The First Days

7/28/07

I haven’t figured out what I’m going to call this blog yet, but that’s fine. I still have days left before we have internet, so the world will have to wait at least that long for my inspired genius anyway.

We landed in Honolulu on Monday night after an extraordinarily long flight, punctuated by extraordinarily long delays. We flew over snow-capped mountains, which I thought was awesome given where we were going to end up. All told, travel took us like, 20 hours. We were quite tired when we got in. We were supposed to land at 1:30, giving us plenty of daylight hours to get settled in, get the basics adjusted. Instead, we landed at 8:30. Sun had set at 7:15; I had checked the weather report the day before to get that time. It was dark, and yes, rainy. The cab driver made some quip about the heaviness of our luggage. ‘It’s like you’re moving,’ he said. ‘We are,’ we told him. He didn’t know where our place was, asked us for directions. I shrugged. Never been there. He didn’t seem too impressed. I began to wonder about this renting sight-unseen idea. Maybe my undying belief that everything will be alright, even when it isn’t, was going to fail me.

But I shouldn’t have worried so much.

We drove past some nice places. We drove past some not-so-nice places. We drove past some more nice places, and some more not-so-nice places. And lots and lots of city. I had been telling myself for weeks to remember that I’m not really moving to an island. I’m moving to a city. And yeah, I did. Most of the Honolulu that I’ve seen these past days does not quite fit into my idea of what Hawai’i is. Mostly because my idea still does not contain a huge friggin city. It’s island, and resort, and palm trees, and volcanoes, and ocean beyond ocean… So far, I’ve seen a good deal of the ridge, but I haven’t really seen the ocean. Not yet.

At any rate, we pulled up next to our building, which is this tiny, cinder-block eight-flat painted brown and tan. It’s on Kapi’olani Blvd, which is kind of a major street. Big enough that you must cross at a stoplight, or you will get run over. Or the cars will have to stop, one. I knocked on Walter’s door and he let us into our place. We dragged our stuff inside, popped down to a corner convenience for some toilet paper, laid out the Korean blanket on the floor, and went to sleep on it.

We explored a bit more the next day. Here’s the layout of the place. We’re the upper corner on the far end from the street. The front door opens into a living room/kitchen area. If you step a bit to the left, onto the linoleum of the kitchen, you can walk straight forward into the bathroom, which is actually pretty big. Actually, it’s the biggest bathroom I’ve had since I moved out of the dorms and stopped sharing my bathroom with twenty other girls. Michael and I talked about that excess of space, and how we might want to find something to do with it. We haven’t yet.

On the other side of the bathroom is our lanai, which translates into “shitty little balcony with a washer/dryer, sink, water heater, and cramped view of the backs of other people’s apartments.” Or maybe we just didn’t get too great a lanai. I’ve already taken to having my morning coffee out on the front second-story walkway, where I’ve got a just-as-uninspiring-but-at-least-wide-open view of Kapi’olani Blvd. Only thing is, I can’t put a chair out there because it’s shared space. Who knows, maybe I’ll warm up to the lanai. I think more likely is that we’ll put some plants back there, but never really use it for anything but laundry.

But back to the linoleum kitchen, you can take a right just past the living room and enter our bedroom. It’s big enough, and it has got a pretty big closet. All in all, this is a nice place. But not nice like “pretty Hawaiian flat.” Nice like, “cozy, with everything we need, and no bug or critter infestation.” Thanks, E, by the way, for your blessing. It worked.

It’s really only been a few days that we’ve been here, but already it’s hard to distinguish what we’ve done during each one. I know the first day we found the grocery store, about a third to a half a mile down the street. We cleaned up some more, just to be sure it’s only our own filth that covers everything. (Although everything does look kind of dingy regardless. I think it’s because you really kind of keep the… eleven windows open all the time.) And we got our gas hooked up. On Wednesday we went to meet the building management people, who are all really nice. We gave them the checklist apartment stuff, where we’d made note of slightly-broken stuff so that we don’t get charged for it at the end, and they sent a repair guy out on Friday. We also spent about two hours looking for a phone. Wound up at Sears in the Ala Moana shopping center, which is… expletive huge. And open air.

That’s something I’ve noticed about most large buildings here. The hallways are all open-air. The shops in this mall, for instance, are indoors and air conditioned. But everything in between is open air. The post office the same way. Campus buildings, same. I do wonder about what happens during a tropical storm. Do they just let the mall flood, or is there some sort of sealing system that takes care of things like that? I mean, it’s all concrete and stone, but there are also all the things you would see in the hallways of any other mall— cellphone kiosks and that car that every mall everywhere is always raffling off.

Thursday was the big crazy day. We rented a U-Haul and drove around collecting furniture and appliances from Goodwill, K-mart, Salvation Army, and the Waialae Furniture Bargain House. We now have everything. It’s like a real apartment. Not that I didn’t enjoy sleeping on the floor, but dude, queen-size bed is way better.

On Friday we went to my campus, met a couple people in my department, poked around a bit, and set up furniture. Which brings us to today in which we did our first weekly shopping trip (Previously we’d bought a day-ish worth of food because we had to carry it home. But we bought a cart while we were at K-mart, so now we can bring home a week’s worth at once). Also, I pulled out my back pretty badly this morning in the final stages of putting together furniture. My poor back. It’s had a tough week. But it gets a rest now.

So here are some things of note about living in Hawai’i.

* First off, people like throwing apostrophes into words here. Sometimes I can tell they work as stresses, as in the case of Kapi’olani, which I had been stressing incorrectly. But other words, like Hawai’i… dunno. Maybe? Also, the h’s are really pronounced here. It’s not quite like the jota in Spanish, which of course has the kind of throat-clearing sound in with it, but the h’s are pronounced. And it’s kind of a ‘hoh’ sound, which give Hawai’i a kind of diphthong there at the beginning. I’m still working on this.

* Also, it’s pretty hot here. It’s not really warm with tropical island breezes. For the most part, it’s just hot. And it rains here on this part of the island several times a day, but nothing ever gets wet, partially because the rain is usually misty and doesn’t last long, and partially because even when it rains hard, it evaporates like nothing. The front half of our house is west-facing and gets really warm in the afternoon. The windows do not help between 4:30 and 6:30. The door becomes hot to the touch. The cinder-block walls become warm. We have an “air conditioner” in the kitchen, but I’m putting it in quotes because it doesn’t work. But the back of our place stays pretty well cool in the evenings. Too bad our desks have to go in the front, eh?

* People are really nice here. It’s just fine to smile and wave at a complete stranger. If you look like you don’t know where you’re going, someone will stop you and ask you if you need help. And sometimes, they’ll stop other people and ask them if they agree with the help they’ve already offered you. If it has to do with bus travel, everyone says, “Ask the driver.” But in a really emphatic way, like you’ll hurt their feelings if you don’t ask the driver after they just told you to. Of course, they’ve already told you what they know. I guess it’s just because they don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction. Also, drivers will always stop at crosswalks if people are standing near them, preparing to cross the street. Then they’ll smile and wave at you. Our neighbor whose name I don’t know yet offered to help us unload the U-Haul. We were already finished and were about to leave to return it, but he stopped us, waved us over, and asked if we needed help. Trisha, who’s and undergrad that works in the Psych office, gave me a campus map and showed us all the places we might possibly want to go while we’re students, including tips on which nearby restaurants had good food. Then she gave us a map of plants on campus. Michael and I bummed around with it for about an hour. There’s some really cool stuff here.

Haven’t seen the ocean yet, and only a couple random views of the Ko’olau Range. We’re going to Diamond Head crater tomorrow, and after August starts, we’re going to start taking the bus all over. We’re waiting for August because the month passes are for calendar months, not for thirty-days beginning whenever like the Chicago CTA passes. Now that we have our place set up, there’s a lot less to do in terms of settling in. And in the meantime of settling in, we have figured a lot out. We’ve got a very general layout of Honolulu in our heads. We’re learning the bus routes. We know where the shops are that we’ll use regularly, and a few not-so-regular ones. And we found Chinatown, which is on the bus route that goes right past our place. I’m excited about this because I know they’ve got farmer’s markets there, and I really dig local shopping.

There’s not much of a rhyme or reason as far as I can tell, to where poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods go. We’ve gone down streets where you would pass a poor neighborhood, then a rich neighborhood, then another poor neighborhood, and then another rich neighborhood—all within the space of a mile and a half. They just all seem mixed together in some random way.

I saw someone with a Hawai’i foodbank t-shirt, so I know that exists here. I’ve found on the map a Salvation Army family services center not too far from Michael’s campus. And I found a community center not too far from my campus. So I’ll poke around at these and other places to see if there is somewhere good to volunteer. After I get my grad school schedule. Grad school, I know, will be wholly different than anything I’ve done before. I don’t want to put too much on my plate before I know what exactly I’ll be doing. At the same time, I can’t imagine NOT volunteering after these past four years. It just… doesn’t seem right. I know I’ll have time to do something. And if I don’t take that time to do something, I’ll be wasting that time.

Also, I really don’t know how poor people move. It sucks, absolutely sucks, trying to get around and set yourself up in a new place when you don’t have a car. It would have been impossible if we hadn’t rented the U-Haul. At least, we’d still be sleeping on the floor and wouldn’t have desks, or chairs, or dressers. Picking up boxes from the post office is an ordeal on the bus. So yeah, I’m soooo thankful that we had some savings from our pre-Chicago years to help us out with moving. Money makes everything easier. And no, Mom, we don’t need anymore. We’ve got savings to live on until the income starts. And that won’t be too much longer anyway.


7/31/07

August starts tomorrow, which is a good thing in terms of bus travel. Michael and I are really looking forward to August. It is such a pain when you travel about as much as we’ve been doing to count out your ones, go buy something cheap so you can have more ones, make sure you have enough ones…. But August starts and we get to flash our nifty bus passes that say “August 2007” and they’ll just let us get on the bus and ride.

Busy and loud though our street is, it’s actually a pretty good location in terms of getting around. The number 9 bus, that goes right by our house, connects to pretty much every bus route to any location on the island. We can see it all, in two trips or less.

The Bus isn’t as frequent as the Chicago CTA. The wait times, especially during non-peak hours, can be quite cumbersome. What I think that’ll translate to in practice, at least for me, is that I’ll schedule that extra time into whatever I’m planning, and use it as one more excuse to sit back and relax. And sweat. Which is of course, now part of the daily routine.

Michael and I switched up our plans a bit for purposes of practicality. We didn’t go to Diamond Head that next day. Instead, we went to Chinatown and bummed about. And yes, fruits and vegetables seem to be almost half price there than they are in our local grocery. But, it’s a long-ass ride. I don’t think we’ll be shopping there regularly, which is a shame. And it rained for a few minutes while we were there. Like, actual rain that made the streets wet and everything. I watched the passers-by at this time. They paused underneath awnings to let the rain pass, which it did rather quickly.

Chinatown, by the way, is not like Chinatown in Chicago. There you will find restaurants and a few shops for very Chinese-looking things that were, yeah, made in China. But in Honolulu’s Chinatown, you’ll find Chinese life. When you walk through you really do feel as though you’re walking through a small piece of displaced China. It’s really neat.

Anyway, I haven’t seen Walgreens around here, but there is Long’s Drugstore. And we knew there was one in Chinatown, so we went there. And we bought… inserts for our shoes to make them comfortable for the long hike of Diamond Head!

Which brings us to Monday. And by the way, I’ll stop with the daily play-by-play once I have a daily schedule. But for now, every day brings something new.

So. We went first to Kapi’olani Community College where Michael’s gonna go. It is right on the edge of Diamond Head Crater. I’ll also say, I believe it is a far prettier campus than mine. The landscaping is incredible. There’s a cactus garden with every variety of cactus that exists, and a few more that they made up just to show off. We poked around a bit, found out that Michael needs shots to go to school, and also found out that he can wait until my paperwork has been processed to process his paperwork, and get the nifty in-state tuition level.

And then we hiked Diamond Head. It’s less than a mile up, but that’s a mile UP, so it seems like more. There were old ladies going up with walkers… okay, I exaggerate… they had canes. It seemed doable for them, but hard, and long. Took me and Michael about a half hour to get up to the top and oh my god… the view is great. I could look about maybe 270degrees and see ocean on the horizon. The remaining 90degrees holds the Ko’olau Range. Oh, it’s so worth it. I told one the ladies with a cane that on my way back down. She said, “Oh good, I keep telling myself that.” Anyway, anyone who comes to visit me will have to hike Diamond Head with me. It costs a dollar. Or, at the top you can spring for the $5 (I think) certificate of achievement. We didn’t. And there’s t-shirts. Proceeds go to support Oahu hiking trails. I’ll support them at some point, I’m sure, since I intend to use them at least once during our time here.