Time Zone Tuesday

This view of Diamond Head is from the third floor of Sakamaki outside the room where I have class on Tuesday afternoons. All Tuesday afternoon. For six and a half hours. In a row. In the same room. It seemed like such a good idea when I was trying to fit a job around my class schedule.

OK, back to the time. Hawaii has its own time zone (in more ways than one). Hawaiian Standard Time is the official time that is four hours behind Colorado right now. When it is noon in Boulder, it's 8 am here. The state does not observe daylight savings, so the time here will not change next month. But it is getting dark earlier. You can see the setting sun reflecting off the building at the bus stop tonight after class.
The other kind of time here is referred to as "Hawaiian time." It pretty much means "We'll start when everyone is ready." It could also be referred to as "Island time" since it is common across populations. When you refer to "Hawaiian" here it means the ethnic group indigenous to the islands, not all the people who live in the state. Those people are "locals" or "kamaaina".This is the view of downtown Honolulu from campus. It's about three miles from the UH campus in Manoa to downtown. On Tuesdays, I catch the bus from campus to downtown and then change to the Kailua bus. It takes about an hour to get from campus to home, which is close to the time it took to get from CU to Gunbarrel by bus except here I'm going across the island and through the mountains.

Fresh Fruit

According to Rick the biology major, this is a Noni fruit. We walked by it this morning on the way to meet my ride-share. There were several of them nice and low so I could get a picture.

They were in the front yard of a house in the neighborhood I walk through. Other houses had lemons, tangerines and a tree I thought had oranges but Rick thought had grapefruit. They were much too tall for me to take a picture of without a zoom, which doesn't yet come with the iPhone. People bring fruit from their yards in to the office all the time. So far, I've gotten tangerines, little bananas and guavas (which I wasn't sure how to eat so I looked it up on the internet).

I sometimes think you could grow things here by just sitting in a field and thinking real hard about it. It is so different from Colorado's five-minute growing season. And things grow so big! This weekend we made guacamole from a large avocado Rick got at the Farmers Market and it was too much for us to finish -- one avocado made more than two people could eat. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture before I turned it into tasty mush.

This is the ripe papaya I bought at the Farmers Market on campus last Friday. It was Sunday breakfast before we went to the beach. The mango is next.

Big Trees, Weird Roots

The trees here are so amazing it will take several posts to describe them. I'm just going to show you two of them I walk past on the way to my office. They both have the weird root thing that is common here.
Not only are these roots huge, they look like they're trying to escape from the planter. Like these.
There are lots of these kinds of trees on campus. The other interesting tree looks like a haystack, except the roots are coming down from the tree not up from the ground.


And here's a picture of the bamboo trees that grow in the courtyard of Sakamaki Hall, the building where the philosophy department is housed. They are so graceful, they whisper as they slow dance with the wind.

(I know that's three trees and not two but I got carried away. The trees really freak me out.)

Sunday at Kailua Beach

It was cloudy today so the photos on the little iPhone are a little off. But it was a fabulous day at the beach.

Football Friday

There is a bar near campus that shows the UH Warrior football games on multiple screens. This week, they had a Friday evening game. Evening at Boise State is the middle of the afternoon in Manoa.
By complete coincidence, this bar has great Belgian beer. Among others. The line of taps is front and back the full length of the bar.There is also a sushi bar. When the sushi chef gets in, he turns the lights on so everyone knows they can order.The Warriors lost but we had a wonderful afternoon -- the breeze blowing through the open space that would be windows or a wall in another town.

Shangri La

For my birthday, Rick and I toured Shangri La. Rather, I should say ON my birthday because I celebrate for the entire month of October so this was just the kick-off event. I had read about the house while we were still on the mainland. It is in Honolulu and tours are arranged through the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The house was built by Doris Duke who was a fabulously wealthy woman for her entire life. She inherited a fortune from her father who died when she was 12. She lived very well and left an estate worth much more than she inherited. She owned several homes but this one in Hawaii is the only one she built. It houses her collection of Islamic art and architecture. When she died, it was opened to tours.

The front of the house is plain but inside is fabulous. Of course, they don't allow photos inside but there is a really good online tour at the website I have linked on the side of this blog. I'm just going to put in a couple of pictures I took for fun. It was OK to take pictures in the back yard and on the patio/deck/lanai.

Our guide was a lot of fun. He knew a lot about Duke and her life in Hawaii, the construction of the house as well as the Islamic art inside. (That's not the guide in the picture, that's Rick.) He had a contest to see who could recognize a particular pattern and I won so I got the first drink of water on our break. Wa-hoo!
The wall of windows is on an elevator machinery that allows them to be lifted or lowered (in different rooms) to open the room up to the back yard.
There are also wood screens that provide some privacy but allow the wind through. And there are draperies to cover completely -- three options for dividing the inside rooms from the outside room.There's even an outside couch.
To provide a foundation for the property, Duke dynamited the area and built it up. Probably would never pass an environmental impact test these days but she started it in 1935. It was a remote picnic location then. Now, it's part of an upscale Honolulu neighborhood near Diamond Head. Jim Nabors lives next door (Gomer Pyle).

Farmers Market Friday

Every Friday there is a Farmers Market on campus near the Student Center. This picture is actually from a couple of weeks ago because today I had my hands full with a back pack, lunch bag, and coffee cup. The Farmers Market is between the bus stop and my office so I was still carrying all the stuff it seems to take to get through the day. I bought a really ripe papaya and an almost ripe mango because Rick loves fruit for breakfast. I also got a bag of fresh mint. (Probably withered mint wouldn't sell well.) There was lots of other stuff, too, but Rick goes to the Kailua Farmers Market on Thursdays so I just get whatever was missing there or he forgot.
I walked in one side of the covered walk way, picked up my fruit, paid for it and it was raining as I stepped out. It happens just that fast. It's kind of like the sprinklers on the produce aisle at the grocery store, except there's no fake thunder to warn you. Water just starts falling from the sky, often with the sun still shining. Here in Manoa, it is usually just a quick shower and it's gone. In Kailua, the rain comes just as quickly but it's more like a fire hose opened and then shut. As I got off the bus last night, the air was completely clear but water was rushing in the gutters (and on low places in the sidewalk) from a quick downpour that I had just missed. As a consequence, students carry umbrellas in the side pocket of their backpacks that is designed for a water bottle. Makes it much easier for quick-draw coverage. This plant is outside the door to my building. It still had some rain drops but the rain had stopped so I could manage to take a picture while juggling the closed umbrella and now-empty coffee cup.

Shopping on Oahu

Ok, first things first. There is no Target on this island. I know! I tried the store locator button on Target.com. It just spun around for awhile and then got lost in the Pacific.

I could deal with that. But also, no Bed, Bath and Beyond. I was severely dismayed. There was a BBB coupon in the book I bought, surely there would be a store somewhere on Oahu, right? Wrong.

But, the harshest reality -- online shopping. In Boulder, I clicked and shipped at will. Quickly, cheaply, reliably. Once removed to Hawaii, however, I learned the cold, hard truth. Most of the websites I used to shop at do not ship to Hawaii at all. If they do, it is at a huge cost that outweighs the advantages of low price (or makes the purchase itself a really bad idea). Only Amazon still ships at the same cost as on the mainland. If something qualifies for free shipping on Amazon, it includes Hawaii. I have purchased school supplies, a rain jacket, day pack, travel coffee mug, swim suit, books and a sailing hat on Amazon. I was always a fan of Amazon but I am now positively addicted.

There are two major retailers that fill in all (most?) of the blanks.

One is Wal-Mart. This is the store in downtown Honolulu. Some of the merchandise is different, much is the same. Thank God. (I never thought I would say that.) (Ever.)

Lunch at the Sustainability Courtyard

You can pick up a fruit smoothie or an entire pineapple at this food stand on campus. It is in the Sustanability Courtyard near my building. The vendors serve vegetarian food and provide recycling, which is not nearly so ubiquitous as at CU.

School day

This is the morning sun on the trees on my walk across campus this morning. I've been trying to get on the express bus from Kailua to UH which means being at the bus stop by 6:30 am. It's hideously early but I don't have to change buses (it goes from the corner by our condo to campus) and I get work done during the day. I want to be able to have weekends free to play, but I also don't get much homework done in the evenings so I'm trying to push the reading to early morning. This is the third morning in a row that I've made it, so maybe it will get easier :)