aloha.

These first couple of days have been very unique from my other visits to the Hawaiian Islands. I've been 3 other times so far, but only to the island of Maui (the second-largest island). I'm on the third-largest island, Oahu – home of the capital of Hawaii, Honolulu, and the memorial of Pearl Harbor.


The trip here was long and dull. 6 hours driving in the car to Las Vegas, an hour and a half to fly up to San Fransisco, and 4 (it felt like 6) hours flying across the Pacific Ocean to get to Oahu. It feels good to stand.

I'm typing this at 6:01 Hawaiian time. In Utah, though, it's 10:01pm. The time difference is on my side here. When it's 11am in Utah, it's 7am here. I get to sleep in and wake up early at the same time, however, that also means I have to fight to stay awake. I'd like to enjoy some night-time attractions, but that really depends on how well my family (more specifically, my dad) feels about moving around.

Today my family went to the Pearl Harbor memorial. It was very informative. The United States Memorial people are doing a better and better job each year of recreating past events in cool ways, like displaying important historical artifacts and pictures. All the events of Pearl harbor are very detailed, and I don't wonder how the events started or what happened. Basically, the Japanese wanted to expand their currently-growing empire, so they wanted to cripple the American fleet, the only power able to go up against the Japanese, long enough for the Japanese to conquer the Pacific before the Americans could rebuild and fight back. It looked like it worked at first, but we Americans are incredibly stubborn and only come together whenever an attack like this happens. How appropriate it was to visit this memorial on September 11; it feels like the American spirit kicked in today 10 years ago as well as December 7 of 1941.

When we entered the memorial grounds, we were followed by a giant group of Chinese folk on a guided tour. Unfortunately, we met up with these same folk during the joined movie/trip over to the USS Arizona memorial. During the movie, they took pictures, talked, and after a bit, a few of them even fell asleep and were snoring loudly. The park rangers asked everyone to remain silent on the boat ride over to the memorial and at the memorial itself. These tourists didn't understand a word of English. My dad politely asked their tour guide (who thankfully spoke English) to ask his group to respect the memorial and quiet down. This mostly worked on the boat. On the memorial, however, everyone was chatting and pointing and acting like they were in some fantasyland. When it was time to leave the memorial, all the Chinese got on the boat and the Americans kind of lingered to have their own silent memories of the place.

It was a solemn Sunday. All the flags were at half mast for 9/11. The overall environment was perfect (with the exception of the Chinese). Funny thing is, though, we did run into a Japanese tour group later on. They were extremely well-behaved. Can I admit I was a bit proud of that, having Americans and Japanese respect these events together?