Our Week in Hawaii (August, 2001)
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Image courtesy of Virtual Hawaii Image courtesy of The University of Hawaii Department of Engineering.	August 10, 2001, Kailua, Hawaii We left after midnight to drive to Minneapolis and catch our plane to Hawaii. The night was very dark, despite a half-moon, and there was very little traffic on the road at first. I kept imagining deer racing across the road and wrecking us, and I asked Rita to tighten her seat belt. Moments later we rounded a curve in the highway and illuminated a female deer standing broadside to us, just inches from the road. We were past in the blink of an eye, and nothing happened. But the speed at which these things occur, and the precious split-second one gets to respond, made me especially alert. Then we passed a deer carcass on the side of the road within another minute. I spent the rest of the 4-hour trip vigilant for deer, but we never saw another one all night. MORE
Image courtesy of Hawaii Aloha Accomodations.	After a longish journey filled with many of the normal travel annoyances, we have landed on Oahu. We've got a nice little "cottage" inland, but with a pool, which is like a guest house type deal. People here actually say things like "Muhalo" to each other, which is like some sort of rejoinder/achnowledgement; but nobody has said "Aloha" in my hearing. On the other hand, half the businesses use it: Aloha Travel, Aloha Taxi, Aloha Mini-Mart. I also heard one surfer-looking dude address another as "Bra". MORE
Image courtesy of Tellus Consultants Ltd.	Funniest Hawaiian moment so far We're in the grocery store to stock up our little pantry, and come across the frozen meat section. There sits this football sized plastic bag and I see, after a second, that it's a full octopus, legs and all: about 3 pounds for $20. This is unusual, yes, and I point it out to Rita. She hoists the thing and wants to go get the camera. But the bag is actually quite frost-lined, indicating it's been there for a longish while, and the picture probably wouldn't come out. By the looks of it, even here the whole octopus is not a big seller. MORE
Image courtesy of The University of Hawaii Department of Engineering.	When you decide to inhabit an island, you should choose a flat, rectangular one. Oahu is far more up-and-down than I'd imagined, with tall rocky peaks and steep valleys that jag up from sea-level to around 4,000 feet at the highest point. Oahu is also a 7-sided irregular polygon, shaped something like the profile of a dog's skull (if you use your imagination). MORE
Image courtesy of Tropic Rhythms Photography Image courtesy of the Bishop Museum and the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau	We have now been to a Luau, and it's all we expected, and more. Most of Monday was spent hiding from the sun in various ways. We were a little bit muscle-sore, and medium sun-burnt from the one snorkel outing on Sunday. So we rested a lot, ate a lunch, and browsed a used bookstore (I got another John Le Carre novel, to follow the one I devoured on the flight over, and also something by Elmore James, whom I've long wanted to read and never have). The two things we needed to do were connected. One, turn up at the conference in order to register and collect my materials. And, two, among those materials find tickets so we could attend the Luau. Both these goals entailed driving down to the bowels of Honolulu and, after consulting the map, we decided to take a different route: one that would involve negotiating the Likelike Highway. MORE
Image courtesy of the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau	This morning we fought our way from Kailua to downtown Honolulu so I could give my talk. Hawaii is a funny place in many ways, not least because the traffic is amazing. First, it is dense. There are sometimes bumper-to-bumper messes that last seemingly for hours. MORE
Image courtesy of the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau	August 17, 2001, Kailua, Hawaii Hawaii is a land of about three jokes, and you hear them replayed all the time. Here's one: a performer comes onstage, or a tour guide gets up to speak, or a driver gets on a tour bus (or, no kidding, a security guard sees a line form at the airport), and they say "Alooooo-haaa" real loud, and then cup their hand behind their ear, waiting for a response. The crowd, yells back, "Alooooo-haaa", usually not too loud, and the performer says "that was terrible", and then you go through it again, louder. MORE