Ho No Lu Lu Hawai'i

Yesterday I spent in Hawaii! It was short but excellent. It took a really long time for the entire boat to clear customs and finally get off but when we did, I and four other girls, we went first to Pearl Harbor. Though I had already seen it- it was good to go again, it was free and at the gift shop I bought a pin, because my mom used to collect pins from places we went and put them on her backpack and I thought that was cool, so hopefully I’ll be able to find a Croatia pin…

We had to go to the Honolulu walmart because one of the girls needed to pick up a prescription and ended up spending way too much time there, but there was a jamba juice right next door so I fulfilled my craving and shouldn’t have anything to complain about. I also saw shelves and shelves of “Maui Babe”, which is Dad’s favorite tanning lotion, So I of course picked one up. Because I have a mission, by the end of this trip I am going to be the color of rich wood. It’s going to be glorious, I’m already the color of the deck. : ) But I’m actually afraid to use the Maui Babe because it kind of gets all over and laundry is limited with my one towel… not that dirty laundry has been any sort of issue in my past so I don’t really see what the deal is now.

I got really frustrated at the Walmart (because I hate them anyway), and here I was, in one when we only had 10 hours of land and of U.S. for the next 3 months, but was soon very happy because we made it to Waikiki Beach immediately ran into the ocean!! Where we took several pictures (of us in swimsuits…) swam for a bit, dried off for a bit, and after about 45 min took off again. I was really incredibly happy to be in the ocean that I had been surrounded by for the past week. It was excellent, as I love to swim.
We ended our land time by walking around a bit, looking in some high end and some touristy stores, and then, again disappointedly, settling on a not so good, as it turned out way too expensive, weird touristy thai ! place. I mean you live and learn and I had a great day but I feel like with so little time I really wanted to “do it right” or whatever, but I guess that’s a lot of pressure to put on a place and I learned that traveling with 5 girls was too many and in Japan we currently have a group of 6 that I need to find a way to break into 3 and 3, Jackie and Christina and I have been trying to think of how to break it to the other 3 that we want to split in half, any ideas?


Anyway with Hawaii we got back to the ship with 2 hours to spare, walked around a bit and then with 1hr and a half went to get in line for the ship, which ended up wayyy longer then we had anticipated and if we are not on ship on time (in this case 9:00) we get dock time, which means that in Japan we will have to be held back for a period of time before we get to get out. So things got really crazy and out of hand, but we were kind of at the place in line where right behind us is where it was turning into a mob, but where we were it was really funny and we started chanting and clapping and stuff. We got in to the ship at 11 minutes to 9, so it was stressful and long but perfect, I even yelled at a few people who were trying to budge me… haha, but it was all in fun, until just after we got in, when it got more stressful and people were pushing and stuff, we ran to the upper deck to watch those below – about 150 people. It got out of hand because there was no structure of people out there helping, and they had pretty much told us to get onto the boat by 9 – whatever we had to do- what slowed the whole thing down was that they were only letting on 6 people at a time and many were trying to sneak on alcohol – which we’re not allowed to do! Anyway I had an ok time joking with the people around me and talking to some friends… on the phone…

We spent the rest of the night laying around on the front deck and talking to others about what they did – a lot of people went skydiving! And we just stayed there until the boat had pulled away and we had satisfactorily waved good bye to Hawaii and the good ol’ USA. Haha, well now it’s 8 solid days on the ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean until we reach Japan. Life on the boat last week and today has been good, though if I write more in this entry no one will read it… haha, so I’ll save that for later this week, I have a running list going on what I have to tell you all! We get to retard our clocks another hour today! Happy Memorial Day!