Hawaii.

Hawaii:

 

Aloha everyone. As I write we are in the throes of finals and I am not managing my time well. I am not, as I ought to be, studying for any of the four finals I’ll be taking day after tomorrow, I’m not in mandatory global studies, and I’m definitely not writing my eight page paper for biomedical ethics on the Bouvia case and the right to die. Instead, I am in my room listening to Mickey Avalon and Amy’s Famous Beer Pong mix on my ipod and writing this blog entry.

 

So I know it’s to be expected around finals week, but I am definitely ready to come home now. It’s not that I couldn’t travel to another 12 countries – I definitely could – but the ties bringing me back home are strained as is and communication between the ship and back home is getting harder and harder. Violet’s C-section’s been moved up weeks early so I’m going to miss it after all, despite getting an early flight back home the day we disembark in Florida. It’s not that big a deal I guess but I thought I’d worked it out so that I wasn’t going to miss everything; since she’s moving away just weeks before my birthday in June, it feels like she’s slipping away from me even faster now. It’s been really hard this semester to be so far from family that I’m normally really close to…

 

Also I can’t get internet in my room anymore and it feels like every email I’m writing no one is reading it all the way through or is missing the point of my email completely. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t my only form of communication. So when I’m trying to work shit out back home like internships and I can’t manage things myself and am left at the mercy of everyone else – complete with time differences, incompatibility between different versions of word and pdfs, and sas’ super shitty email server – I could scream it’s so frustrating. For the love of God, and my own sanity, if I send you an email please read all of it and respond appropriately.

 

Now that I sound sufficiently anal and neurotic, onto Hawaii. We docked unusually early in Hawaii (6am early) and since we had face-to-face immigration stuff like we’d had in China, we all had to be up then. The night before was a little hectic and weird; I’d been hanging out with Allison, Allie, Grant, and Mike, and didn’t get back to my cabin until 3-ish, so when I set my alarm for 5:30 to shower and go up to 7^th deck for inspection I was over it. The Hawaiian immigration guys were unordinary sweet and even though it was way too early it was nice to hear only English (!!!!!) and be back in the US (kind of.) I looked like crap and my hair was standing up in all directions and the big Hawaiian guy inspecting my passport laughed at me when I came up to his desk and handed my passport over to him – I told him I’d slept two and a half hours and he said, “I went out last night too and got up at four. Welcome to Hawaii.”

 

I figured that was a pretty good sign. We finally debarked the ship and got outside the port terminal by 9:15, where we waited around for around an hour for the shuttles to pick us up and take us to the skydiving place. A bunch of kids had tried to get in on the earlier 10am time so we were a huge group and when the first little van came we shoved 21 people (plus the big thug-looking driver) inside. It was a long ride out of the city to the sky-diving place but it was fun since everyone was so pumped to go skydiving and we listened to the radio for the first time in three months and heard new American music. We finally get there and things start going really quickly. We all sign the papers that promise not to hold Skydive Hawaii responsible – no joke, these were the scariest-worded papers of my life. They, at one point, listed all the possible ways we could die; oh, and not just by parachute malfunction – they also refused all responsibility for the safety of the takeoff of the plane. Insane. Despite all this they were turning us all out really quickly. As each person was suited up they weren’t even briefed on safety until they were riding up in the plane before the jump. With something like 40 of us all there for the 10am time, something like 5 or 10 of us were suited up and jumped before they stopped everyone and said they wanted to wait before sending another group of us to jump.

 

There were unusually strong winds from the West, which was weird at this time of year, but they wanted to be really careful because we were on the coast so when they jumped if they were blown just a little bit off course they would end up in the ocean. A bunch of the instructors were willing to jump but it was all up to the discretion of the “tandem master” who decided when and if everyone jumped, and after one instructor wiped out on her way down, they weren’t about to let all of us go up until the winds had died down. This instructor wasn’t able to slow down on her incoming and slammed into the ground on her butt/lower back – they thought she might have a problem with her spine and called an ambulance for her, and when the EMT’s asked her where it hurt she pointed to her bellybutton and said “all the way through, into my spine.” It was a creepy, auspicious start to the day.

 

While we all sat around I called my dad and some friends while I got steadily more nervous. I walked over to the other company next to the one I’d booked with and saw Sarah, Grant, Mike and Lee – as I walked over there Brian and Allison were getting off their plane – they’d gone up and the door was open, they were all ready to jump, but at the last minute they’d been called back down because of wind. Haha.

 

So they all messed around and tried to learn to ride unicycle (I don’t know.) and I walked back to my company. As soon as I got back they said they were going to have to reschedule us all because the winds weren’t dying down at all. At this point it was like 2:30 and we’d wasted all of our morning and afternoon waiting around here doing nothing when we only had like a day and a half in Hawaii at all. I was pissed but we rescheduled for 6am the next day. I told the girls I came with and Allie that I’d find them later in Waikiki since our cell phones all worked (!) and that I’d see them later at dinner since I didn’t want to hang out all the rest of the day on the beach. I went to the smokers kids at the other company and waited with them to all reschedule. Their company said it would be 3 hours until a van would come pick them up and take them back to Honolulu – ridiculous!!!!! A taxi was going to cost like $140 dollars and the only public bus was still a 20 minute drive away. I wanted to go already, so I went back to my company and asked if he’d drive me back to Honolulu then and if my friends could come with; apparently there was “bad blood” between the two companies and he would get in serious trouble if he did that even though he’d have to take me back anyways.

 

I was starting to get really frustrated with the whole thing by then and was about to cry when the young guy came over and told Grant he’d take us all back if we were quiet about the whole thing (there were about 50 people still waiting for that van that was going to take 3 hours at the other company) – we snuck into the van and headed back to Honolulu. The guy who agreed to drive us was probably the sweetest man ever. He was a pysch major at the university of hawai’i and was just doing this as a weekend job to help bay off loans. He drove us back to Honolulu to grab our stuff off the boat and then even offered to drive us to Waikiki for free. Like I said, sweetest man, ever. He said he knew if we’d been stuck back at the skydiving place it would’ve ruined the way we thought about Hawaii and he couldn’t let that happen.

 

So he dropped us off on the main strip in Waikiki and we wandered down towards the beach, we stopped into an ABC – okay, footnote: in Hawaii ABC stores aren’t liquor stores, they’re kind of like 7-11s that sell EVERYTHING. Seriously everything. From one 7-11 I bought a white sundress, a coke with lime, some sushi, a postcard, a sticker of the islands, an I love Hawaii shirt, and a pair of flip flops. They’re really typically Hawaiian and I shall always think of them as a big part of how I experienced Hawaii… So anyways, we walk towards the beach and stop in a random dress store to look at some cute summery stuff when we ran into Steph! Everyone else was across the street so we bummed around for a bit and kept walking towards the beach together.

 

Sarah bought a bottle of tequila and beer while we waited outside looking sketchy… So being underage for the first time in three months really sucked. It wasn’t even as though I’m some douchey-alchoholic who needed a drink – however, to know that I didn’t even have the option – that every country except my own trusted me to make my own decisions. Whatever. Thaaaat being said, it’s not as though I don’t do what I want anyways. Speaking of which – I called the girls: Allie, Laura, Michelle, Emily, and Vanessa, and left the smokers to their own sketchy devices while I met up with the girls again at the resort quest hotel right on the beach. We all had mixed drinks of 151, pineapple juice, and Malibu and danced around the hotel room.

 

We ate a delicious dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise and met Erin and Alex’s boyfriends which was very cute but made me a little jealous and bitter of their being adorable couples. It just made me miss home and all the people in my life I’ve been apart from for over three months… I know I’m so close to coming back home but for now it’s just been a little difficult missing them so much. Anyways, we walked to the international market since it stayed open until 11. What a cool place! It was filled with little stalls in the middle of a paved area between two rows of shops with all kinds of stuff being sold. Lots of jewelry, wind chimes, clothes, and normal cheesy souvenirs. I bought a few stuff for ang, and my dad and mom and a necklace with Hawaiian sand and a pearlized turtle in a block of black Lucite. It’s a little weird but cool. 

 

We met up with the same Japan crew member I had so much fun with – I’ll call her/him Pepsi for the sake of anonymity. So Pepsi says to meet up with them and a couple other crew members at a tiny club in the middle of nowhere. Once we get there I went to hand my ID over and the huge Samoan bouncer guy puts two huge X’s on my hands (so weird) and holds my ID up to my face. Then he says he’s going to keep my ID with him at the front until I leave and if anyone sees me drinking anything not from a waterbottle or if they want to come over and sniff my waterbottle and it’s not water they were going to keep my ID and then give it to the police. Crazy, huh? Stuff like that doesn’t even happen in Virginia. I asked him if he was the bouncer for the rest of the night and he said, “Maybe, why?” so I said, “Because how am I supposed to know if I can trust you with my ID or if the next bouncer decides I don’t look like my photo and doesn’t want to give it back?” (Honestly, it was a sketchy little club and I was paying a 10 dollar cover charge to get in and I was pissed about the whole thing.) Then the bouncer says, “well that’s just a risk you’re going to have to take.” Isn’t that awful!? I would have left but we asked around and no joke – it seems in all of Honolulu there are only two clubs that allow people between 18-20 to get in. I have two months before I turn 21 and in all of my three and a half months of traveling nothing like this had ever happened. In fact in all the places I’ve ever been to even back in the states no one ever gave me such a hard time.

 

Ugh. So Pepsi and two random other crew members are there and we’re dancing in this shitty dead club where I am the only one who has to pay for anything it seems, no cover for 21+ and drinks are only like 2 or 3 dollars when I had to pay 4 for a bottle of water. I’m bitter and angry but enjoying myself none the less.

 

-         OOOOOOOOOOOOKAY side note. Allie never wears real shoes (or underclothing staples like socks and underwear it seems) so as a result she has developed some particularly gruesome looking blisters on her feet. They’ve healed some but now they’re like skin shrapnel from once-deadly minefield-like boils. DISGUSTING. And, because Allie particularly delights in making me vomit all over the room, she liked the one on her big toe the other day. Then yesterday she picked a piece of it off and jumped on my bed while I was writing a paper with it. She then proceeded to “accidentally” drop it somewhere in my bed and I started dry heaving and hyperventilating so badly I had to run to the bathroom to use both the inhalers. She of course found this hilarious. Just one more peek into the fun-filled life of cabin 4151 aboard the Explorer!

 

So. We dance all at the club (called PlayBar for future reference) and we have fun and one of Pepsi’s friends, a crew member from Guyana is being sketchy and just generally creepy and at one point says “How old are you? You look like you are 15.” I’m obviously a little bit offended by this and say that I’m very nearly 21, to which he replies, “Well whatever you’re doing to stay young you keep doin’ it girl, you look good.” Terrifyingly creepy. If you think I’m 15 you need to not talk to me in a bar.

 

We dance to ridiculous music (the DJ was TERRIBLE) and we wander around a bit. We get the brilliant idea that what we really needed to do right then was to skinny dip in the ocean at the public beach in Waikiki… We wander over there and there’s like 10 of us now and we all run into the water in various states of undress. I, because I am brilliant and am a master planner, take assorted articles of clothing off but for some reason decide to go into the ocean with my dunks on. My shoes are soaked and have sand inside them but the ocean was relatively warm and I was in Hawaii. Life was good.

 

We all stagger out of the ocean to see that there’s a group of probably 30 or so SAS kids on the beach in the dark watching us the whole time – later I found out my friend Caroline saw us but thankfully it was dark enough no one was identified, haha. Michelle and I try to get into a bar, which was obviously a no-go since it seems all of Hawaii believed me to be a 15 year old out way past curfew… We even were confronted by a group of frightening Australian lesbians who told us we looked younger than one of their 17 year old daughters (this was all drunkenly screamed at us). Michelle tried to steal their takeout pizza. Things got ugly. We unsurprisingly decided to leave there and head back to the hotel… It was three am and my phone had died so I went to sleep. I had a 5am alarm set to wake up to pack before going skydiving.

 

So the alarm goes off and I immediately realize the foolishness of my thinking I was going to jump out of a plane that morning. I was a little hungover and it was essentially my second all-nighter in a row – I was in absolutely no condition to go skydiving, I’d begun to pysch myself out considering the ambulance and the winds of yesterday, and I didn’t really want to throw down $200 dollars to do it so I told Allie I thought I was going to pass. Laura decided to skip it as well, but because Allie is a baller who isn’t afraid of anything she went solo. I felt pretty jealous when I saw her pictures and video of her soaring through the air above the gorgeous coast. Oahu is seriously beautiful and she undoubtedly had the best view ever.

 

Instead though I slept in until 9, which is unusual for any country, and packed leisurely. We all got out of the hotel around 10 and since the girls were hellbent on some “American” food we found a food court with taco bell and a subway. It was really nice to eat some familiar food but I wasn’t 1/1000 as excited as they all were. I think I’ve been relatively lucky this semester not to really miss any food since the only restaurants my mom and I ever go to are Sushi, Thai, Chinese, or Indian. It’s not as though I eat a lot of McDonalds and Italian food while I’m home, so for me lots of the food we’ve been eating has been familiar fare. That sounds kind of pretentious but whatever.

 

Sooooo then all the girls wanted to lay out on the beach and since I don’t possess the patience to do that and get frustrated doing nothing besides roasting all morning I took the public bus number 19 back to Aloha Tower in Honolulu where the ship was socked. It was a long ride but it was cool to talk to some locals. I met a guy who tinted car windows who was cool but looked like he’d just been released from prison. Oh! And the bus drivers all wear little uniforms of Hawaiian shirts with “the bus” printed all over them with palm trees and surfers and stuff. So cool.

 

I called Allie and met her around the outdoor mall outside the port – I was killing time so I walked into a private art gallery where I had a long talk with the owner who showed me a lot of local artist’s work. There was a woman who came on vacation from Detroit and never left and now made her living painting Hawaii’s native flowers with dew drops so 3d I would’ve thought I could see my own reflection in them. There was the “Hawaiian Mona Lisa” with a young Hawaiian girl with thick wavy hair and a hibiscus behind one ear, whose eyes followed me all around the room. There was a series of paintings by a Japanese-Hawaiian man who crushed seashells and mixed them with his paint to create designs of cranes soaring through mountains and Japanese style waves along what was obviously the Hawaiian coast. The gallery owner said his family were kimono designers and it showed all over the traditional Japanese cranes in flight and the long twisted trees the artist used, but the landscape was obviously all taking place in Hawaii. So cool to see all these influences in the way immigrant cultures mix their own familiar practices with native stuff – I bet I’ll see America completely differently once I’m back home ‘cause of it. He told me to read “The Alchemist” after I explained to him what I was doing on SAS and how I could tell him it was changing me. Mental note to check that out once I’m back home.

 

I bought a crazy printed Indian-style wrap-around skirt like the black one I got at fabindia! From a crazy hippie beside the gallery. This one is red and blue and yellow and green and the whole thing is reversible. It’s incredibly cool. I got starbucks and sat in the pavilion and used the internet for an hour-ish uploading Japan pictures and talking to friends before walking towards the grocery store Allie went to print out all her “Thank You” photos. On the way though I saw a Marshall’s where I wanted to try on some dresses for the Ambassador’s ball; I found two, one is a frilly short black dress with a see-through over layer of fabric with a thin tie at the top and the other is a club-wear zebra print dress. I think I’m going to wear the black one with my platinum blonde wig from Vietnam and the big gold earrings from India with my black patent heels. Hopefully I don’t look like a crazy person.

 

Oh! And I also bought a pair of new dunks since I decided to leave the old ones at the hotel before we left. They had been through an awful lot (dune 4x4ing in Namibia and entrails in Thailand’s meat markets just to name a couple places) and between all that and the two inches of seawater and sand still residing in them I figured it was time to let them go. I bought them in Chicago a while ago and they deserved a Hawaiian burial. However, in the Marshall’s in Honolulu I found a pair of hot and light pink and pearlized white dunks in my size for 20 dollars! Maybe it’s Japan, but I’m beginning to really believe in the idea that if you stay zen and just get used to letting things go it’ll work out in the end. Like my dunks!

 

We walked back towards the ship but we only had an hour and a half before on-ship time so we stopped in for a last meal in Hawaii. The restaurant we went to was right near the ship and when we sat down we realized we were seated right behind the academic dean Reg Garret, his lover, and his grandkid! I actually can’t stand the man and find him incredibly obnoxious, but how weird is that! Both Allie and I bought kaluah pork quesadillas with sweet chili sauce. I talked to my mom for a little bit and then paid the incredibly cute bartender. It was amazing and a perfect end to my time in Hawaii…