E komo mai! Welcome to
my trip log/photo page for my trip to Hawaii with several buddies from UC
Berkeley. Before anything else, I must acknowledge that this trip was made
possible by my awesome friends, Jen and Kathy, whose constant prodding and
help getting the PDL internship made it all happen. Throughout my last semester
at Cal, I would get constant shouts of HAWAII!!!! from Kathy and once the
PDL internship was in place... it was confirmed. As a veritable bonus, my
parents paid the airline ticket as a graduation present. With that, and
with the permission to miss work for three days, I took off for Hawaii directly
from Fremont on July 7. So enjoy the reading and/or the pictures and mahalo
for visiting.... This page has the description of july 7 and july 12 (the
traveling days) while the sightseeing days have their own pages.
My overall
impression of Hawaii is that it is a very unique place, well at least Honolulu
is. Honolulu is a huge city, with more tall buildings that any city I've
ever been to before and definitely more tourists. I easily saw the most tourists
at one time than i ever have in my life and that was actually disappointing.
I'm not impressed by large cities and urban sprawl,
and would rather see more natural things. Fortunately, this trip had a good
share of the natural things and tropical scenery that I wanted to see.
July 7 - Leaving for Hawaii
-i actually went to work on wednesday and hastily ran an
experiment, which unfortunately didn't work. We didn't expect it to work,
but there is always hope. Not exactly the best note to leave on, but what
can you do. I left work on the 4:15 pm shuttle to the Union City BART station
and had a fairly interesting conversation with one of the other interns.
I got on BART and rode it all the way to the other end at SFO. The SFO BART
station is amazingly convenient; the station is only 20 feet from the Int'l
terminal and a short 5 minute walk to domestic terminal 3. Anyway arrived
the gate at 6pm.. with an 8:10 pm depature... So i read random newspapers
that were just lying around and played FFTA on my gbasp while waiting. The
flight itself was ok, and the in-flight movie 50 First Dates, with Drew
Barrymore and Adam Sandler, was actually pretty good. UAL Flt 65 got into
Honolulu Int'l at 10:30 pm HST (1:30 am PDT). Then i had my first ever taxi
ride to the Hawaiian Monarch Hotel in Waikiki.
-first thing i noticed was that it wasn't as humid i was expecting. Second
that gasoline is about the same price. Third all the tall buildings. I got
to the hotel and met up with Andrew and Wen-Lin who were just returning
from the beach and Jen who was waiting in the lobby. Up to the rooms and
our initial pow-wow. Slept at about 1 am.
July 8 - Diamond Head, Waikiki
Beach, and sushi
-we all ate at the Jack in the Box right next to the hotel
in the morning somewhat independently....
July 9 - Hanauma Bay, canceled
luau, and Todai
-Hanauma Bay is famous enough and beautiful enough that
it was recently voted America's best beach by some magazine....
July 10 - Pineapple juice,
Aloha Stadium Swap Meet, and luau
-Breakfast the first two days was somewhat disappointing,
so Brian and I went out to try one of the many $2.99 specials....
July 11 - all O'ahu Tour and
Ramen
-The rest of the trip Brian and I went independent of the
rest of the group....
July 12 - Return to the Bay Area
-the last day on Oahu was actually pretty shitty haha.
I had a 1:40 pm flt back to san francisco so i couldn't do much. All i did
was eat breakfast at Jack-n-the box , take a taxi to HNL, sit in the airport
for 3 hrs, said aloha to hawaii and got back to Berkeley around 11:50 pm
after the 5 hour flt, 90 minute deplaning and baggage ordeal and 1 hour BART
ride. Not such a nice way to end the trip, as i really felt i wasted a whole
day, but whatever....
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Page created: July 13, 2004
