference my last week there in the country.

Even after almost two and a half years back in the States, I think about Hungary on a daily basis, and look forward to the day I can go back. Maybe I'll find a way to work it into my post-graduation plans, along with grad school and living in a monastery in Nepal.

For somewhat more recent news... I got an email yesterday saying I will have money from the school to cover most of my tuition for winter semester, which was quite the relief, as I've spent a bit of time stressing about money and school and such lately. That was a handy reminder that my hard work does pay off- my grades are good enough and I've apparently made a pleasant enough impression on my professors to receive a department scholarship. On top of that bit of good news, I got two different papers back with As and was provided another opportunity to look at for while I am still here at school that will help prepare me for grad school and allow me to do research on a topic I choose, along with maybe getting published or sent to an international conference. There's still a lot of work to be done if that's going to happen, but I'm excited at the prospect.

I'm reminded every day of how good life is and how incredibly blessed I am.

It's that time of year!

(Every game we score over 100 we get free ice cream. Nothing excites college kids like free food! If I remember correctly, there were about 48 seconds left on the clock and we were at 98 or 99.)

Basketball season!

Seasiders are number one in NCAA Division II men's basketball pre-season rankings. The team played UH in an exhibition game last week and lost 83-69, but had another two games this weekend in the Asia Pacific Basketball Tournament against the Fiji National Team and the China University of Mining and Technology. I missed the game against Fiji, but watched last night's game against China and spent most of it feeling bad for how terribly we were beating them and in awe of one of the player's gravity defying hair. It was incredible!

Check out the hair on China's number 6!

I'm sitting in my living room listening to the rain POUR down and thinking about how awesome my life is. School is still going well, I really enjoy my job, my friends are great, and I get to spend my entire weekend studying/researching for the seventy some odd pages I have left to write this semester. Exciting, right?

This is actually a shot from my first weekend back when I went on a RIDICULOUSLY long hike up to Laie Falls. It was pretty, but probably not pretty enough for me to devote another six hours to hiking up that beast of a hill again anytime soon.

I haven't been taking too many pictures lately, but I will get the ones I have taken up, and devote some of my copious spare time to going out and playing with my lenses, because I haven't done that since I got back.

Living on a rock in the middle of nowhere like I do, there isn't much in the way of news from the outside world that I actually hear, but there is one thing that I've been hearing lots about lately, and that's the tsunami in Samoa.

Ever since I arrived at school, I've been involved with the Samoan Club and count among my friends more than a handful of the people I've met through that club. Many of them come straight from the islands, and have family who have been deeply affected by the tsunami. Their facebook updates are filled with concern about family members they haven't heard from yet and more than one of them have said they just wish they could be home with their family now. There really isn't much I can do, and I really wish there were. For now though, I'll stick with sending up a few more prayers than I normally do for those affected and waiting for more news.

Oh, also: TO SHOW SUPPORT, WEAR A WHITE RIBBON OR A WHITE HEADBAND OR A WHITE ARMBAND FOR OUR ISLAND OF SAMOA TO REPRESENT LOVE AND RESPECT. (10-01-09)

I may not be in the Beehive State...

...but considering how busy I am, I'd fit right in.

I had a bit of fun time when I first arrived, but with getting a job and classes starting on September 10th, I've been lucky to get all my homework done, not to mention taking pictures every day and blogging them. I began the semester taking eighteen credits, but with the amount of homework for my anthropology course, there was no way everything was going to get done, so I dropped a class and am down to fifteen credits and around sixteen hours of work a week.

Even with so much to do, it is so incredibly good to be back.

Where else could I go to school with so many people who know how to dance with fire knives?

Peace out, Naptown.

I have approximately seven hours left here (am I packed? of course not!) and am so dang excited to be going back to school.

Even though the circumstances were less than ideal, and there were probably more days that I wished I were in Laie than not, it's been nice being around here too. This is the most time by a long shot that I've spent here since I left three years ago and I've been reminded of how much I love it. Annapolis is beautiful, and there are people here that mean the world to me and because of the much extended visit, I got to spend lots more time with them than I would have otherwise. I got to go to my little sister's birthday party, meet up with my host sisters from my last family, visit DC with another exchanger, drive down to see family in Virginia, hang out with my sibs a bit, and enjoy the company of some of my favorites from high school. My life is good.

So, Annapolis, I'm not sure when I'll be back, but thanks for the good times.

Now back to the land of longboards, late night beach jams and bonfires, new friends and that awesome aloha spirit.

"The Ladies' Resort to the Ocean."

...that's what they called Ocean City up until 1870. Who knew?

As appalling a statement this may be, from the time I moved to Maryland when I was pre-elementary school, until just a few weeks ago, I had never been to the Ocean City boardwalk. Some friends and I were wanting to hang out, and one of them tossed out the idea to drive the two and a half hours out there and spend the day seeing what there is, so off we went.

It's a typically kitchsy beach town with all sorts of fun little game places set up along the board walk, all of which are totally set up for you to lose both your money and your faith in your ability to beat six year old girls at anything. As a side note, should you see some really awesome, incredibly large Charmander stuffed animals, they are not worth the $50 you'd have to pay to buy one instead of win them. Sad.

Pictures!

This lovely shark is sticking out of one of the buildings -maybe Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum?- and it moves! If that doesn't epitomize kitschy beach town, I don't know what does.

The beach was absolutely packed. That fact, along with my inability to go in the water made me miss Hawaii and my north shore beaches pretty badly. Luckily, the company was enough to make up for it.

Probably my favorite part of the day was wandering around taking pictures on an empty beach, with my friends jamming in the background. It was a great way to end the day.

On Being a Tourist

I often think of my life in terms of pre-Hungary, Hungary and post-Hungary, and always feel a little strange when the three collide. The last week in July was definitely one of those collisions. For all that my family and some really good friends are still here, Maryland is very much a pre-Hungary place for me, and having an exchange student friend come visit now, when my life is decidedly post-Hungary was wonderful, but brought up all sorts of mixed emotions. I was thrilled to see her, and to be able to reminisce, speak Hungarian (which is komolyan one of my favorite things ever) and catch up on everything we've been up to since my departure two years ago. It also reminded me of how much I miss the place and the people that were such a huge part of my life. I am grateful every single day for the opportunity I had to go spend that time over there, for the things I learned, for the people that helped me get there, and for who I became and how I changed while I was there.

...I meant for this to stay pretty light, whoops. Anyways. She was here with a couple of friends for the first part of the week, and that Tuesday we all went down to DC together. They'd been the day before and seen all of the monuments, so we went to Arlington National Cemetery. I've visited before, but not for a while, and was reminded of why that place is so great.

For all that I love Hungary, I'm so very glad to have been born an American, and can't ever express enough how much I appreciate all those who have worked hard to make this country what it is. Even with all it's flaws (and I'll admit, there are plenty of those), it's a great place. Growing up near the capital has it's pros and cons- I remember being dragged down to visit this museum or that memorial when I was a kid, and didn't have a say in the matter, but once I got to the age where I could go down there on my own, I didn't because I always thought I'd have time to do it later. I didn't, and am a little disappointed in myself that it takes someone else coming here to do touristy things for me to go down there and be reminded of how awesome it is.

Summer vacation!

I hadn't planned to take a break, but some other things came up and blogging wasn't exactly a priority. I've still been pretty busy participating in all sorts of grand adventures, and of course, taking photographic evidence of it all. There are still a few days left before my return to school, so I'll try and get caught up on the summer out here before I get back to Hawaii and return to my daily postings.

Artscape!

Artscape is the country's largest free arts festival. Baltimore shuts down a couple of streets for the weekend and replaces traffic with tents filled with artists, craftspeople and fashion designers. From noon to ten at night, there are constant performances- in the Lyric Opera House, inside UBaltimore or Maryland Institute College of Art buildings, on various stages, and on the street. It's a veritable smorgasbord of delights for your eyes, ears and taste-buds.

I went up there on Saturday the 18th with Dan and Ellen and the fish-eye attachment for my camera. We caught the Chinese gymnast show in the Lyric as soon as we got there, then spent the rest of the day meandering.

The place was positively packed.

One of my favorite parts of the whole festival was the Art Cars. There were quite a few there- from Hawaiian themed to a Yellow Submarine. I love Mondrian's work, and was so excited to see this one.

Camp Liza, as my aunt called it, ended on Friday.

I spent the week finding fun things to do with a five year old boy and a seven year old girl, both of whom are incredibly energetic, inquisitive and all around delightful. We took trips to the library, the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum, the park by their school, another fun park a little further away that had mini-golfing, a train ride, a carousel, lots of trails, a playground and ice cream, and to a paint your own pottery place. On top of that, we played lots of Uno and Clue and plenty of Spider Solitare, and I was also resoundingly beaten in the numerous tic-tac-toe and Pokemon battles they conned me into. Really, they had incredible persuasive abilities, add that to being completely okay with making up their own rules and I had no hope at all. The kids seemed to make it through unscathed, but I was exhausted, in a very good way, by the end of it.

Luckily, I had a four hour car ride to get a bit of rest, before stopping by to see more family- this time my step-dad's parents and brother and his family. I always love visiting them (and I'm not even saying that 'cause they read this blog! :D) and this trip was no exception.

This time, however, there was something else besides visiting that I got to do, and that was to go meet a guy from craislist to pick up a camera and a couple of lenses.

Oh yes.

The camera is another Pentax SLR that I doubt I'll use, and the lenses were really what I was after. Since getting my camera in February (thank you again and again and again, Dan, Ellen, Q, Flo and Theresa!), I've just been using the kit manual focus 50mm lens. Now I have that, along with a 70-300mm and a 28-80mm. On top of that, I'd ordered a fish eye lens off of ebay earlier in the week, and opened that as soon as I jumped in the car on Saturday.

Oh yes.

I've been playing ever since.

This evening, I dragged my little brother off with me so I could do some night shooting (and be safe should we encounter questionable characters, he is a ninja afterall). Mainly I was just doing lens comparisons and figuring out what I wanted from each of them and getting a little more comfortable. That at least was the goal, and it was working out wonderfully until my batteries died. D'oh. (Note to self, never, ever, ever again go shooting without an extra set of batteries. That is dumb.) I got some fun shots in before that happened.

The World War II memorial, all lit up.
I went through and did this shot from the same position with all of my lenses, just for comparison.


Looking over the Severn River bridge, towards Annapolis. Taken with the fish-eye.

I've been down in Virginia since Sunday, helping watch two of my cousins so my uncle can make the world a better place.

Today, I took the youngsters to the park and enjoyed playing with them and watching them interact with the other kids. It got me thinking about how great these kids are, and what a wonderful job their parents have been doing raising them.

I like to think that my parents sent me out into the world filled with the right stuff to make it to the top in whatever I end up doing, kind of like that balloon (I'll admit, it's an incredibly cheesy analogy, but I wanted to link the picture in somehow). My hope is that should the time come when I am raising my own kids, I'll be able to provide them the experiences, skill sets and background to be honest, empathetic, happy, independent, intelligent, contributing members of society, and know that when I let go of them so they can float off on their own, I can do that with confidence in their ability to make good decisions in whatever it is they choose to do.

Heck, I'd settle with having half of those attributes myself.

Catchin' Up

The first full week I was back here in Maryland was my mom's family reunion. My grandmother had rented a few condos/apartments for the twenty-seven of us, and we spent the week enjoying each other's company, eating, laughing, splashing around, paddle-boating, boating and tubing. All in all, it was quite delightful. I hadn't seen a lot of the family for more than three years, and finally got to meet the three beautiful kids my aunt adopted.



I love my family, and spending time with them (especially in such a beaaaautiful place) is wonderful. I'd enjoy being able to see everyone, but it's a bit difficult, so we make the most of the reunions every other year.

Later this summer, I'll be heading out to Utah for a weekend to celebrate my paternal grandparent's 50th anniversary, and I'm quite excited about that one as well.

Happy Birthday, America

Some of the highlights of the day:

The local parade, which included the usual things as well as larger than life paper mache sharks,

drumming bananas,

silly handouts,

true, yet amusing, statements,

sparklers with the family,

watermelon, and

forgetting my tripod for the fireworks, and missing the whole show while talking to a friend I haven't seen in a couple of years.

I am so grateful to have the opportunity to live all over this great country and to enjoy the many freedoms provided. I appreciate more and more the freedom of speech we have, that we can speak out when we disagree, and that we have a culture that encourages that. I am so glad that I've have the chance to live elsewhere and to see the contrasts in all sorts of things, that help me see the positive and the not so positive in both.