Welcome ceremony, the East-West Center

While I am at the University of Hawaii pursuing my M.A., I am also an affiliate member of an educational institute that is attached to the university, called the East-West Center. The center funds graduate students and lots of different cultural exchange programs. I have entered into a program of theirs that allows me to stay in a dormitory in their campus, along with about one hundred and fifty other graduate students from all over Asia and America.

The housing experience has been wild already. As prices are higher in Hawaii than anything I am used to, and as it is relatively convenient, I am cooking my meals with the other students in big communal kitchens built into each floor. Alongside my quasi-Korean dishes are pots of Thai soup, chicken being fried by some Iraqi Phds, along with a half a dozen other dishes I cannot recognize from Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Phillipines.

During the day, I have been going through orientation procedures with the other students. The organizers kicked off the official welcome with a hula ceremony. It was actually very nice, I lost any preconceptions I had of it being a hollow exercise for the sake of tourists.

Afterward, alumni from our program circulated through the audience and gave us lei's.





With my few hours free in the afternoon, I decided to tour around Honolulu and see a little bit more of the city where I will live for the next year. While the first thing I noticed was the unusual makeup of the city, which is composed primarily of Japanese, Hawaiians, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders. While I make the distinction of their origin, what was even more unusual for me was how Americanized it all was, despite the diverse origins.

In terms of the physical city, it reminds me of a tropical Stamford, with a clean if infrequent bus system, low buildings, and plenty of discount stores and bar and grills.