American Travel Story: Part 1

This story begins on the second of January this year (technically it begins about halfway through last year, but I doubt you all want to read about filling in paperwork and attending weekend lectures for several months).  The second of January was the day I got onto an aeroplane for the first time since I was two years old.

This plane trip was new and exciting despite about 90 percent of my internal organs attempting to exit my body through the soles of my feet on takeoff.  I had emergency exit seat and was informed "people will kill for these" which struck me as somewhat ironic as people in those seats agree to help save others.

The flight took me to Brisbane airport, which was less exciting, although it did have some reasonably interesting sand sculptures so that was cool.

It's like I was already in Hawai'i

After going through customs for the first time ever and being told that at my age I should have a good understanding of how customs works I was on another plane.  This plane took me away from Australia and toward the international date line and time travel.  I let out my inner nerd and played the Doctor Who theme as I went back roughly 25 hours.  I also had some fairly good luck on this plane trip as I had an empty seat next to me, which the passenger behind me felt compelled to explain was clearly beginners luck and it was all downhill from there, thanks for the Mr Ray-of-Sunshine.

My first view of another country

I arrived in Hawai'i and cleared customs and everything with no fuss whatsoever.  Turns out telling staff that you're a first time flier as you hand over your passport means they are immediately apologetic for previous rudeness (that I hadn't noticed anyway, but I appreciate it all the same) and just want to be as helpful as possible.

I took this picture then saw the sign prohibiting pictures until after customs

One of the things I enjoy doing when travelling within Australia is walking around towns and cities and just enjoying the feeling of the place.  I thought I'd give it a go in Honolulu and I spent an hour just wandering around the Capitol District and the surrounding area.  During this I discovered that Honolulu Hale (which translates as Honolulu House and is the mayoral and local council chambers for Honolulu) which had a rather impressive Christmas display both inside the building and in the surrounding gardens.

Translation: Merry Christmas

After that I headed down to 'Iolani Palace which is famous for being the only state royal residence on American soil.  I took the audio tour which had lots of really interesting information, most of which I forgot by the end of the day, but also included gems such as an audio reenactment of the crowd cheering as the king and queen entered the throne room and physical descriptions of the first two telephones Hawai'i located in the king's study on the top floor and in the basement, which were there to be looked at.

Royal coat of arms on the front gates 

              

                           The throne room                                        The main staircase and my fashionable footwear

Across the street from the palace is Ali'iolani Hale and the statue of Kamehameha I who united
the Hawai'ian islands under his rule and then wrote a national anthem for his new kingdom.  Personally I reckon that's a fairly epic legacy to leave behind.

Next I headed over to the Hawai'i State Art Museum where I looked at lots of art relating to Hawai'i and learned about the Percent for Art law which legislates that 1% of the cost of all state buildings must be put aside for the acquisition and commission of artworks to “beautify and humanise the built environment” which, if you can get past the rather dull language, is rather a nice sentiment.  I was going to include a couple of images of the art that really impressed me, but as I'm not sure about copyright and the like I'm going to play it safe.

At some point during the day I had lunch at the Foot Street Market which, except that it had been recommended to me and there were locals eating there, I almost expected to give me food poisoning.  But no, the food was not only edible but quite tasty.  Then I walked around the city some more, all the way to the Ala Moana Center.

     

A four story open-air shopping mall with no decent cafes, how do you survive the Christmas crowds?

This is the largest open air shopping mall in the world, for those Melbournians among you, it has almost thirty thousand more square metres of retail space but almost 200 fewer shops than Chadstone.  I bought an aloha shirt because what else does one do when one finds themselves in a landmark shopping mall in Hawai'i?

I'm not entirely sure it is tacky enough to properly identify me as a tourist

By this point it was getting late and I hadn't slept at all well on the plane so I headed back to my room and tried in vain to get the internet to work before heading to bed.

Culture shock for the day:  Street signs here say yield instead of give way which makes me think of broadswords.

What they mean.  Source

What I imagine.  Source

Next time: I learn about coral, I climb a volcano and my photography doesn't improve.

Christmas Reflections

So I keep hearing that Christmas and New Year is a time to spend with your family, something that becomes ridiculously easy when you all give each other DVDs that you want to watch yourselves.  I also keep hearing that it is a time for reflection on the year you've had and your hopes and dreams for the year about to come.

This would be much easier to achieve if I didn't go straight from finishing a university assignment into packing for America.  I finished a part of my university course last week and have a week to get it finished and handed in (even though the staff are currently on holidays) and I leave for America on Wednesday.  However, I figured if I had time to watch The Hobbit yesterday, I have time to do some blogging today, even if I have absolutely no idea what to say.

I am happy with the year I've had, I managed to quit smoking, achieve decent grades in my masters course, make some fantastic new friends and started a blog.  These are all accomplishments of which I am reasonably proud and they are balanced by almost nothing I regret or would do differently.

As for looking forward, there is so much stuff up in the air about next year that I haven't really made plans, although my hopes include doing as well, if not better at uni as I did this year, get fit and keep blogging and improving my blog (any suggestions as to how I could accomplish this are welcome btw).

For now, though, stress is the order of the day, so I'm going to stop procrastinating and finish the assignment so I can get back to packing.

A belated Merry Christmas to you all!

You learn something new... and sometimes wish you didn't

And today I learned of a traditional Christmas game, popular throughout the nineteenth century apparently, called Hot Cockles.  It seems those crazy uptight Victorians particularly enjoyed a game which consisted of burying your face in another person's lap and guessing who hits you from behind.

This game both confuses and scares me.  Clearly whoever came up with it was channeling Christian Grey or something because it sounds like a combination of physical and sexual abuse for funsies, oh those crazy Victorians.

For all the world may seem to be going to hell in a handbasket at times, it is comforting to know that this game, for all its previous popularity, is not played anymore.  To my knowledge.  And I'd really rather keep it that way so if you shove your face in someone else's privates while people hit you, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T TELL ME!

My attention was brought to this through a webcomic I enjoy immensely called Lit Brick which if you know it at all, shouldn't surprise you in the slightest.  If you don't know it I recommend you check it out.

Christmas Spirit

It seems we may have reached that time of year when Christmas is really starting to make itself known.  Not that it hasn't been in stores for a while - I overheard a conversation in a local supermarket about whether they could reduce the Christmas display to make room for the Halloween one this year.

However, as of this week the shops down the road from me have been putting Christmas pictures in the window, you know those kids colouring pictures that everyone makes a big deal about even though most of them look like a rainbow vomited all over the page. These are mostly like that except that some of the images are free drawings.
Mostly the drawings have been, well, pretty much what you'd expect but with more unicorns, but today I noticed a new one that made me lol right there surrounded by people who probably thought I was mentally deficient or something.  The picture was dominated by a rather good drawing of a Pikachu doing some sort of electric shock attack to Sant Claus while some kid (I'm assuming it's a self portrait) who is holding a poké ball makes off with a stack of presents.  Now I'm all for creativity and to be honest it was a very good picture but it was pride of place in this store's display and I couldn't help but wonder how this store thought they were portraying their view of Christmas when they chose this for the window.
Also, Santa had an expression of quite severe pain on his face, which makes me worried about this kid.  I don't think I know anyone who didn't think about stealing Santa's sack with all the toys, but no one actually wants to cause him pain.  That's kinda screwed up.