I decided to take today off from homework and wander around. I didn’t really have anything specific planned, so I figured I’d go to the . I waited and waited for a bus, but nothing ever showed up so I walked instead. The Aquarium admission was $6 with my student ID, and that included an audio tour thing. Unfortunately no matter how high I turned it up, I couldn’t hear it, and they didn’t have a transcript. I was told that the videos were captioned, but I didn’t see any captions the whole time! It was amusing anyway, and $6 was probably about right. I don’t think I spent more than 30-45 minutes there, there just wasn’t that much to see. They have a monk seal, but he looked lonely and/or bored; I didn’t see if they had any buddies for him to play with.
Next I crossed to catch the #4 bus to University and King so I could go to . My friend Colleen recommended it so I wanted to make sure I went! Unfortunately I arrived WAY early, so I had an iced mocha and did some crocheting. Then I accidentally opened up Geocache Navigator on my Blackberry, and even though I hadn’t been caching in months (since September, actually), I figured I’d see what it found. To my surprise there was a cache 0.03 miles away! So I packed up my yarn and finished my drink and went and found it. Still too much time before Bubbies opened though, but I happened to spot so I got to have lunch there. Finally it was time to go to Bubbies and I enjoyed it!
I went and waited at the bus stop to catch the “A” bus back to the hotel. I waited…and waited…and waited. I watched three #1 buses go by, but no “A” ever came. I finally got on the #1 toward Kahala Mall and figured I’d go to a transfer point and get back that way. We ended up going who knows where, and I got off at a transfer point and caught a #14. I knew I’d seen #14 in Waikiki so I figured that would be okay. Well, we went everywhere. We were in some seriously residential areas and I was afraid I was getting further and further from where I wanted to go! (It turns out we were actually on a loop, and I was never more than 4 miles from the hotel, but it felt like a lot longer because I didn’t know where we were.) Finally we got to Kahala Mall (guess I should’ve stayed on the #1) and I got off because I knew there had to be another bus coming! I used Google Transit on my phone and found out I needed to walk to the other side of the mall to catch the #23 back to Waikiki. Whew! It was entertaining to go on a little adventure like that, but for a while I was nervous because I thought we had gotten quite far from Waikiki.
Back at the hotel room, I drank cocktails and lounged on the lanai. We had bought some passionfruit-orange juice and pineapple rum in the ABC store, which makes for a very good drink, and I had a few and got silly all by myself. I had my laptop out there and I read about haole/local relations, the Hawaiian language, Hawaiian pidgin (which is actually a creole, not a pidgin), and other related topics. It was fun.
At night we had a work social for :A:’s conference. That was…special. It was a work thing, you know? Not nearly enough food for me, so after it ended I came upstairs and ate the mock tuna sandwich I’d picked up at Down to Earth earlier in the day. And that was it for Monday!
(BTW, I am including tweets in all my travelogue posts, because they are part of the story. They will probably closely parallel my blog entries, but I want to include my random daily thoughts in with my travelogue.)
Tweets for Today
- I haven’t needed the vibrating alarm clock yet. I keep waking up at 6:30 or 7:00 on my own. Slept exactly 8 hours last night, then woke up.
- Nail polish that I thought was blue with sparkles is actually clear with blue sparkles. So I have faintly sparkly toes, but no color to them
- Just saw parrot guy again, this time at Kealohilani and Kalakaua. Red one’s name was Buddy.
- LOL, I knew there had to be a Del Sol store here somewhere. Kapahulu and Kalakaua.
- Tourists asked me for bus advice, gave it to them happily. Hopefully I was right!
- Can’t hear audio tour even on max volume, no transcript available. “But there are captions to read!” #deaf #hawaii –
- First video I came across? You guessed it, no captions. Oh well, I got a student discount here, only $6, I’m happy. –
- Why are so many people here STUPID about the bus system? Tourists left and right asking “is this the bus for…?” Didn’t you look it up 1st?
- I mean, even if I didn’t have Google Maps w/transit dirs on my phone, I printed a list of popular sites w/bus routes from thebus.org 1st!
- Good iced mocha but they charge for wifi! I thought “Cafe 2600″ would follow the “information wants to be free” … –
- Organic vegetarian Hawaiian pizza NOM –
- Hawaii is goddamn humid, people. Feels like home in summer – which it will be when we get back. Caving and putting my hair up.
- OM NOM NOM you have no idea –
- Having a little adventure. Got tired of waiting for A bus and hopped a 1 instead. Went who knows where. Transferred to a 14 now, going…?!
- That’s THE “A” bus, not “a bus” – so glad I bought an unlimited bus pass. Hey, free tour, right?
- It’s a good thing I have a few hours before wife gets off work, because I just got to Kahala Mall and have no idea where that is.
- For the record, I am not being a clueless transit user. Just needed to get somewhere major so I could transfer.
- Okay, so my adventure wasn’t THAT big. Kahala Mall is 4 miles from my hotel. But it felt big! Back now to chill … –
- Spending the afternoon reading about haole/local relations, Pidgin, and tangentially related topics. Interesting stuff.
- Seems to me the answer is: if you are haole, you ARE a foreigner. Treat yourself like an expat. Yes, it’s still US, but you ARE a foreigner.
- KITV has got it going ON with the captions for their news. All tape is fully captioned, easy to see who’s talking vs. reporter voiceover.
If you added up all the voggy days this year, it would be maybe a week or two on Maui and Oahu (Honolulu). Actually, Kilauea has been pumping out increased levels of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants all summer, it’s just a matter of the wind patterns.
This weekend was pretty nasty on Oahu and Maui because there was no wind to blow the vog out to sea, but it did clear up this morning when the trade winds returned (whew!). On Maui, the smoke from burning sugar cane and the dust stirred up by the harvesters added to the haze during the morning commute. And now I seriously need to wash my windshield.
This year has been unusual compared to recent years. Kilauea has been erupting out of the big Halema’uma’u Crater, and there seems to be more sulfur dioxide created there than at Pu’u O’o, where the action has been going on for the past 25 years. Pu’u O’o is still erupting, too, so sometimes you have two plumes of smoke at Kilauea.
We don’t know exactly what the eruption patterns will be in the future, or what the long term effects on our health will be. It’s not exactly like the pollution from factories or automobiles. The particles are bigger, and may never work their way out of our lungs.
Another problem for you will be the fireworks in Honolulu at July 4 and especially New Years. You think you’ve seen fireworks before, but if most families here only had one string of 10,000 firecrackers to set off, they would consider themselves to have a poor New Year’s indeed. Aerials are illegal for regular folks to set off, but each city block seems to have enough to rival the Independence Day displays of small towns where I come from.