A Kind of Aloha

So here, as promised, whether you wanted it or not, is Hawaii.

I somehow managed to wake myself up at 5:45, and was like, hey, that’s when Jim said the pilot boat was coming! so i poked my head out the window - there, in the distance in the shadowy morning light were the lights of LAND! and there, headed straight toward my window, was the pilot boat! as it turns out the, the port side pilot boat docking spot is right under our window, and i got watch the whole transaction of pilot boat lining up with the ship so the Honolulu pilot could hop on board and lead us in. it was so neat! and it was SO exciting to see land. you don’t even understand.

it took us awhile to clear the ship - the immigration people come on board (though i spent much of that time in the clinic being giving anti-anxiety medications :-P ) - but it seemed an even more impatient process to actually disembark everybody. when i went to join the line it stretched all the way down the narrow narrow hall and up the next set of stairs back, and so i gave up and hung out with Nancy until everybody else cleared. it was a wise choice in terms of getting off the boat (sorry, ship), but perhaps not such a wise choice in terms of staying with the group i was supposed to be with, and by the time i got out of the terminal they were gone. so i ran around Honolulu for a while, and found them eventually.

The tour - poor Bob - was a bit disjointed. Bob had never really done this tour before, and i think we spent more time getting in the way of everybody’s grocery shopping that we did observing honolulu. oh well. we did walk right into the middle of a festival celebrating Queen Liliokalani’s birthday, and would got to see a group of men performing a traditional dance, which was pretty cool.

then we took the bus out to Waikiki and hung out on the crowded but lovely beach for a bit. and then, not wanting to go off alone, i joined in a trip to ala moana mall with my professor and his wife and couple of other girls. the other girls seemed perfectly nice - of course, now i cannot remember their names - and we all went together to a big food court at the mall. pretty much all i wanted was pizza. it was SO weird to finally sit down and really feel our bodies trying to make up for the lack of rocking of the ship. it’s like being seasick, but on land.

anyway, the girls got to talking with this navy kid about living on ships, and i was eating too slow, so i ended up joining in two other SAS girls, Kate and Heidi, who had just shown up. we finished lunch, and then we all decided to do some shopping. and my goodness was that a lot of time in Long’s drugs. then they needed to go to sears. and a skate shop so that Katie could get a new sweatshirt. and all i really wanted to do was call my parents. so i did. and then we agonized about picking a sweatshirt for Heidi, and then wandered around in the parking garage underbelly of Ala Moana mall, only to get on a bus headed BACK out to Waikiki, which we then proceeded to get off randomly when they decided we were going the wrong way, and we ended up spending forever in a little local park along the beach and next to the military museum. there were strange birds there.

then there was a VEEERY long and complicated process of finding the friends who invited me to dinner, and i ended up scampering alone down fancy Waikiki streets, searching for them, only to get a text message from Lindsay that said “don’t come! it’s closed!” thank goodness i ran into them! i even might have been on the wrong street! i don’t even know what happened, but we ended up wandering like four lost vegetarians (and one non-vegetarian, Ben) in the desert for 40 years, except the desert was really fancy stores that very inconveniently did not sell the cheap food. incidentally, our tired party at last came to rest at Cheeseburger Waikiki, where lovely tofu and garden burgers were enjoyed by all (but Ben, who had fish.) then we called a cab to get back to the docks on time, which ended up being complicated when two cabs showed up. but we all ended up in one of them, headed back to the ship, past the ACTUAL ala moana transit hub, as opposed to the little bus stop Kate and Heidi and i had THOUGHT was where all the buses came from. as the harbor came into view, we saw this great string of lights and were like “Ohh it’s our ship! how pretty!” and then we closer to the beautiful, perfect lights, and were like, “nah, it’s that giant cruise ship.” and then from behind it appeared strand of droopier lights, missing a few bulbs and sagging in the center, and we were like “now THAT’s our ship!”

before we lined up to get back on, Bobbi (the one who raises peacocks and drives motorcycles) and Leila and i spent a few last moments at a little coffee store at Aloha Tower, and then fell into line. we passed through the first checkpoint just fine, only to discover that the line to get on the ship was RIDICULOUSLY long. we waited and waited, and it hardly moved. we keep waiting. i got antsy, and started to feel funny. people were crowding in around us, trying to cut (if your card gets swiped in after on-ship time, you get punished by having to serve dock time - sitting on the ship - at the next port). the crowd started to get rowdy, and they were all SCREAMING. i was about to fall over, and Leila was holding me up and pushing me on (hence the heroism) and then of course my own roommate cut in front of us...we got on about ten minutes to on-ship time (having waited in line for an hour and a half), but the mob of at least 200 people behind us had gotten COMPLETELY out of control. and the whole reason it was taking so long in the first place was because people were trying to do stupid shit, like smuggle alcohol on in their crotch. god. some of these people are crazy.

The moral of the story is, we actually left Honolulu. eventually. and here we are, once again the middle of the pacific. right now i’m so beyond exhausted that i just tried to have multiple conversations that did not go over well...although now a bunch of random people are aware of the tiny hole in my shirt.

things have been going decently well, but we’ve gotten to that point were people are just starting to pair off, you know? that part when it starts to become glaringly obvious that you don’t really belong in anyone’s group? i guess i still just don’t know where i fit into this whole thing. even here, with people around us all the time, life is lonesome. but we do exciting things, like stargaze or read aloud on the front deck, or get professors to buy us hot chocolate when we sit down with them to talk about our majors, or watch Mulan on closed-circuit TV, because soon we go to China. i even had a really nice chat with one of my vicarious voyage teammates, about whom i was a bit skeptical at first - i don’t think she thinks i’m a total dork anymore! but i’ve been getting more homesick lately, too, and getting more and more impatient to get to Japan, and weeks with more land time instead of more ship time, as it is now. because for me, i still have to take this one wave at a time.

and today we sailed through a little rainy corner of a storm, and then there was a giant, giant double rainbow - way more awesome than Ben’s - spread across the sky, and even some birds flying around it, which is weird cause we’re like 1000 miles from land.

Mike says it was like someone had just turned the switch on.