2025 Family Hawaii Trip: Part II (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday)

[dorchadas]

This is the second of three posts about our 2025 Hawai'i trip. The first post is here.

I'm getting more used to Hawai'i. I don't bat an eye at all the surfer dues and beach bunnies wandering into shapes in their swimwear, nor do I think "But it's December!" when I walk out into another 25ºC sunny day. I suspect a big portion of it, though, is that this is my ideal food situation--Japanese food is plentiful and easy to get, and if I wanted to live on fish and rice and pickles and fruit, it would be very easy for me to do so here. Not cheap, of course, because nothing on Hawai'i is cheap, but easy.

sashagee is already trying to convince me to move here, half joking and half serious. There's a variety of problems with that. For example, there already aren't enough jobs for the people who do live here--over half of all native Hawai'ians live outside of Hawai'i--which puts a damper on any attempt to build a life here. My sister wanderluster_kp, who makes more than I do as a veterinary surgeon, is almost priced out of buying a house. She could afford it, but it'd lead to either an hour-long commute if she lived further away or having to completely give up travel if she bought something closer, andshe's not really willing to do either of those things. She also told us that the public schools here are not super great, which is something we have to really worry about now that we have Laila, and the Jewish community is almost nonexistent (0.5% of residents). But man does the food perfectly fit what I want to eat.


Friday
Fortunately Laila didn't wake up today until 6:15 a.m., with a brief wakeup at 4:30 a.m., and double fortunately it was my turn to sleep in so I slept in until 8:30 a.m. when sashagee came in and told me it was 8:30 a.m. and asked what I wanted to do, so I got up--still feeling a bit awful from the remnants of that cold--and took a shower. We ate breakfast (another yogurt bowl with tropical fruit and tropical fruit granola), and by that point it was almost 9:30 a.m. and we had to go to an actual appointment together: our tour of the 'Iolani Palace.

The only royal palace on American soil, the residence of the Hawai'ian monarchy from 1879 until its overthrow in 1893. I was originally hoping to get a tour on Wednesday, when they offer guided tours and on that particular day, there was their deluxe tour package where you go in at closing time and get to go behind the ropes and have an up-close look at many of the artifacts on display...but there was only one spot left and two of us, so we had to miss out. The tour we got was instead an audio tour, so after we put on the little booties they gave us so our shoes wouldn't damage the floor, we picked up our audio guides and got to touring:

I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting such a European-style residence for the Hawai'ian monarchs. This is the main staircase--the only staircase, as the guide pointed out, since there wasn't a separate stairs for the servants--in the center of the building. It's also the only original wood left in the palace, since a tropical climate is not that great for wooden structures. While checking something else, I looked up the building date of the palace and it turns out there was an earlier 'Iolani Palace that had to be torn down and rebuilt due to termite damage. It's like in Japan where you go to a wooden shrine and the plaque is like "This shrine was built in 753. It burned down in 923, 1054, 1201, 1389, 1555..."

The state dining room, where foreign dignitaries were entertained and formal dinners conducted. They had an example menu (this menu isn't the same but features similar dishes) which had mostly European food, including an after-dinner coffee service, which at first I was confused by but makes sense when the kitchen is for mostly state events--if you're the ruler of the Hawai'ian Islands, any visiting dignitary is going to be from hundreds of miles away and used to very different food than what's grown locally. I assume this is the same thing the Japanese did during the Meiji Restoration, where they conformed to European ideals of what made a civilized society in order to be accepted as a civilized. And it did work, since the guide mentioned that Hawai'i was the first indigenous nation to be recognized as sovereign by the European Great Powers like France and England. There was a gigantic portrait of King Louis Philippe in an adjoining room, gifted to Hawai'i by the French as a token of their esteem.

This is the Blue Room (name derivation obvious), used for smaller receptions. The portrait is of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last queen of Hawai’i before the monarchy was overthrown by a cabal of foreign businessmen with the aid of the American Secretary of State (though opposed by President Cleveland). She's very fondly remembered for a few reasons: she was the last queen; she was a noted composer and composed many songs in Hawai'ian, including the classic "Aloha 'Oe"; and in her will she established a trust for the purpose of educating native Hawai'ians in their culture and language, which is partially responsible for the network of Hawai'ian specialist schools that, being Jewish, I can only compare to day schools (partly secular education, partly cultural education).

This one was not sashagee's favorite dress--there were several other dresses that had flower accents that she liked better--but this is the only picture where the dress and her portrait are both visible.

The only throne room on American soil! The feather decorations on either side of the thrones are traditional symbols of a Hawai'ian chiefdom's authority, as is the central gold ball pierced with a narwhal tusk. The rest of the throne room is European style, including the side alcoves that musicians would be tucked into during an evening's entertainment, and the thrones themselves. The presentation here had a lot of mentions of ceremonies and the reception of foreign dignitaries, once again hammering home that the Hawai'ian Kingdom was officially recognized by the Great Powers of Europe.

The entire tour was about the lost grandeur of the monarchy, which, you know, I can't really blame the Hawai'ians for feeling. They had their own modern government, their own modern infrastructure of state--I was reading a comment on a recent post about the lawsuit against the Kamehameha Schools for racial discrimination (they only admit native Hawai'ians) responding to a joke about shells as money, and the comment was a furious history lesson about the metal coinage issued by the Kingdom of Hawai'i--their own diplomatic relationships with foreign powers, and it was all taken from them by outsiders. Then again, if you look up the history in full there's a bunch the tour didn't talk about, like how when the kingdom reformed the traditional land allotments they reallocated the land, giving two percent to the commoners and ninety-eight percent to the ali'i hereditary nobility. They also ruled that land could never be sold, only transferred to a lineal descendent, which does prevent the nobility from stealing that two percent but also, of course, makes their overwhelming share set in stone (or ink, as it were). They did, however, mention that King Kamehameha II formally abolished many of the old taboos relating to women, which had banned them from eating pork, coconuts, taro, and most significantly, from eating together with men. King Kamehameha III wrote the first Hawai'ian constitution, transforming the kingdom from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one. It did remind me a lot of Japan, going from an ossified feudal system to a constitutional monarchy in just a few decades in respond to contact with the outside world.

Unlike Japan, though, Hawai'i had no immunity to smallpox. By the reign of Queen Lili'uokalani, the native Hawai'ian population was about one-fifth of what it was when the first European landed on Hawai'ian shores. There was never any chance they would have maintained their independence--one of the reasons for the coup by American interests is that they were worried the Japanese Empire would annex Hawai'i if they didn't act first. And Japan was planning to invade after the coup, but stood down at the queen's request to avoid any bloodshed, and they had Hawai'i on their maps of the planned extent of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Sometimes there is no good ending.

After the tour, we were hoping to hear a concert, since the tour mentioned that the Royal Hawai'ian Band usually played at noon on Fridays. However, on this particular Friday, it wasn't playing due to the holiday, so we checked the gift shop for records of the Hawai'ian music that had played during the tour. They had CDs, but no records, so sashagee demurred, deciding that we'd go to a record store and see if we could find a record of it there.

I didn't mention it due to flow, but on the way into the palace grounds, we saw a group of teenage boys walking out with roosters under their arms. And on the way over to the ticket booth, we saw some police walking into the palace grounds, I presume looking for those dashed chicken rustlers.

We boarded the bus and went back to the Ala Moana shopping center, looking at the food court but deciding that maybe getting Sbarro or P.F. Chang's while on vacation in Hawai'i was a stupid idea, so we walked back to the neighborhood near wanderluster_kp's apartment. We were originally planning to go to the Chart House in a nearby hotel, but it was only open for dinner, so we instead went to the Menehune Grill inside...another hotel.

I had to get a mai tai. I'm on vacation.

I got poke and sashagee got swordfish fish and chips, which I tried a bit of--there's an ancient debate about whether swordfish is kosher or not, and if you google it you can see people arguing even now--and which were delicious. We ate our meal and shooed off the occasional bird that tried to steal our food, stopped in at Dave's for some ice cream, and then went back to the apartment. Poppa, Nana, and wanderluster_kp had taken Laila to the zoo while we were gone and they also all were back, so we hung out in the apartment for a bit before we eventually decided to go check out the sunset. It wasn't very exciting, unfortunately--there were heavy clouds rolling in, preceding the next day's rains, and the sunset was just a tiny blob of orange in the midst of vast sheets of grey--but it got us all out of the house.

Poppa got a nice picture of the family as we were walking, with some of the colors of sunset visible above:

After the sunset we went back to wanderluster_kp's apartment to eat dinner--leftovers--before waiting around for a while. Laila was going to get the special treat of staying up to go see the fireworks that the local hotels put on every night at 7:45 p.m., past her usual bedtime, so she watched some "pictures" (movies of herself) with Nana on Nana's iPad for half an hour or so, and then spent some time with wanderluster_kp using a laser pointer that she had gotten from a convention she went to. It had three different colors and several animal shapes, so Laila just kept saying "Um, how 'bout ceiling" or "Um, how 'bout fan" to ask wanderluster_kp to move where the laser pointer was pointing. She really loved it! Maybe we'll have to get one.

Then we gave her her medicine, all put on our shoes, and walked out.

It was raining lightly and pretty cloudy, but wanderluster_kp said that the fireworks usually happened without regard for the weather as long as it wasn't storming, and that was true. Laila got to see a few fireworks set off by excited locals (or maybe tourists who had somehow managed to smuggle them in?), before the main show began exactly on schedule:

Unfortunately we quickly ran into a couple problems. The major one is that the wind was blowing in just the right direction that the smoke all came right at us, and for a while the fireworks were blurry through the haze. The second is that while Laila likes fireworks, we've never been this close to a fireworks show before, so when the finale happened and the fireworks really got loud and rapid, they were all happening right overhead and Laila suddenly realized a bunch of explosions were happening very close to her. When we asked her about the show on the walk home, she said it was "very loud" and "too scary," though I did eventually get to admit that the fireworks were "so pretty" before that. I'll count that as a win, and after we put her to bed, we went to sleep pretty rapidly after that.



Saturday
The original plan for Saturday had been to go on a drive through the mountains, ending up on the North Shore, but after we woke up and got ready (Laila had finally awoken at a reasonable time), sashagee and I went outside to get her coffee only to find out that it was raining, something that none of our weather apps had reported--Carrot Weather told me it was partly cloudy and Apple's native weather app said it was cloudy. We walked through the light rain to Sunny's Local Grind, where sashagee got some coffee and a breakfast burrito, and by the time we left the rain had mostly stopped but it was still very cloudy. As such, when we got back, we all rethought out plans and eventually decided to go to the Waikiki Aquarium:

They were feeding a Hawai'ian monk seal when we arrived, one of only around 1600 individuals--this one was in the aquarium because it had kept trying to "interact" with humans, like leaping onto boats or surfboards, and after releasing it in the northwestern isles they did a checkup and found it was mostly blind, so they recaptured it and now it gets a cushy life in the aquarium, including eyedrop treatments for its cataracts.

Unfortunately, Laila wasn't super into this. After she hit me on the head a couple times--she was sitting on my shoulders--I took her off to a bench near the bathrooms and said that if she couldn't behave, we were going to sit over there while everyone else had a nice time looking at the fish. She eventually promised to listen and be good, but even while we were in the aquarium she never really took to it. Part of it is that it seemed like the aircon wasn't working in a portion of the aquarium and it was very hot and stuffy, and Laila has never done well with hot temperatures, but she might have just not been up for aquarium that day. Fortunately for her mood, the aquarium wasn't very large and we finished it in half an hour or so, after which we went back out into the relatively-cool weather.

After going home and eating lunch, we talked to Laila and asked her if she wanted to go to the beach, to which she of course said yes. The weather at this point had cleared up a bit to partly cloudy--thought of course my weather app said it was raining--so we had nice weather for chasing Laila around the man-made pool near Waikiki Beach. Despite all the toys we got for her, all she really wanted to do was run around, and later she ran over to the actual beach and started once again throwing rocks into the sea. Despite repeated attempts, sashagee and wanderluster_kp were not able to convince Laila to get on a boogie board:

She refused to lie down.

This lasted an hour or so until she decided that she was getting too cold. We told Poppa and Nana, who had spent the time relaxing in the shade of a palm tree, and we packed up all our things under the dark clouds and got Laila into the cart along with all the beach stuff, making sure once again to stop at Dave's for shaved ice again. This time, I got guava and mango, and the mango was much more tasty than the dragonfruit.

We had no more events planned, so we all went back to wanderluster_kp's apartment to clean off and relax. I talked with sashagee about dinner plans and she agreed to go to curry, since the weather was pretty cool and she thought curry would be a good meal for more mild weather, and after asking wanderluster_kp she agreed to come to, so we said goodbye to Poppa and Nana and walked the half a mile to the McCully Shopping Center to go to Coco Ichibanya, this time open!:

I got the mushroom curry with fried whitefish, sashagee got chicken katsu curry, and we got a kid's curry meal for Laila, which was just rice and corn with the sauce and some jello and ritz crackers on the side. Laila ate basically her whole meal and sashagee said it was delicious, so a job well done! I also thought it was great, though it would have been nice to have more control over the spice level--in Japan they let you pick from one to ten, but here it was just "mild" or "spicy." I picked spicy and it was just a slight bit of heat. When I asked wanderluster_kp, she said that traditional Hawai'ian food isn't spicy at all, so like Japan, there's not a lot of taste for spice on the islands.

After we were done with curry and cleaned Laila up as best we could, we walked downstairs to the Claw Kingdom now that sashagee had Laila here to show off to. Laila kept asking for me to put her down and I kept saying no--there were too many buttons and I was worried about her pushing them--but sashagee tried her hand at the machines after we bought $20 in tokens:

That $20 we spent actually paid off pretty well--sashagee won this plush and a star-shaped monster plush, and since she kept asking Laila to push the button to dispatch the crane, we could tell Laila that she was the one who won the prizes! We put our plushies in the clear bag they had given us, picked up Laila, and left. If we lived here, I have a feeling we'd be taking advantage of their rewards program, which said that if you win too many plushies you can give back the plushies you win in exchange for points and then exchange the points for rewards. sashagee is a claw machine fiend, to the point of watching videos of people playing claw machines and dreaming about the day she'll get to go to a Japanese arcade and play the claw games. This was a whole room of claw machines, so basically the next best thing, and now she has two wins to her name already.

There was a claw machine with Kirby plushies in it, but I wasn't willing to spend any extra money.

We walked back to wanderluster_kp's apartment just in time for Laila's bedtime, so we gave her her medicine and put her down to bed. After a couple incidents of her busting out of the room--a first for our trip, showing that she had finally adapted to the time change--she seemed to be calmed down, so sashagee and I took a short walk to get soft-serve pineapple ice cream. Once we got back, sashagee went basically straight to bed, and I only stayed up a bit to make sure the laundry was in the dryer. Once it was, I turned in.



Sunday
Laila finally woke up at 6:30 a.m., an actual reasonable time for a four-year-old, and I woke up with her. Basically everyone else was awake by 7 a.m., so I took a shower and got dressed. Our original plan was to leave when wanderluster_kp arrived and go out to brunch and then on a hiking trail on the North Shore of the island, since Poppa and Nana had generously agreed to watch Laila since this was the last day before wanderluster_kp had to go back to work, but when she arrived she said that the flat tire light in her car had come on and she didn't want to drive it very far. There was some commotion while we tried to figure out which tire was flat and what to do about it, but eventually we decided to take the other car that wanderluster_kp was borrowing and she would take her car to the shop later.

We arrived at YogurStory, recommended to me by my old schoolmate estory00, at 10:50 a.m., about two hours after our initial intended arrival time, but wanderluster_kp had the foresight to put our names in line so we arrived right when our name came up and got a table immediately. Everyone basically already knew what they wanted, so we put in our orders quickly and they came out:

This was what estory00 had eaten and what convinced sashagee to come here--the ube pancakes. The sauce was purple, the pancakes were purple inside and outside, and when she let me taste a little bit it was overwhelmingly sweet with a hint of a bit of ube. Delicious but personally, I wouldn't want an entire pancake's worth.

A smoked salmon benedict. I unfortunately did not eat the rice--after I ordered it, wanderluster_kp pointed out that the specks in it were probably spam because we're in Hawai'i--but the rest of it was delicious. I did have the option for white rice, and next time we go there, I’m taking it.

Thus fueled, we got back into the car and continued our trip. Our goal was Ka'ena Point, on the far northwestern part of the island, and since my sister lives in Waikiki that meant we had to drive basically across the entirety of O'ahu. O'ahu isn't a very large island, but it still took an hour, partially because of traffic, and as we drove the density thinned out, the city gave way to suburbs and then scattered houses on a narrow strip of land between the Wai'anae Mountains and the sea. A lot of the houses reminded me of rural Japan, actually, with slate roofs and single stories, or being built in a compound with several other houses all enclosed in a stone wall. I'm not sure how much of that is local culture and how much of it is Japanese influence. Like, every bus stop seems to have a shelter with a narrow sloped roof above that would fit right in on the streets of Kyōto.

Anyway, we arrived at the end of the road around 1 p.m. and parked a bit further back near the bathroom, so we'd know where a bathroom was when we returned and to make sure the car would always have people around it (violent crime is lower on Hawai'i but property crime is very high). After a stop at the bathroom, we began our walk on the trail, with the mountains on our right and the sea on our left.

This is at the trail head looking east, toward the north side of the mountains. We got there after about an hour of walking, including multiple stops trying to see if there were any whales nearby since it's mating season--and we did see at least one, spouting far out in the distance, but it never breached the water. The walk was rough, since the trail was out in several places and we had to go up on makeshift paths that walkers had made a bit up the mountains in order to get around the places where the sea had encroached on the land, and it while it wasn't very hot and there was a constant cool breeze from the sea, it was sunny and there was no shade to be had at all. But after an hour, we were standing near an old WWII-era pillbox in an albatross sanctuary at the far northwestern point of the island.

While sashagee and I were sitting down, we saw a Hawai'ian man standing rocks on their end on the path, and he said he did it to make paths and freak out any tourists who came by. He asked us if we knew any stories about the area, and when we said we didn't, he told us a story about two giants, one living on O'ahu and one living on Kaua'i, and they got into a battle and started throwing rocks at each other and as a result, you can find some rocks from Kaua'i around Ka'ena Point and some rocks from Ka'ena Point in Kaua'i. He also mentioned that Ka'ena was part of the path to the afterlife, since souls would follow the setting sun and thus Ka'ena was the last part of land they touch before they continued on to what awaited them. Those were unfortunately the only stories he could remember, and when wanderluster_kp returned--she had been looking for monk seals but came away empty handed--he bid us goodbye and went back around the other side of the pillbox.

The albatrosses didn't care about the heat or sun at all:

We sat down for a bit in the shade before getting up--it had been an hour and a half's walk to get there and we'd have to walk all the way back--and started our walk. As is the way of things, at least for me, the way back seemed a lot shorter than the way there, and it helped a lot that now we were walking into the breeze instead of along with it and also a bit of clouds had started gathering and covered the sun around halfway back. While we were walking, we noticed the moon was almost touching the top of the mountain:

We also were passed by a runner running along the trail, and as I moved out of the way to let him pass, he gave me a 🤙🏻 sign as he passed.

Around 4 p.m. we finally made it back to the asphalt path past the giant pools that marked the beginning of the path, and after washing our feet in the shower set up near the nearby beach, we piled in the car and headed to 7-Eleven for some well-deserved refreshments, having walked six miles in the hot sun. I got a protein smoothie and an Itō En green tea bottle, wanderluster_kp got lychee lemonade, and sashagee got a coconut water and some ice cream. We were only on the road for about twenty minutes before we stopped in at Don Quixote (called Dondon Donki here for branding reasons) to pick up some groceries. I managed to find momiji manjū right at the end, just before we went to the register, but we also got some snacks for the flight back and a few things we can eat before then. And all the while, the speakers intermittently played some in-store jingle that ran:

Don don don don donki, dondon, donki

It's stuck in my head even now.

When we got back, I tried to see if Laila wanted to go to Foodland to get poke with me, but she was adamant about not leaving, so walked the sixteen minutes over, bought poke, a seaweed salad, and a lilikoi bar (like a lemon bar but with lilikoi), and walked back. On the way back, I saw a legit gyaru, puffy socks and all, though in deference to her Hawai'ian origins she was wearing her seifuku shirt unbuttoned and tied over a bikini top.

I came back and ate my dinner while sashagee hopped in the shower, and when she got out Laila got one more episode of Bluey before it was bedtime.