This is the front of the building and the street it's on.
Then there's the dining room, kitchen, and living room.
Next the bedrooms and the views.And then just some random pics.

St. Patty's Day Block Party!

Reddy, Björn, Eddie, Freddie, Tevis and Christian
Reddy, Björn, Eddie, Freddie, Tevis and Christian
Me, Freddie, Eddie, Heather and Jas.
Me and Jas.

Christian, Björn, Jas, Me, Eddie (Jas's boyfriend), Freddie, Reddy

Happy Birthday To Me...

On January 18th I had my 24th birthday. This means that I am now old, decrepit, and in need of a cane.
But seriously, I had a fantastic birthday! In the morning I went to $2.75 breakfast with Jen and Rob (don't knock it till you try it!), and had pancakes, hashbrowns, and scrambled eggs. When I got back and checked the mail box, my parents had sent me a great present, a box of candy from the Big Island Candy Company, and I've eaten almost the whole box already...! Then I spent a lot of the day at the mall with Jasmine shopping around for something exciting to buy. I wanted to get a ring at NaHoku, the Hawaiian jewelry store, but they didn't have my size. So I ended up getting some stuff to pamper myself at Origins which is just as good!
Later that night some of my friends and I went to Duke's Canoe Club for dinner and I even got a birthday cake! It was a massive slab of Hula Pie with a candle on top that as soon as I blew out, everyone attacked. Needless to say that pie didn't last long with 6 of us gobbling! Everyone sang me Happy Birthday and embarrassed me in front of all the tourists :) Above is a picture of me that Jasmine took (probably as blackmail), and that is the infamous Hula Pie. If anyone comes to Waikiki, I highly recommend this delicacy. It takes at least 2 people to finish it so eat lightly...Here are a couple of pics of all of us at the dinner table. In the first one there's Jen, Rob, and Jen's new roommate Ashley. In the second one there's Linda, Me, and Jas.
We had a good time though and after 2 Hawaiian Iced Teas, I was ready to head to Magoo's for college night. We hopped on the bus, thankfully it came on time, and went to the bar. There were a lot of people there so it was a good time to go. Everyone got a pitcher and sat down to hang out and have a good night. Jen and Rob decided to get cheesy bread and i managed to stuff down a piece, sooo good!
And here is a pic of me holding up my nearly completed pitcher of Sam Adams. I managed to pawn off almost 2 full glasses on Rob because I knew I couldn't even come close to finishing the whole thing by myself. I was a trooper though and gave it my best since it was, after all, my birthday and Jasmine bought it for me. Couldn't let it go to waste!
We spent the rest of the night taking photos and having conversations with random 30year olds who were planning on changing the world but couldn't seem to get a handle on their lives... That conversation didn't last long because one guy was a bit of a jerk so I went to hang with Jas and her friend Gopal and some people he'd brought.
Earlier in the evening Linda and I had been standing by the bathroom in an epic line, when this random chick just ran into the bathroom, cutting in front of at least 10 girld desperate to get in, and jumped in the ONLY working stall!! A near fist fight almost ensued between the cutter and some other girl she cut in front of. Some guys were pulling them off each other while they screamed insults and waved fingers across the bar. Interesting entertainment but I'm glad I didn't get in the middle of it.
Around 1.30am I started to get reeeally tired (see, I AM old!) so we called it a night, got a cab and took off for Waikiki. All in all a very good birthday!!

More Pics From Waimanalo

I managed to pull the pics off of my cell phone so this post is dedicated to the 3 pics that I took. They actually turned out pretty nice so I have to say I'm proud of my little phone, it did well :)

Waimanalo Bay And Great Shave Ice!

On Sunday 6 of us went to Waimanalo Bay on the East shore of Oahu to check out the beach. We had been planning on going the previous Wednesday but ended up just hanging around looking at pics on the internet. Ben was searching online while Juanita and I were practicing Salsa dancing on the balcony (she rocks, I suck) when he made us take a look at some fantastic photos. There before us was what looked like an unspoiled beach, 2 miles long, where hardly any tourists (the plague of the earth) ever visited because they always get off the bus too soon at Hanauma and Sea Life Park.
We plotted and planned to make it on Saturday for a full day of beach going. Life doesn't ever work out how you want it though, and after a rather wild impromptu dance party at Jasmine's apartment on Friday night where there was lap dancing (much to James's joy) and cheese crackers falling from the heavens onto our lanai, no one was in any kind of condition to wake up early. Particularly not Ben, Rob, Jennifer and I because we'd gone swimming at 3am in our undies in Waikiki. We didn't think it was necessary to take the time to run to our separate apartments to change into our swimsuits. Can you blame us?
Saturday was spent with Rob and Ben running around between Sam's Club (great cheap pizza!!), Ritz Camera, and some other random stores in search of a camera for Ben. He had to have one before we went to Waimanalo so finally we found a really nice Fuji, he bought it, and we went swimming at Ala Moana Beach Park right across the street from the mall. Ok, bad idea. The water was warm but it was really dirty with a ton of algae and mossy gunk floating around. This is because there is a man-made wall of rock and sand that breaks the waves so nothing crashes on shore to wash the gunk away. We soon tired of it and took the bus back home.
Later that night a large group of us decided to have movie night as an alternative to going to the Hano Hano room at the Sheraton Waikiki. The club is called Skyline and incredibly worth the $15 cover you pay to get in, but most of us were broke and didn't feel like partying after the previous night so we rented the Lake House, bought Haagen Daazs, french fries, and Oreo cookie shakes and settled down for a nice relaxing night.
On Sunday morning we got up bright and early (10am) and sallied forth to the beach. The bus ride wasn't that long, about 45min, and when we got there it was warm with clear skies and a beautiful white beach with turquoise water awaited us. I took pictures with my camera but I've had some trouble pulling them off. Hopefully I can manage to do it and post them here because the pics I do have are all from later in the day.
All six of us made a rush for the water and floated around, dunking each other, splashing, and doing handstands until we got tired. I went to sit down and read and ended up waking up about 30min later and everyone had wandered down the beach without me! They came back pretty quickly though and we decided that plate lunch was in order. There was a tiny hole in the wall about 20min away so we walked over there and ordered pure fat for lunch. But oh! What good tasting fat it was! Then, being the pigs we are, we ordered shave ice. I had lilikoi, coconut, and pineapple with vanilla macadamia nut ice cream on the bottom. Jen had kona koffee ice cream only, Rob had exactly what I had (copy cat), and Ben had some nasty lime and lilikoi concoction that was waaaay too sweet for me.
After stuffing ourselves to the gills, the four of us went back, but this time to Waimanalo Beach Park. It's closer than Waimanalo Bay and we were too full to waddle back to the bay. We'd ended up losing Ping (Jennifer's roommate) and Chen-yu (Rob and Ben's roommate) after food which was too bad because Waimanalo is beautiful in the evening. The water was still warm at 5pm and we played king of the sandbar. There was a little sandbar under the water and each side sloped off into deeper water (we were still about chest deep even on the sandbar) so we (Rob and I) decided to fight it out. I ended up calling a truce and promising him half the bar but he tried to trick me in to shaking his hand so he could judo throw me off the sand. I wasn't stupid enough to fall for it :)
The last bus went home at 6.40pm so we had to cut our visit short. We showered off in the cold, clean water that feels so good after the ocean, changed, and hopped on the bus. It was such a fantastic day and the beach was so great that I know we're going to head back.
Living in Hawai'i has been one of the best decisions of my life! I've met so many incredible people, made great friends, and I've seen so so much of the island in just under 2 months. I can't believe that I've already been here for that amount of time, it just doesn't seem real yet that I live in Hawai'i. Hawai'i!!! I live here! Jennifer, Cristie and I always say that, almost on a daily basis. None of us can believe that we're living in paradise and we feel like we're the luckiest people on the planet :)

Stupid Camera

My camera has been acting up so I went today to Best Buy to have them fix it. It is now on its way via the mail somewhere out to the wild blue yonder where hopefully it will be retrieved, fixed, and sent back to my loving arms. Apparently I've over-loved it and it needed a well-deserved spa vacation.
Basically this means that I must rely on other people's cameras to take pictures and hope that they let me rip them off their computers to post here on the blog. I do apologize for the brief pause of pictures since it's going to take a minimum of 2 weeks to either fix or replace my camera.
Tomorrow I'm going to Waimanalo Bay to swim and run around on the beach. I'll keep everyone updated on how things are going. Hope you're all doing well!

Kapena Falls

Last Saturday (I always seem to do things on Saturdays) a very large group, about 12 of us, went to Kapena Falls. We left in the afternoon and hopped on the bus. As usual our trip to get where we were going was not that short. We got to downtown Honolulu and waited for our bus connection for about 30min until we realized that the #4 bus didn't pick up at our bus stop. We called TheBus and they told us to walk down 2 blocks and then up 1. We did and then had to wait for another 50min because we'd just missed our bus by about 10min. Whoops.
When we finally got on our bus, the bus driver asked one of the guys where we were headed. So he told him a waterfall and the bus driver said that there are no waterfalls where we were headed. There really is but we decided that he was just keeping the "tourists" from finding a really good spot. This waterfall, you just wouldn't know it was there because it's in such an odd place. We went up Nuuanu Ave. past a rather large cemetery, until we saw the Honolulu Community Church. That was our stop. Everyone piled off the bus and followed Ben and Rob down the driveway of the church until they abruptly stepped off of it into a wood compost heap, then continued on through a ton of underbrush. I can tell you that everyone was thinking "where the hell are you taking us??"
Then we arrived at a chain link fence with a hole just big enough in it for us to squeeze through. I threw down my backpack and climbed through only to be confronted with a rather steep embankment with lots of sneaky vines and roots that grabbed at my feet while I tried to go down. I finally made it and we tromped through a lot more brush until we saw it up ahead.
The waterfall itself isn't very big, just a grouping of rocks with water that flows down the sides. There is also a huge pool right underneath it and it's really really hard to touch bottom. If you're facing the waterfall there is a 40ft wall of rock that is right above the pool that you can throw yourself off of into the water.
Immediately everyone stripped off their clothes down to their swimsuits and ran up the steep side of the hill to get to the top of the jumping rock. Well, everyone except for me and 2 other girls. We decided to wait it out and see how we felt about jumping because it was really high. I'm rather terrified of heights if I know I have to jump them so I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it off the rock. The feeling of dropping in my stomach is not pleasant and neither is the rush of adrenaline because it makes me feel rather icky. Adrenaline in an exciting situation, good! Adrenaline in a scary jumpingoffrockstomydeath situation, bad.
I ended up taking pictures of everyone and their mother jumping off and pretty soon I decided to climb up and see what all the hype was about. This was my first mistake. I got to the top and I realized just how high it was. You see it didn't look that bad from the bottom so I figured maybe I really could get up, not look over, run, and make a speactacular flying leap out into the abyss before gracefully landing in the water below. HAHAHA! Yea right. I crept to the edge and looked over. That was my second mistake. While I was standing there looking over, one of the guys launched himself off and I had to watch him all the way down. The fall was so long that he had time to flail his arms around like a frightened bug before he splashed down. I backed off very quickly and spent about 10min wrestling with my better judgement about jumping until it won out and I climbed back down the side of the hill to jump off of a tamer rock about 8ft high.
The rest of the day was spent swimming in the pool, watching people jump off the rock, watching people use the rope swing and swing super high then drop doing flips and dives, and sitting in the waterfall. Like I said earlier, it was pretty small but powerful. Some of the guys were sitting in it letting it run down over them and they invited me to give it a try. They helped me down and told me where to sit, insisted that I lie back into the water, and in the process I almost lost my bikini top and bottoms! The water was really strong flowing over the rocks and when it hit my body it was with a lot of downward force. Downward force + bikini = potential disaster. I was holding on for dear life and after a while I decided that a show would be inappropriate so I got out ;)
One of the girls, Jennifer, showed up a little later. She decided that she would give the giant rock a chance and climbed up to the top. By the time Jasmine, Colby, Ben and I left about 30min later, she was still up there debating the wisdom of her idea.
After we left, we decided that the four of us were dying of starvation so it was time to go get some grub. Plate lunch sounded good so we went to Rainbow, a little hole-in-the-wall that serves the best plate lunch you'll ever have. For those of you that have never heard of/eaten plate lunch it's the most fattening thing you'll eat in a while. It's 2 scoops of white rice, a ton of macaroni salad swimming in mayo, and whatever fried/bbq'd/cooked meat you wanna eat with it. I had the mahi mahi and by the time I was done I could hardly move. However, Ben decided that all we needed now was a malasada to top things off. He then proceeded to drag us about 25min more down the street to Leonard's bakery.
Malasadas are kind of hard to explain if you've never eaten one but I'll try. They're like little round puffs of donut dough with custard filling, fried, and then rolled in granulated sugar. They have different fillings or they can just be that dough fried alone, but they're good. Oh So GOOD. And they're cheap, about 80 cents each! Needless to say I could only eat one after that huge fried meal. It was a good thing that we had a niiice long walk ahead of us before we made it home or I would've felt like even more of a pig than I did :)