Hawaii

Well, I’m sort of sick of studying for my two finals tomorrow at the moment, so I figure now is as good a time as ever to make an entry for Hawaii .

In Hawaii , we docked in two ports again. And no, I have no idea why these multi-port countries are all at the end of the voyage. Anyway, our first port was Honolulu . The first day I went to the USS Arizona Memorial, and it made me think of my Grandpa and how he was stationed in Hawaii during WWII. If the pictures of the harbor of the day the Arizona was sunk are any indication of what the harbor looked like during WWII (and I have no idea why they wouldn’t be), then it’s changed a lot since my grandpa was there.

The rest of that day I basically spent making phone calls and texting. My original plan was to call my parents and to keep contact with everyone else for after SAS (excluding email, of course), but since my friends were either being boring (i.e. sleeping) or doing things I didn’t really want to do (i.e. shopping), I decided using the phone now that I could do so without being charged absurd amounts of money for it. It was nice to hear some of your voices again, and over break/when I get back to school, it’ll be great to talk to all of you I didn’t get a chance to call in Hawaii .

The second day in Hawaii, I went shopping with Michaella and some other girls for awhile, but I decided that what I really wanted to do was snorkel even though nobody else wanted to pay $8 to go to the best snorkel spot on the island. So I went by myself, and I’m glad I decided to go. I saw plenty of humuhumunukunukuapua’a, an eel (which terrified me and made me make the closest approximate to a scream one can make through a snorkel), several different parrotfish and butterfly fish, and other things I can’t remember. It was pretty neat. The bus ride back took longer than expected, however, and I made it on the ship 6 minutes before we had to be on board. That was the closest I’ve ever come to having dock time.

And now I guess I owe an explanation for dock time. OK. So for every port, we had to be on the ship 2 hours before it departed, and for every 15 minutes we were late, we got 3 hours of dock time, which basically means at some point during the next port, those with dock time had a 3-hour period (or more) period during which they couldn’t get off the ship. Since there is no port after Hawaii besides San Diego , if I had gotten dock time, I probably would have missed out on the Ambassador’s Ball or something.

Anyway, the next port was Hilo , Hawai’i (as in The Big Island). The first day started off uneventful, but eventually Nick, Jacob, and I went snorkeling. We saw a lot of the same fish I’d seen in Hanauma the day before, but it was of course still cool to see them again. I also had an exciting encounter with a rip tide when I went too far out in my quest to see more fish, and a life guard had to help me out of it since I was basically swimming in place for a few minutes. I’d like to think I would have made it back eventually, but that is probably wishful thinking, and it was nice not to have to fight Mother Nature, so I am very grateful to that lifeguard.

Another cool thing about that beach is that it had sea turtles! The poor things (3 of them) were stuck in a small pool, probably because they’d gotten stuck there during high tide. I hope they made it out eventually, but I’m glad I got the chance to see them, because they were really cute.

The next day I went with SAS to Volcanoes National Park . I’m bummed I didn’t get to see any live lava flows (those are happening outside of the park grounds at present), but I did see a lot of other cool stuff. For example, we saw sulphur vents and sulphur crystals, steam vents, walked through part of an extinct lava tube, and saw a lot of VOG (volcanic smog). The trip also included a hike down to, across, and out of a small crater. Of course, this crater was only small in relation to other craters, because it looked pretty enormous to me. Anyway, I was dreading the hike because our tour guides said it would be “moderately difficult,” and after trying Table Mountain I knew I couldn’t handle much, but I should have guessed that SAS’s idea of “moderate” is easier than what my parents try to force me to do in California . You know it’s easy when I am more or less leading the group. Anyway, it was a really nice hike (4 miles, most of it either flat or downhill), and it was good to get some exercise, plus part of it was through a rainforest and the other part was across the crater floor. So yeah, that was pretty neat.

And that was more or less Hawaii . I should have eaten more pineapple, but I did make an effort to drink pineapple juice and eat pineapple anywhere I saw it on a menu. But seriously I should have just eaten pineapple the whole time because food is expensive in Hawaii .

So now that we’re done stopping in ports, now it’s finals time (joy!). I had one today, which wasn’t too bad…well, actually, it was terrible if you account how much time I put into studying for it. Our professor gave us the questions ahead of time and said we could bring whatever we could fit on one side of a sheet of printer paper to the exam, so I typed up very extensive notes, made them 4-point of some random tiny font, and was ready to go. But seriously, I spent a long time working on those notes. Anyway, tomorrow I have 2 exams, but they shouldn’t be too terrible…I hope. I’ve spent a long time studying for them already, and I plan to go over my notes again for both classes and add more stuff to the study guide I’ve been filling out for one of the classes. I realize my studying strategies really aren’t the most thrilling topic in the world, so I think that’s all for now.