Tsaiberspace

We left Waikiki to see downtown Honolulu and Iolani Palace. Our route took us past the old judiciary building and one of the statues of King Kamehameha I. Downtown we saw some very colorful street markets, and had some limited-edition McDonald’s mango peach pies.

Shortly before our trip, the Hawaiian Kingdom Government had blocked access to Iolani Palace to all but those with Hawaiian bloodlines. By the time we arrived, the group had been relegated to a small area of the grounds, but were physically preventing people from viewing their proceedings (my brothers had curiously wandered over to see what was going on, and were physically shooed away by some big dudes). I was purchasing tickets for our group and missed this experience.

The audio tour of Iolani Palace itself is very thorough (almost a little too thorough) and very educational. The audio recording for each room has a full description of its significance, but also contains a good amount of historical context as well. Audio tours are one of the things Patrika and I do at museums on vacations, but even for me, I found myself wishing the audio snippets would hurry up so we could move on to the next station.

This “Pearl Harbor Museum” is not really a museum per se, and as such it might leave many visitors feeling disappointed. It is really just a memorial to the sailors on the USS Arizona when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Smithsonian-like exhibits one might be expecting to find, such as those on Japanese airplanes or US aircraft carriers and other WW2-era military technology, will be rather conspicuously absent.

The better expectation to set would be akin to a visit to Arlington National Cemetery or some similar site. There is a small museum, but in general, the USS Arizona Memorial is more of a quiet beautiful place than it is some kind of Pearl Harbor museum. The other related sites might be a better match for those interests, but I can’t say (we visited neither the USS Missouri, the USS Bowfin, nor the Pacific Aviation Museum).

The minimal museum does have a few interesting scale models of US and Japanese ships. There were also some Pearl Harbor survivors in front of the book store talking to people and doing book signings.

We arrived at 8am and the line already stretched out to the parking lot, with lots of people fighting for pictures at the front of the grounds. However, the line moved quickly, and we entered to get tickets for the 9:15am group to see the film and board the boat for the actual memorial. When we left around 11am, the line was completely gone (although there were plenty of people inside waiting for their memorial film showing and boat ride), leaving the grounds completely free for anyone to photograph without random people in the way.

We rented snorkeling gear from Snorkel Bob’s near Waikiki, for $32/week (their “Ultimate Truth” package). The rental experience was very smooth, with a very helpful staff. You can do inter-island drop-off and pick-up for certain kinds of equipment (boogie boards, but not snorkeling gear) to avoid having to lug them on the plane if you are island-hopping.

At their website, they also advertise snorkeling with DolphinExcursions.com, where they pick you up from your hotel and drive you to the launch site (1-hr drive) for a 2-hr excursion to swim with dolphins and fish.

I don’t know how I felt about the experience. The snorkeling itself was great; the water was very clear, with good visibility, and we saw lots of stuff (dolphins, fish, octopus, turtle). But a few things didn’t seem quite right:

• I felt weird about the way we “hunted” dolphins, where once they were spotted, the operator basically had everyone stampede to within some distance of the pod for viewing.
• At the second site, I did see the operator throw a muffin overboard prior to the dive, and later, after more thought, I think this was to lure the fish to the surface. That seems wrong on both ecological (don’t feed the fish) and marketing (see lots of fish) grounds.

This is our first trip to Honolulu, and in a short time we learned and saw some new things:

• Honolulu does not use Daylight Saving Time (timezone abbreviation is HST). This caused my auto-synchronizing atomic-clock timezone watch to get confused.
• Ala Moana is not in the middle of things at Waikiki. We are right next to the Hawaii Convention Center, and adjacent to the Ala Moana Shopping Center (an upscale-but-not-quite-high-end mega-mall). It is within walking distance to Waikiki (a hike), and a few blocks away from the Ala Moana Park and its beach.
• We saw many red-crested cardinals at Ala Moana Park (apparently, a.k.a. “Brazilian Cardinal” – an imported species).

Ala Moana Beach Park is 100 acres and is more of a local beach than a tourist beach. There are no fish in the shallow water, but the sand is very nice, the beach is very un-crowded, and the water very swimmable (no currents or rocks).

We are staying at the Ala Moana Hotel for a few days for a conference. Many things we read about this place were rather negative, but the hotel is undergoing renovation, so perhaps they completed the renovations just in time for our stay. Our room and the grounds are great: new and clean. The whole hotel is non-smoking; there are little signs in the rooms that say there will be a $200 room-cleaning charge for smoking.

The rooms are all very modernly-furnished and laid out, with lots of right-angled furniture and artwork everywhere. Each unit has a private lanai (we can see the ocean if we lean out over the railing), a dorm-room refrigerator, and free cabled internet access (WiFi is handled by BlueSocket and costs $10/day):

There are two perks to this hotel’s location:

• It is a five-minute walk to Ala Moana Park.
• It is a two-minute walk to the Ala Moana Shopping Center. For the hardened traveler, the benefit is not so much in the shopping (although there is a Foodland grocery store there) as it is in the large food court for quick meals.

More photos from New York:

Is New York really able to enforce “No Honking Zones”?

Sadly, the romantic gift shop is closed. And this really is on “Mott” Street; not an Engrish spelling of “Most Romantic”.

A first visit to New York cannot be complete without a visit to the Empire State Building.

Billboards and signs as far as the eye can see. And in New York, last call is at 4am, not 2am like all those other wussy cities …

It’s been less than 12 hours and we’ve already spent over $100 in taxi fares. Ugh.

JetBlue used to be my domestic airline of choice. They’ve got decent seats, each-to-their-own LCD screens, and all-you-can-eat snacks, including blue-corn chips.

But Richard Branson has got David Neeleman beat, hands down. On our first Virgin America flight, we experienced every cliché you could possibly imagine:

• Techno music to greet us upon boarding, and to see us off upon landing.
• Lots of neon blue and neon red ambient lighting to match the mood music.
• Obligatory metrosexual Asian steward and exotic Asian stewardess, and in general, flight attendants under the age of 60 whom you don’t have to feel bad for every time you see them walk by.
• High-five greeting upon exiting the plane, instead of the David Spade “buh-bye”.
• They fly out of SFO; no more trips to Oakland.

There was also some heavy-duty geek-friendly stuff going on:

• A/C power to each seat. My MBP’s legendary 4-hr battery-life prowess was not required for this 5-hr flight. When I was finished marveling at the presence of A/C power in coach class, I simply plugged in and recharged.
• The in-flight media entertainment has much to offer (movies, TV shows, music, games), and on top of all that, seems to be Linux-based to boot. I didn’t bother asking the flight staff any questions about it, but with game selections like “Penguin Command” and “Circus Linux!”, and with a distinct X-like hourglass cursor appearing every now and then, I had no doubt.

Virgin America, my new favorite domestic carrier. The bonus on top of all that, in this day and age of $4/gallon gasoline, was their relatively-bargain $389 round-trip price for SFO-JFK on the same weekend His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI was visiting New York.

Finally, the first nice weekend of spring: