Tsunami Warning

There was a tsunami warning yesterday morning after an earthquake in the sea near Samoa, which was absolutely terrifying until it was called off about an hour after I found out about it. The earthquake measured an 8.3 on the Richter scale, which is pretty high, but Samoa is over 2,600 miles away from here so by the time the waves had travelled that far they weren't high enough to engulf the city - thank god!

We have been looking around at different restaurants to go to on Saturday, and there is an upmarket-y Chinese place round the corner which looks nice. No matter what we do I am getting white chocolate raspberry cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory! Mmmmmm.

Everything is fine... quizzes and tests and essays begin next week, so things will be getting harder. I had a terrible headache after the tsunami warning yesterday so missed a class for the very first time - considering that it is week 4 of term, I'm quite impressed. Tom is spending a lot of time reading the news and sharing it with me, which is intermittently irritating =) We are considering

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this but Lloyds are being terrible - we've gotten through to them twice now, and both times their system has been down, and we have wasted over forty minutes of our calling card on trying to transfer money from England to Hawaii and not being able to. I did get through to them a third time, but the robot warned me that the queues were upwards of 10 minutes, so we gave up. I'm not really sure what to do - I suppose we'll keep calling and asking them to check if their system is working before we go through the whole payment process. Argh!

Comments allowed!

Hi everyone! I have just sorted it so that if you click on the bit that says "0 comments", you can write a reply to what we have said. After you type a message, select 'Anonymous' on the drop down menu, and click post - you won't have to create an account to be able to leave a message. Remember to leave your name though =)

Annoying little things

Finally managed to get through to the bank on my mobile - stupidly, you need to dial 011 to be able to call outside the US, even though everywhere else in the world manages just fine with the usual country code - and Lloyds is having technical issues and couldn't get my information, so I wasted 7 minutes of our international calling card. I have to call back in a couple of hours. How pointless! Oh well, at least we're on the way to getting things sorted.

Also, I am sunburnt from the parade this morning. Argh.

Aloha Festival

We have learnt the true meaning of "Hawaiian time" - no, it doesn't just mean GMT-10. It means that a 90 minute festival beginning at 9am ACTUALLY begins at about 9.30 and goes on for nearly four hours. We left after about an hour and a half because it was just too hot, and because the best part of the parade was over. The best part was when an elementary school marching band, with hula dancers, played the theme tune to Hawaii Five-0! It was kind of surreal. Sadly both our camera batteries had already died by then, but take my word for it, it was cool.

There are quite a lot of pictures and some videos of the parade that I shall put up later on.

We are thinking of heading up to the North Shore tomorrow - we wouldn't be able to swim, because there are huge waves up there at the moment apparently, but we would be able to watch surfers. (Talking of surfing, our resident surf teacher hasn't been in touch. Might have been a one-off, sadly.) The waves are 10-14 feet high, although everyone says that the estimate on the news is "Hawaiian measurements" - it's actually twice that. I hope we don't see anyone crushed and torn apart by a wave!

Oooh, we have a phone, finally. I am having a problem sending international texts, though, so I will take it into T-Mobile (again) on Monday morning to fix it. They are very slow but very helpful there, so it's probably worth it. We also have a phone card and have been trying to call Lloyds, but all the phone numbers I can find for them are apparently "non-working," which is extremely annoying. We'll be going back to a pay phone later to try and sort it out. Obviously it's not ideal to be sorting out bank stuff on a public pay phone on the busiest road in Waikiki but it seems to be the only option.

Thursday

Money is becoming a bit of a worry at the moment - we have $50 in our account, and although both our student loans have come through in England, Lloyds has blocked Tom's account and doesn't allow international payments to be made online. A friend of mine gave me the phone she used when she first got to Hawai'i four years ago, but for some reason it's refusing to work, so I've asked Tom to go to a mobile phone place at the university and get a sim card later on. Hopefully he'll remember.

Thursdays are never nice, which I've probably said before. Tom leaves for class at 10, I leave for class at 11.45, he gets back at 12.30 and I get back at 4.15, and then he leaves for an evening class at 4.30 and is not back till 9ish. It's his second film class: they're starting with films on the Holocaust, which I suppose should be interesting, although he says that his class is mostly German!

So next Friday we will have been together for 2 years, which is a long time (!), but he has another evening class! Grrrrr.

Yesterday we wandered round Chinatown - it was quite disappointing, really. We also went to a botanical garden but Tom had accidentally found directions to the only one that charges ($5 for entry) instead of to any of the four or so that are free, so I have a picture of the outside of that!

I'm heading off to class soon - my history courses are getting extremely boring. The teachers are kind of rushing through a lot of background on the course, so it's 3 hours of dull lectures twice a week. In my English courses there's a lot of discussion and independent thought going on, which is far more interesting. One of my history teachers has gotten really confused and set us the assignments for last week again instead of for this week, and I don't know what's going on - I also don't want to be the person who asks, because then the whole class will have to do a ton of work! Oh well, it'll get sorted out, I'm sure.

Tea!

I am a happy Francesca - I have nine teabags in the cupboard and one cup of tea next to me. It smells really good. I haven't had tea for nearly a month, and I think I was starting to get depressed without it =) It amuses me how the teabags have directions on the side.

Sadly there is not much else to report on today, apart from the fact that Tom had his first State & Local Government class yesterday, which seemed to alternately terrify and amuse him: the former when he was told that he has to go to a trial or local government meeting or something here - actual politics! - and the latter when he realized that the teacher didn't even know what the main British political parties are called.

I watched part of Monty Python & The Holy Grail in class last night, which was fun, and then got the bus home and watched the new episode of House, which was psychologically interesting but not fantastic. Tonight I'm going to a class on publication design for the Kalamalama, which should be useful and also, hopefully, interesting.

This morning we were rudely awoken by drilling from the building site next door, which started around 7.30 and went on till about 10ish. It did force us to get up and go swimming, which we haven't done first thing in the morning for over a week. It would be a nice habit to pick up again - that said, it's been nice having lots of sleep, too!

Temple and Festival

We decided to go here this afternoon for sunset - the guidebook says that although the temple closes at 4, it's worth going afterwards because it's so tranquil and beautiful. However...

These are the mountains behind the valley. The sun hides behind these mountains two hours before sunset. Bloody guidebook tricked us. Also, the entire valley closes up around 6, but thankfully the guy closing up felt sorry for us and let us go and have a look around!
This is the temple.

Also quite a few graveyards around the valley.

Tom is sad that the temple is closed - we will be going back at some point to ring the bell so we have fantastic lives.

When we came back, the Aloha Week Festival had started on Kalakaua Avenue! The streets are full of stalls, mostly serving food, and there are native singers and dancers all over the place.
There are also some weird signs: bread pudding, not exactly what you'd expect in Waikiki...
Designer bra straps...

And people dancing the hula!

Assignment after assignment

Unfortunately it looks like it's going to be quite a boring weekend - I have a huge long list of things to do, from reading theories of humour to writing about eighteenth-century satire to answering 50 questions about the Chinese revolution. It's been a similarly busy week, and it feels like all I'm trying to do is make it even busier: I'm working and volunteering for the Kalamalama (which includes going to extra classes for no credit - good experience though), have applied for a job as Junior Editor of the HPU magazine, and will be finding out about potential other positions on Monday (they're all 'Federal Work Study' and I'm not sure if we're allowed to apply for those as study abroad students). If we are, though, Tom might be able to work as a theatre assistant, which would be interesting for him!

Hopefully we'll be going to the Byoudo-in temple for sunset today, although that remains to be seen. If so, I shall take tons of pictures and put them up. It's meant to be extremely tranquil and full of life-changing serenity at sunset, which would be useful after the stresses of just the second week of classes!

In my Revolutions class (during the last class of which my teacher wore a beaver hat and claimed that Viagra represented everything that is wrong with capitalism), there are prizes for the 3 best term papers. I'll be doing mine on the different attitudes of Western media and Iranian underground media concerning Iranian counterrevolutionaries, I think, which will link to another paper I'm doing in an English class on Reading Lolita in Tehran. And we might be going to the Irish bar this week to see what it's like.

Laundry time!

Banished

I have been reading The Female Quixote, and 'banish' is one of the terms that just seems to pop up every other paragraph, so I have been banished to the room while Tom is outside still having fun at the HPU Beachwalk Barbeque - to be fair, I still have a ton of work to do for tomorrow (which is, of course, why I'm updating).

Just heard a splash - I wonder if Tom's been pushed in the pool!?

Anyway, back to the start. We had our first (free!) surfing lesson this morning, after I started chatting to a guy on the bus yesterday. He offered to teach us, and he knows a place around here that hires out surfboards for $7 an hour (and isn't that strict on the number of minutes in an hour). I was absolutely terrified, as was Tom, but he was managing to conceal it quite well, which helped. The lesson started out with some stupid lying-on-a-towel-practising-jumping-up kind of thing, which was just a bit embarrassing on a crowded lunchtime beach. The embarrassment only got worse, however, when we tried to wade into the water with our boards: my board turned over on top of me and I went completely underwater. Not a great way to start!

We got out further and Gabriel was a great teacher - he kept pushing me into waves and I actually kind of surfed a few! The first time was terrifying, I stayed on my stomach because I was so shellshocked, and it just went so fast. And so far! I totally lost Gabriel and Tom, and had to paddle back out for ages before I found them. Second time I actually managed to kneel and even put one foot up, but at that point I went under again. Tom was a bit less lucky, and 'pearled' once or twice (when the front of the board is sucked under the wave - you can imagine what happens then), but it was fun, and he will definitely do it again. Me, I'm less sure, but I still had a great time.

I've done most of both assignments for tomorrow but there's still a bit left to do for each. I can't believe how much work I've got to do. Around 6:30 we could smell meat outside, and as yesterday we got an invite to a barbeque, we headed out. We each got a burger - for free! Yay! - and Tom got a hotdog - also free! We love free stuff! - and chatted to loads of other students who live here too, for about an hour. We met Andrew, finally. There is one really nice Norwegian girl called Eda (?) who just seems mad! I think she was half-drunk though. Tom got in an argument with a 23 year old in the army studying Military History, which was a teensy bit awkward, to say the least. And now I have been sent back here to do work while he (from the sounds of it) throws people in the pool. Life is sad!

Lots of pictures

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to change the order of the photos on this (which also means that all the photos are in a wacky order), so you're being started off with a picture of Tom's hip! We went surfing today (it was SO SCARY and SO MUCH FUN) and he wanted a picture of the booboo where his hip was digging into the surfboard.
I learnt how to put my hair up using only a pen, like my mum does, and was proud of it so Tom took a picture. Sorry to be starting off with such dull photos.
This is Eggs'n'Things, a restaurant out the back of Beachwalk. It serves breakfast, and no matter what time of the morning you go there, it has a huge queue of people waiting outside. This was about 9am.
One of the pools where we live. We still haven't been in either of them.
Our kitchen.
Our bathroom - the glass is to make washing sand off our feet easier!
Tom getting ready to go out.

Pearl City, taken from the USS Arizona memorial.
Our room, looking a teensy bit messy.
The bus stop!
Walking home from the bus stop.
-Mad Japanese women using umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. It's way too hot to wear trousers, too.
At Pearl Harbour, there was loads of war paraphernalia around, including half a submarine. Tom pretended to be driving it.
Changing the course...
Although this suicide torpedo had an escape hatch, it was never used. 86 Japanese soldiers died in one of these, including 16 in training. I think it said that only one managed to do any harm to American ships.
The memorial, from the boat.
Part of the USS Arizona, which was still kind of visible just under the water from the memorial. 1177 sailors died when it was sunk, and nearly 900 of them are still in the ship.
Tom's dad sailed on that submarine Tom was driving earlier! Only they misspelt his surname and middle inital.
Tom working a machine gun.
The USS Bowfin - a submarine that was built specifically to avenge Pearl Harbour. It was launched on December 7, 1942.

And to end with, a picture of our ticket to Pearl Harbour. More on surfing later!

Jellyfish

When we went to the beach yesterday afternoon, there was a warning sign about jellyfish in the water. As there were tons of people in the sea we decided to go in anyway, and just not go too far out, so if anyone started screaming we could escape quickly! Then we watched the news last night, and apparently there were 363 jellyfish spotted at Waikiki Beach yesterday, and by 3:30 (we got out of the water at 3:45), 61 people had been treated for stings. Scary.

The rest of yesterday was good too - unbelievably hot, but then again it usually is here. We went to Ala Moana Shopping Centre for the first time, which is absolutely VAST. There are three or four floors, and it must take up so much of Waikiki. I normally have a pretty good sense of direction but we both got so disoriented that it was almost impossible to get out! We had gone in search of adaptors and sim cards, but the sim cards had terrible international rates and the adaptors were like $11 each, so we gave up and just wandered around. There was a Lego store, which Tom of course adored, and which we spent about twenty minutes in while he wandered around ooh-ing and aah-ing. We spent a while chatting with the assistant in Lush, who was lovely and jealous of us studying abroad - he wants to study in England, although why anyone would want to do that beats me =)

I'm trying to take more pictures of life here but as Tom gets embarrassed every time I whip out my camera, it's difficult, to say the least! I might just take pictures all day for the next couple of days, and post them up here soon.

We had our first Monday evening classes last night, and although we left the flat 45 minutes before (and the bus takes 20 minutes), we both ended up being a few minutes late - forgot to really factor in the rush-hour traffic. I went to British Comic Literature, which was amazing (we watched Blackadder!), and just had a great time; Tom went to State & Local Government, couldn't find the right classroom, asked some of the teachers nearby where it should be, and then gave up and came home - once he checked his HPU email, it turned out that the class had been cancelled at around lunchtime. Some people are just irresponsible =) It was fantastic for me though, it meant that by the time I got home just after 9 dinner was ready and waiting for me! We could afford to buy chicken stock last time we went shopping, so the shepherd's pie last night had flavour! It was almost a miracle! Oooh, and we have a mini oven on the way, so we should be able to start making more interesting stuff soon as well. Tom got an enchilada recipe off Ashley, a study abroad student who lived with us in our very first term at Essex, so that should be first.

Tom was probably late for class this morning - at about 10.30 he started wondering what time his class started, and it turned out that he was working on the basis that it ended at 12.15 instead of starting at 10.50. Again, some people never think!

Right, now I have to rush off to class.

Pearl Harbour

So yesterday we went to Pearl Harbour. The beautiful draw to it being that is a free adventure. It was a pleasent enough morning, you're allowed to wonder around an outdoor area next to the harbour which has a load of missiles and anti-plane turrets. There's also a submarine you can go into and a museum and I think a ship but they all cost extra. But what you can do for free is watch a (quite bias) 20 minute film about the bombing of Pearl Harbour and then go on a short boat trip to a structure built over the wreck of the USS Arizona. It was declared a national monument in the 60's and in the 90's had this bizarre white bridge structure built over it. It was an interesting thing to do, though just as much in the sense that we can say we've been there then the experience itself. A lot of bodies are still down there, 1177 souls died on that one ship, and I think it would have been a lot more emotive if it wasn't for the film before hand which although interesting was annoyingly American. What was more annoying though was the woman sat next to Francesca who in the packed theatre was going "yeeeeh" and "um-hum" to practically everything said in the film as though the commentator in it was actually listening to her. Although the film wasn't directly biase it was unsympathic to the cost the Japanese paid for the war. There was an explanation for why the American seamen had "had their futures ripped away from them" making them seem all innocent but although there was all this pre-Pearl Harbour anti-Japanese stuff all they showed after that was how it rallied the Americans into war, nothing about the two huge nukes the American dropped. American military is so self righteous, bleugh! Though this opinion is probably currently extenuated by the book I'm reading, Little Brother, which was given to us for free by the uni which was nice of them.
ANYWAY, we did have a nice day, and it was an interesting place which I'd definately recomend to anyone, just be prepared for a one-sided presentation of events.
In other news, we both have a new class today as there weren't any classes last Monday. I can't say I'm particularly looking forward to it, 3 hours of State and Local Government, but you never know.
So, until next time,
This is Tom signing off two weeks into our Hawaiian experience

After being mistaken for an Australian...

Yesterday was good - my Revolutions teacher is getting progressively more insane, and is planning on wearing a beaver hat to class next week. He was asked to write Country Joe's (?) biography but declined as Country Joe is - and I quote - 'too crazy for him' (HA!). He now gives us a signal to cackle loudly when he feels like... I don't know, actually, when he feels like hearing a bunch of young adults cackle like witches, I suppose. Gender is also going well, there were laws in early modern Europe saying that hermaphrodites needed to pick a gender and stick to it, and stories about pubescent girls who jump over ditches and become boys when their bits fall out.

I made a terrible, terrible dinner last night. It was going to be chicken breast and pasta in a tomato-cheese-spinach sauce, and it was going to be just about ready to serve up once Tom got back from his late class. Instead I discovered that the only boneless chicken you can get on O'ahu is chicken thigh, which is bloody difficult to cook, which meant the pasta was overdone, and then Tom came home about an hour early anyway so my plans were ruined! Also the sauce was tasteless (it wasn't the other day, weird) and there wasn't enough of it anyway. On the plus side I did make enough for about two meals, which was good as Tom was starving, but then again it is so gross I think the remains will just sit in the fridge until it's time to put them in the bin.

This morning we went for another early swim, even though it's getting harder to wake up at 6. We went at 7 today and it was nice enough, though the sea is very choppy early in the morning! I had class at 9.40 - my new one - and it was SO much fun, I really enjoyed it. The teacher, like all the others, is a bit mad, and spent a lot of time talking about Days of Our Lives (like in Friends! I didn't realize it was a real show!). She was the one who thought I was Australian, and apologized for being so stupid =) The coursework looks good too, I think I'll be able to do Oscar Wilde for one of the papers. The teacher disclosed that although one of the major issues in her life is that she is in love with a gay guy, it's not THE major issue (riiiight...), and spent a long time discussing a soap opera plot in which sentences such as the following are said: "But I'm sure I'm in love with YOU, not your corneas!"

Club Carnival was after that - a mini Fresher's Fair - during which I joined the Press Club (I get to do volunteer work at a radio station later this fall) and Tom joined the Future Educators Club. He got a keyring and some candy for that and I got nothing =( Also, Tom told the German stall that Germany does not have the best beer in the world, and I got a free book worth $17.95! Furthermore we subsequently got the all-clear for TB, so today has been good =)

In other news, the kittens, and the box in which they were living, have all vanished, which is sad. We are about to head off and go to some of Waikiki's shops in the daytime, for once, or at least while they're actually open. Tom has another evening class tonight, and I think I shall make this; it sounds interesting. No wine, obviously, although we have white grape juice, which might work. I wonder if we could buy cooking wine? Anyway, tomorrow it is the weekend and we are not yet sure what we shall do. Probably - probably - go and sit on a beach somewhere on O'ahu while I work like crazy? Probably.

Second day of class

Was, for me, a bit of a crap day all round! At least Tom's was better =) He didn't even have any classes.

Actually, first thing in the morning we went to Walmart and bought stuff to do laundry!

I went to my first English class and the bus was impressively slow - to be fair there was traffic - but it took 35 minutes to do a 15/20 minute journey, which meant that I ended up being five minutes late for class. Then the teacher had the STRANGEST voice ever - it was both high and hoarse, and she slurred. My first thought was "I can't stand this for the next three and a half months, I have to switch out," especially once she said that more than five absences and you would fail the course! However, she did seem quite nice, if off the wall (so many of them are) and displeasingly willing to show most of the class her knickers, so I reconsidered... until the end of class, when I went up to her to say that I can't afford the books and would be relying on the library and photocopies of other students' books, and she was extremely rude. She actually said "I don't know why you're in university if you can't afford the textbooks."

So I went to Academic Advising and changed into ENG3251 - no more Representations of Pacific Life, hello Sex, Power and Narrative! This course looks far more interesting anyway. I have my first one tomorrow morning and am going in to meet the teacher just before my history classes today, so I can pick up a handout to read. I am going to have to spend $10 on a book though, which is not very good, but there you go.

After class I went to my Gender teacher, who was lovely, and lent me even more books. Then Tom was very late meeting me - we went to the Careers Centre to find out about on-campus jobs, and the TB testing centre to get a prick test. We need to go back tomorrow to have our skin read, but it currently looks like neither of us have TB! Woohoo!

When we got back, we went to the sea, and Tom saw an 'alligator' and thought it was following him (again). I spoke to my mum, which was lovely, then I had a ton of depressing work to do for 3780 (I did all my 3270 reading while waiting for Tom - there is a serious amount to do even with only two classes so far). During this we were doing laundry, and two cool things happened: Tom was invited to go play poker with a load of guys who live here (he lost all our cents - they were all 21 and drinking!), and we found some tiny stray kittens! They are very cute, I am going to go and take pictures of them once Tom goes to class in 15 minutes.

In another news, I am considering purchasing a Kindle once my loan comes through in October.

First day of class

Had my first class today. The bus I was supposed to catch didn't turn up so I caught a later bus and only just beat the lecturer to the class room. The unfortunate thing is that we'd been swimming in the morning and I got my flipflops wet when cleaning off my feet and when they're wet they squeak, loudly. So although I beat the teacher I can't imagine I made the best impression to my class mates as I entered and squeaked my way to my seat. But anyway, it was fine really, but it's funny how Americans seem to be inately, unconsiously racist. Not in an obvious way but in an ignorant kind of a way. Just a few of the things the teacher said, who, although liberal, was discussing whether complete free trade is a good thing or not and its the way that racism can be implied but not said, well, apart from him bluntly telling us that he NEVER buys anything from China and forming an X with his fingers and hissing...
Now I have a wait for my next class as I have nothing tomorrow, annoyingly it's the same class again.
Tom

Francesca's First Classes

1. Modern World Revolutions
The professor is a NUTTER. He is seriously mad. He walked into the room at the start of class and made us chant revolutionary slogans: "Last Star On, First Star Off!" (No, I have no idea either.) He hinted that he had been shot in an anti-Vietnamese-war protest. He claims that the government once offered him a job 'destabilizing African democracies' - he said no as he felt that he wouldn't be able to sleep at night after a day of pouring poison down Muslim wells. He has given us a class song, which we apparently have to sing every class, and has offered more class credit to anyone who volunteers to sing the Marseillaise or the Russian revolutionary song in various languages. He quotes constantly from films and gets annoyed when no one knows of the film to which he is referring; he gives us signals to applaud him when he feels like he's made a particularly interesting point. However, he seems to know what he's talking about, and the class WAS fun. The assignments are crazy though, we have class twice a week and there is a compulsory assignment for each and every time we meet, otherwise we lose credit and can potentially go down a/several grade(s). He actually reminds me of Mr Mimmack (my IB History teacher), with the madness and the irreverence and the strictness and the in-depth subject knowledge. I'm looking forward to the rest of the course, actually! =)

2. Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
My first impression of this class was a seriously bad one. The professor put up a projection of a fifteenth-century woodcut of Phyllis riding Aristotle, and asked the class why it had been printed. I had no idea, so I said nothing, and neither did anyone else. The answer was this: "Because they didn't have photography in the fifteenth century."

AAAARGH.

And this to a class of final-year History majors! This is one thing that really annoys me about the US - if you go on the history section of the HPU library website, they have a database of primary historical documents, which sounds fascinating, until you read that they go ALLLL the way back to... 1972. That's not history!

Anyway. The poor teacher had obviously expected a bit more class participation, because towards the end her voice was trembling and she let us out 20 minutes early. I went to talk to her about being unable to afford books and she was amazing! She lent me one of the books, and is going to photocopy (whoops - Xerox) the documents from the other one for me, which I'm going to go and pick up tomorrow after Representations of Pacific Life. We're also going to go to get our TB tests in the afternoon, otherwise the university here won't release our final grades to Essex and we'll fail university. Tomorrow I shall also speak to my parents (unless they simply don't call and then don't bother apologizing again =P), after our daily sunrise swim at Waikiki Beach... ah, I love being here.

Ooooh, our bank cards have all arrived, including the various letters for Tom from England! We have money! Yay!

And hopefully I shall get Tom to finally write in here about his class today.

Labor Day

Tom keeps saying he'll write this entry, but every time I offer him the laptop he pulls a face and says he doesn't feel like it yet.

On Saturday evening we went to Kuhio Beach to swim and read a bit, but unfortunately as we were getting in the water, we saw a (used) sanitary pad floating around. Tom couldn't get it off his mind even though we swam pretty far away, and then he started getting paranoid that it was following him - sensibly enough, as it turned out, because it was! Obviously we had to get out of the water immediately =)

Then we went to see the Changing of the Guard at King's Village, which is one of the most insane ceremonies ever. Three Hawaiians dressed up as soldiers and doing lots of stamping and impressive rifle-twirling and less impressive flag-folding and so on. Weirdly, although I suppose predictably, it's far more amazing than the changing of the guard at Windsor, which is what it's based on. Did you know that the Hawaiian state flag has a Union Jack in the corner? It also has stripes. This was to honour both the UK and US back in the early nineteenth century.

After that we were going to go watch the sunset (as we had tried, and sadly failed, to watch the sunset in the morning) but were sidelined by a free Hawaiian culture ceremony by the Duke statue! It was fantastic - there was singing, and ukelele playing, and men doing the hula (there was one seventeen year old who was SERIOUSLY gyrating!), and a group of about twenty girls hula-ing as well. Watching them made it easier to understand why it used to be banned =) A lot of them were extremely talented, and it was fascinating to both watch and listen to the story behind the dance. Some of them, however, were a bit like Lilo and didn't really know the steps properly!

Yesterday we took the bus to Waimanalo Beach on the south-east coast, which is the longest beach in Oahu - 3 miles from end to end. The bus journey in itself was a bit strange, what with the bus driver jumping off at one point to get some lunch from his aunt's house! Tom got a home-made banana muffin off him, too. I still can't quite believe that Tom took food from a bus driver =P

The beach was absolutely stunning... at least in the photos we took. In reality it was extremely windy and the sea was terrifyingly powerful. Three steps in and the waves were practically lifting you off your feet and dragging you out. We did play in the sea for a bit, which was exciting in a kind of death-defying way (sorry to both our mums!), and then read for a while. The area we were was almost utterly abandoned, and other than us the entire three miles of sand looked devoid of tourists and non-locals. Despite hefty amounts of sunscreen, my forehead and cheeks are now burnt from sitting there for an hour or so; despite Tom's protestations that he never needs sunscreen, he is now bright pink all over! Sadly he will be brown by tomorrow, so I am enjoying it as much as I can in the meantime =D

Yesterday ended scarily with another attempt at watching the sunset from Waikiki Beach. Unfortunately the sky was so cloudy that you couldn't see the sun at all, so instead we just swam for a bit - I wished desperately for a waterproof camera so I could take a picture from the sea of Tom being practically indistinguishable from the Pink Palace due to their identical colouring. Then, as I swam out, Tom called to me to come back - he had seen a fin in the water. We watched from the shore for a while and were half-convinced that there was a shark pretty close to the beach. Obviously we would have told someone but most of the lifeguards (here called Aloha Ambassadors!) were preoccupied with a multiple arrest going on at the Pink Palace, and no one else was swimming around there anyway, so hopefully everything was safe and we were just overreacting.

Today is Labor Day (basically just a bank holiday) and we're going to go to Walmart soon to get some 25c notebooks. We had our latest lie-in this morning - 8.15 - and Tom still hasn't showered an hour and a half later, so we've missed one of the main events which is a rough-water swim across Waikiki Beach, starting at 9. Oh well. I can't seem to find any other Labor Day events in Honolulu online, but I'm sure once we go out we'll find stuff to do.

Classes start tomorrow! Argh!

Travelling around Oahu I

Yesterday was a strange day. We went to the HPU library and I got out 'Revolutions and Revolutionary Movement,' and a free textbook about journalism, and then we took the bus up to Ali'i Beach Park. It took a long time and, sadly, it wasn't worth it!

Ali'i was crap - although the beach was quite empty, the sea was cold and full of seaweed (we have been spoilt at Waikiki and Kuhio!), and although the sun was shining, there was freezing rain pelting down. The waves were also disappointing and there were no surfers to be seen. It was generally very unpleasant, so we walked into Hale'iwa, the town, which was amazing. All the signs point to "Historical Town of Hale'iwa", and Tom loved it: the McDonalds looked like it had jumped out of a turn-of-the-century Western, and all the buildings were made from wood and corrugated iron. Matsumoto's, a surfer hangout and shave-ice place much lauded by the guidebooks, is there, and as we walked past we could see a queue of at least 20 people stretching way out the door! Sadly we only have $4 now, and the shave ice was $2, so we decided not to get any.

We had lunch and considered coming back to Waikiki, but it was only midday and we'd been travelling for a couple of hours so spending just half an hour on a rainy beach was a bit of a let down. Instead we took the Circle Island bus on a bit further - and about ten minutes down the road, we saw a STUNNING beach with clear turquoise sea! Waimea Bay is beautiful, it's the kind of sea you could have stayed in forever. There was a huge rock which people were jumping off, which provided entertainment, and the sea was cool, and the waves looked gentle but were amazingly powerful. Once we'd had enough (after about an hour in the water =P), we sat down and I read some of my Revolutions book for Tuesday. Although the beach was pretty crowded, it was huge enough, and the sea was loud enough, that it felt like we were all alone. You couldn't hear anyone else. It's a truly gorgeous place, and anyone who comes to Oahu should definitely go there. We'll be going back as often as we can =)

This morning we got up at 5.45 and went to watch the sunrise from Waikiki Beach. It was so lovely to swim there with so few people around, even though the sun was rising behind a load of skyscrapers and we couldn't really see anything. Hopefully getting up so early will mean we can sleep a bit later in the day, and then stay up far later than we normally have been tonight: as I've mentioned before, classes start in a few days, and Tom has three evening classes (5.15 to 8.10pm). He gets tired around 6pm, and we're normally asleep by 8, so we need to keep adjusting our schedule. We'll be discovering Waikiki today, instead of hiking up Diamond Head, as there is a $1 entry fee per person to Diamond Head and we can't even afford that =S

I'm about to go and get free breakfast from the hotel, yay =]

America's Got Talent

... is what we have spent a lot of time watching over the past 24 hours =) And it seems that America doesn't, really. They don't have even a particularly talented host.

We got bus passes today! This means we can travel all over Oahu for free. Tomorrow we're spending two hours on the bus to go to Ali'i Beach Park at Waialua, which is on the North Shore - they have bigger waves up there and I am EXCITED about seeing more experienced surfers. We've seen some at Kuhio Beach here, and it's quite thrilling. I can't wait for the surfing championships in November.

Then on Saturday, the plan is currently as following: to hike up Diamond Head. Yes, Tom may get me to hike up a mountain!

Classes start on Tuesday and we can't afford the textbooks, which is a bit worrying, but hopefully we can go to the HPU library at some point tomorrow, to pick at least one up which I need to read over the weekend. The professor emailed round specifically to tell us to read the first two chapters. Although orientation yesterday was a bit facile (imagine lots of adults in their 20s being encouraged to shout out the answer to the question "what is the capital of Hawaii?" when they are currently IN that city), starting university again should hopefully be fun!

Off to registration

On the Hawaiian news last night, there was a top story about "Pungent Passengers" - TheBus has a huge problem with smelly people using it. Now you can get a hefty fine or be imprisoned for 6 months if you are on a bus and you smell. This law has been passed in a place where the average temperature now is above 30 degrees. I'm definitely taking deodorant with me on our first trip.

First Day

So after 36 hours of travelling over two days (one of which was 36 hours long in itself!), we arrived at our new home in Honolulu last night around 9. The city is so neon and sparkly at night! I love it! Unfortunately sunset is really early - it was at about 6.45 tonight.

Tom's doing our first set of washing up and broke the tap into three pieces, whoops. The room is actually bigger than we expected, with tons of storage so it should be easy enough to keep tidy-ish. There is a double bed and a single, and a little kitchen, and a bathroom in a DELIGHTFUL shade of brown, and a pool outside, so who cares, really =) We don't actually have any windows - there are window panes, but no glass. It's weird. There're just thick wooden blinds and mosquito nets. It gives you a real feeling of being outside when the blinds are swivelled, but you feel really protected and cosy when they're closed! In fact, loads of the Hawaiian 'indoors' is actually outdoors - that pool outside our room is the hotel lobby!

I slept terribly last night and was irreparably awake from 2.30, fixing our internet and sending various emails. We walked down Beachwalk this morning and went paddling in the sea - were propositioned by this weather-beaten but lovely old lady who told us we were in shape and that twelve hours after landing in Hawaii was the best time to learn to surf, lol.

Then we went to Walmart - a giant, giant store, with only about a third of it dedicated to food. I was SHOCKED at the things they don't sell: vegetables! Flour! Pesto! CHEESE (how will I survive?)! Butter! And that's just the stuff that was on our list. Also, it seems that Hawaii doesn't truly believe in shower gel, it's like precious jewels here, impossible to find. Yet despite all that, and walking back with several heavy bags of shopping in 30 degree+ heat, it has not even occurred to me to complain! We've even been talking about cycling up mountains etc and I've been fine with it! Being in Hawaii overrules everything else =)

We are watching America's Got Talent and have just learnt that Sharon Osbourne doesn't know the word for 'frisbee.'

This afternoon we opened a bank account (that's $100 gone until we get our cards... gulp) and then came back to the room to drop off my bag and get some towels and go swimming at the beach. Then we decided to have a quick nap, and go to the beach for sunset around 6... and woke up after 8, in the dark. That is going to screw up our schedules even more =(

Oooh, one of the things we found in Walmart was frozen gyoza! We're cooking that now with (homemade) peanut sauce and rice. So I've got 4 out the 6 ingredients for peanut sauce, I'm sure it'll still be great. THEN we shall go to the beach.

And last thing: CONGRATULATIONS KELSI AND STUART.