Do I fit in yet?

So what exactly does it take to fit in? Doing what everybody else does? Being able to get along with other people? Making friends? Is fitting in even important? I feel like the older I get, the less worried I am about trying to mold myself to other people's standards in order to make myself appear that I am enjoying myself or friends with someone. I feel free to make decisions based on who I truly am, and not who I think other people want me to be. Yet at the same time, something inside of me still feels a little pang of worry and discord when I feel like I am not a part of the larger group. Take, for example, partying which seems to be a huge thing for college students nowadays. My college experience has not taken me down a path of much partying. My friends and I rarely go out to parties at Pitt, if ever. To me, a better night is spent more quietly, either relaxing at home or doing something less wild (and perhaps less expensive) with a closer group of friends. Yet here during study abroad, the majority of people I have met are intense partiers--here in Bonaire, the students go out Thursday for salsa night, and Friday+Saturday to the clubs. It's crazy, three nights in a row. And this session, they started going to karaoke night on Wednesdays. So that's potentially four nights to go to bars and drink every week which is almost unheard of in my circle of friends back home. Do I feel the need to go out with my classmates every week? Not particularly. But at the same time, a lot of bonding happens when people experience things together, and I want to be a part of that bonding. It is this dilemma that is constantly playing in the back of my head--would I rather be a part of something that I do not enjoy in the moment but do not regret in the long run, or relish my time and potentially regret  my decision in the future. I definitely feel like I am an outlier from everyone else here because of my preference to not party and not drink. It inhibits me from connecting deeply with the people around me, since I cannot bond over a major part of everyone else's lives. I can only speak from speculation and the few experiences I have had with that sort of thing. Oh well, we'll see how the next few weeks goes. Is it worth it to fit in?

It appears that I am a little behind on updates, so I will start from the beginning on Tuesday and do the three days. 

Tuesday we had a late class (11:30am), so I woke up later to recover some long lost sleep. It seems that people in this program don't sleep/don't need a lot of sleep to function, which is certainly not the case with me. I need A LOT of sleep to do well during the day, or at least a nap or two in the middle to split things up a little. I currently have a similar sleep schedule to that I had during the school year,  which is bad--it's summer! This is time I should be recovering from the year to prepare myself for senior year of school. Anyway, we had class and came back to Hamlet to have lunch. Since we had hte afternoon off, I decided to go snorkeling with some classmates that were diving to provide surface support if anything were to happen during the dive. It was really cool to watch them descend into the depths of the ocean--something I am not going to be able to do myself during this program. Even while snorkeling above them, I was able to see a lot of different things--a couple turtles, many, many sergeant majors, a couple trunk fish, parrotfish, the usual. Again, I wish I had an underwater camera to capture it all because that would be so cool. I am thinking of borrowing someone's soon...so hopefully there will be pictures to come. After about an hour of snorkeling, I headed back to the apartment and basically did homework for the rest of the day. Sounds exciting, huh. We actually have a ton of assignments to do for this class, it's a pretty legitimate science class which I was not at all expecting. 

On Wednesday, we only had planned for us a mangrove kayaking trip in the afternoon, so my roommate and I went out to film a music video for one of his original songs. It was really cool being the videographer for the video, trying to find the right shots and scenes to match the content of what he was saying. It was an artistic side of me that really had not ever been used before, so it was quite interesting to have to try to stretch that for this video production. We got some shooting done before lunch, and afterwards, we went close to Lac Bay to go kayaking. Something really cool about mangroves is that they form natural channels between them to allow continuous water flow through them. Which makes kayaking so much fun! We were swimming through these channels, many of them too close to even paddle (we had to grab onto branches like Tarzan) like it was a maze. At the end of it, we got to snorkel through another channel ending up in a shallow seagrass bed. It was an amazing experience to get to see such a pristine nursery area for fish. A couple people were taking pictures the entire trip, so when they end up posting them I will definitely update the blog. Afterwards we came back to Hamlet for dinner, and then spent the night in our house doing homework and chatting it up with friends.

(A still shot of the shoreline near Hamlet for the video)

(Anther still shot near the pool)

Today, we had a pretty packed day--class at 9:30, lunch, class at 2:00, lab at 4:30, grocery shopping at 5:30, and dinner at 6. There are definitely some days that are way more intense than others, and I wish they could spread everything out a little bit. Ah well, I guess they do these things for a reason. class was pretty typical--simple lectures and discussions about the readings we had to do. The lab was a plankton ID lab, so we were given a sample of seawater and asked to identify the plankton as best as possible using microscopes. There was actually a lot more life than I was expecting in my small sample of water. Copepods galore, a few radiolarians, dinoflagellates, etc were scattered throughout my milliliter of water. Plenty of things to see. It kind of scares me though, to think that the water column is full of these creatures--that means that whenever you open your mouth, you are ingesting millions of these in the seawater you take in. Thoughts to think about...anyway the lab was really short but nice because we could see everything we were learning in lecture in real life. After dinner, we spent some time talking with some other other classmates before heading out to Salsa night at the Cuba bar downtown, near the taste of Bonaire. It was really fun to "demonstrate" my salsa skills to the people that were there. Even the small amount of training that was received in London played a pretty big role, but I still was able to remember all the basic moves which was impressive. As the night went on, the place got super crowded so I left a little early (around 1am) to get back home at a decent hour. 

(Salsa night!)

(This man watches over everyone at Cuba....)

Tomorrow is basically a free day for us, which means an opportunity to snorkel!

A new adventure awaits.