Greece Journal: 2003 part 1

I lived in Athens, Greece from 1965-1976. I speak Greek quite fluently. Between 1976 and 2003, I lived in the U.S., raised children, worked, worked, and worked, but in 2003 I returned. That is a gap of more than 25 years.

I was traveling alone, and thus felt much more comfortable having a purpose to my trip. I would do linguistics research on the situation of the Macedonian community in northern Greece. ( The research has since been presented at an academic conference at Ohio State, and gained me an A as I finished my M.A., so in the end my mission was accomplished.)

Greece was preparing for the Olympics, and construction construction was everywhere in Athens. There was a new airport.

I hopped on a bus to go to the Royal Olympic Hotel, owned by Saki Papadimitriou, whom I had last seen some time before 1976. A friend had been his girlfriend, and we saw him quite often. I wrote to tell him I was coming, and he wrote me back saying that it would be nice to see me, and my stay would be complementary. I was gratified at his warmth and generosity. After all, we hadn't seen each other in 25 years.

The bus driver asked where the bus passengers were staying, and seemed open to suggestion as to where he should stop. Giggling, excited American tourists were asking him to take them to their hotels, and he flourished many an "okay." When I asked him in Greek to take me to the Royal Olympic. He lifted his chin toward the ceiling -- the "no" gesture. "We don't go there."

"But you're stopping at many other hotels. Couldn't you stop at this one?"

"Oxi -- no." Abrupt.

I sullenly took my seat on the bus, prepared to either haul around my suitcases or get a cab when we got to Athens. One by one the tourists were dropped at their hotels, leaving me the lone passenger.

"Hey!" He called back in Greek. "Where do you want to go?"

I went up to stand next to him "The Royal Olympic."

"I know where that is. Are you Greek?" He began to chat with me, taking one hand off the wheel for frequent hand flourishes.

Though he had irritated me, he had me where he wanted me, and I didn't want to piss him off. He might change his mind.

"No. I'm American."

"How come you speak Greek?"

"I used to live here."

He laughed. "You speak Greek well."

"I haven't been here for 25 years."

He gave me a rundown on what had happened in the last 25 years. He said I should be sure to see the new Acropolis area, and declared Athens "beautiful now."

"I've read that the air is very polluted. Is that true?"

He wrinkled his brow upward and raised an open hand from the steering wheel. "What can we do? That's progress."

He not only took me to the hotel, but he helped me with my bags, chatting and laughing.

I realized I was back in the Greece I knew and didn't like so much. They toy with you. Their reactions to you have nothing to do with anything more than whim. First they insult you brazenly, then embrace you as if you were family.

I had an unpleasant feeling in my stomach as I entered the hotel and asked for Saki. I was looking forward to hearing about his last 25 years. He's an interesting man.

"He is in the bar," the woman at the front desk said, and I left my bags there and walked up the marble stairs into the bar.

How is it that two men sitting at a table having a coffee can look like conspirators in an international plot? That is how Saki looked in the corner of the bar. Greek men love to look "spudeos -- important," and nothing is as spudeos as having a secret, so they often speak as if they had one. It always looked silly to me.

I was delighted to see Saki, and it showed in my smile as I reached my arms out as I walked across the marble floor toward him. I was shocked to see how old and frail he looked as he rose from his seat. His skin was sallow, his body strained.

From the way he greeted me, I realized that he did NOT want me joining his conspiracy in the corner. It flitted across my mind that since I was a 60 year old woman, not a 30 year old beauty, I would be of no use at his conspirators' table. If I had been a 30 year old prize to show off, no conspiracy could have kept him from flaunting me..

He said he was busy now, and made no offer to see me any other time. I wrote him a note on the hotel stationery, saying I'd love to see him, but never heard back. Despite his generous offer of a gratis shotel room, I got a bill and, of course, did not protest. Saki owed me nothing. His offer had been an empty flourish. It did annoy me because his hotel is not cheap, and I had not factored in the hundreds of dollars it would cost me.

So I was greeted with the same kinds of brazen rudeness and self-interested crassness that I had always experienced in Greece. I had spent many years observing and experiencing Greek ways, and needed no more than a few hours to realize that despite the shiny Olympic veneer, it was the same old place. The only difference was that now I was better able to protect myself, and had a nuanced perception of the motives behind their ways.

The Royal Olympic is very close to where I and my husband used to live, and the first thing I did was to see what had happened to that house. We lived in the large first floor of a house owned by Mrs. Bambouki, an elderly woman whose son had a gambling habit bad enough to cause her to ultimately lose the house. There was a courtyard and garden out the back, and a large terrace along the street.

The location of this apartment had been ideal. It was an easy walk from Syntagma and Kolonaki Squares, right next to the stadium, across from the Royal Gardens and, most importantly of all, was on a hill seaward of the city, so the sea breezes cooled and refreshed the apartment through its high windows. I often did my laundry and strung it on the roof, where sheets would have flapped dry by the time I had hung up the rest of the laundry. It was a matter of stringing up the laundry, then bringing it right down.

I was quite sure that this taste of old Athens had been torn down and replaced by a square, generic apartment building, but was surprised to find it still there. The whole area had been gentrified, with a cobblestone street with plantings along it. The area under the terrace was now a garage. There were expensive, lovely curtains blowing in the wind through the open terrace doors. It had cost us 3000 drachmas a month (about a hundred dollars in those days). What could it possibly cost now?

When I was there we often strolled to either Syntagma or Kolonaki and sat at cafe tables, watching life go by. There were cafes on sidewalks all around both squares. As we sat there, we were always sure to see one of our friends or acquaintances passing by. It was an easygoing, enjoyable cafe life. People didn't usually meet in homes. They ran into each other at cafes. There were hardly any cafes left now. Syntagma's busiest cafe had been replaced by a MacDonald's, and the only one left in Kolonaki was the one where I had loved to eat loukoumades, deep fried puffs, which were always made fresh as you ordered them, and covered in honey sauce. They no longer made loukoumades. Too time consuming.

I went to a Linguistics conference which happened to be happening on the very days I was there, and walked around the equally gentrified Acropolis. There was little for me to do there though. My friends were all gone. The apartment of one of my closest friends there, Muriel, was now an embassy.

I couldn't wait to pick up my car and head north to Florina.

Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 6

We flew back to Honolulu for our one night of pampering at the Moana Surfrider before returning to Newark. Our room was on a high floor, giving us a perfect view of the hundreds of surfers in the water outside the hotel.

When we arrived at the Surfrider, two young women in muu muus greeted us. One gave us a cup of real guava juice, not guava punch, which tastes like .. well, never mind, and the other placed a lei around my neck (Terry’s was of black beads). I was stunned by the heady fragrance of the pungent yellow plumeria. I got the point of leis. They feel like the smoothest velvet and smell like paradise, lying with a pleasant, evenly distributed weight around the neck. I’m going to pack mine and dry the flowers when I get home to see if I can preserve this fragrance, which climbs into your hair, your skin, your mouth, your nose.

“Partly cloudy, chance of showers” is the weather forecast every day. It is 6:45 am., the sun is shining, and the surfers are out. The trade winds are not blowing, so the surf is up on the south side of the island. The surfers lie in wait far offshore (at least it’s far if you are swimming), a few popping up to catch the waves of their choice. Some of them ride the waves laterally as they break almost into shore, others wipe out as soon as they mount their boards. There is a separate world out there, fun, dangerous at times, pleasant, congenial, physically demanding. They probably have their own means of eating and drinking on their boards, they spend so much time there. The aquatic version of a golf cart gave a ride back to shore to one of them. They take water safety seriously in Hawaii, as 20 or so people drown here every year.

I plan to go for a morning swim as soon as I finish writing this. I swam a long time yesterday, and never have had so much fun in the water. One can swim in Hawaii’s sea, and I lapped the beach 6 or 7 times. The water is powerful, playing with you, lifting you up, twisting you a little, crashing here and there. There was a sense of play stronger than any other place I have swum and I was exhilarated. We have asked for late checkout as our flight isn’t until 9:00 tonight, and I plan to swim as many times as I can.

I experimented by swimming once before and once after a mai tai. The swims proved nothing, as they were pretty much the same, but it was fun noting sensations with and without alcohol. I indulged once in a tropical drink, seated in a beach chair watching the sea. Terry had a margarita with some exotic red stuff around the rim—it had cayenne and sugar in it, I think, and some other tasty, but Hawaiian additions.

The Surfrider is filled with Japanese. A large Japanese group ate next to us last night, laughing a lot, the women mainly silent. I felt I had a glimpse into Japanese family life. There was the nerdy one, the misfit 21 year old with his spikey hairdo, sitting glum and disapproving at the far end of the table, the hip middle-aged man, with a white mesh shirt over a t shirt of another color, a baseball cap on sideways, the talkative storytelling woman, whose words always brought laughter, the woman sitting prim and silent most of the meal, smiling at the jokes – like a family anywhere, I suppose. Though I couldn’t understand the language, I had the impression that no serious subjects were touched upon – no common remembrances, or plan making, or heaven forbid, politics.

My opinion of Hawaiian music has changed somewhat – not that I would buy any CD’s of it to take home, but sitting outside on a terrace having a lovely dinner, watching the light catch the breaking waves, it sounds lovely in the background, especially with a singer like the one featured in the group at The Surfrider, a pure, high soprano, melting one note into the next as sweetly as you could possibly sing.

As we left the hotel a Japanese bride and groom arrived in a stretch limousine. She was petite, with creamy white skin and a pretty face. She looked like exploding cotton candy. The groom stood by in his silver tails looking concerned and awestruck, afraid to interfere, as two women bustled around the poof of a bride, gathering up great billows of fluff in their arms.

We’re in for a nine hour plane ride, but they always turn out to be not quite as bad as one thinks. It’s time to get home and get on with reality. It intrigues me to see how, with masses of people sometimes crushed together, as in an airport, or simply coexisting, as in a hotel, they get along. Driving along the roads in the north of Kaua’i, with their one-lane bridges, calls for a high degree of cooperation, yet drivers instinctively fall into the protocols, even if they have never been here before. At the airport there is tolerance for the other guy. The surfers are working in with each other, as they crowd behind the waves. The animal instincts which preserve us are calculating and projecting beneath our consciousness, making it possible for great numbers of people to slide frictionless past each other to their destinations, without spoken rules, and without a common language. Occasionally there is an asshole, but it seems to me that everyone else forms a block of solidarity when that happens, oddly making the bonds among those willing to cooperate even stronger. Traveling is a pain in the neck, but has gone as smoothly as one could ever expect for us.

Thoughts are turning to home. What do I have to do tomorrow? There is a six-hour time difference, so I will be a little peculiar for a while.

Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 5

I went swimming this morning, about five minutes by car from our B&B. Terry walked in the water for a while, then retreated to a spot under a wide-spreading tree to read. We passed several beaches which were either down a steep wooded hillside, or had warning signs about tides and waves and currents, until we reached a protected, accessible beach. The warning signs are mainly for other seasons. In May the sea around Hawaii is, we are told, as benign as it ever is. I don't even swim in a pool without someone watching. All you need is one little problem in the water. It's not like land.

Since I was wearing goggles, I could study the sea bed. There were deep canyons in the ocean bed. I was swimming over them, but if I had been walking I would have suddenly stepped into crevices which would have swallowed me to my shoulders. Fish too numerous to count hugged the canyons.

In the afternoon we tried again to see the vaunted Hawaii sunset, but it was once again was a bust. A bust for Hawaii, that is. The sky was still infinite, with patches of clouds coming from Japan, and rosy, but not the display that this place is famous for.

We played GO on the seashore at the Hanalei public beach. There was a surfing school, sailboats, a jetty with a gazebo at the end, and picnic tables. Dozens of people were watching the sunset with us. It is cloying to imagine that if one lived here, one could stroll out to such a place virtually every night of the year. I suppose that, like the many Greeks I knew who hadn't ever visited the Acropolis, familiarity breeds contempt.

At the nature preserve at the Wailua Lighthouse there were Frigate Birds, Albatross, Red- and White-Tailed Boobies, Shearwaters. Birdwatching was easy as taking candy from a baby -- there hundreds of birds. They are serious about preservation here.

We always search for fine dining, and were well satisfied at the Bar Acuda. Tapas – goat cheese cheesecake (not sweet), Guinness Stout Chocolate Cake. The delightful maitresse d’ was a former New York lawyer who moved out here in January, and lives with the non-necessarily-logical confidence (let's call it "faith") that her student loans will get paid off. She has just joined an outrigger canoe team and cannot imagine ever leaving.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 4

The Farmer’s Market in Hanalei specializes in tropical fruits – pineapple, mangos, some unpronounceable things, something that looks like grapefruit, lychee, tomatoes, some cucumbers, salad greens, mustard greens, bok choy, onions, odd looking sweet potatoes, and arts and crafts of various kinds, the most interesting of which were the bowls made of moli (meli?) and kau woods. The bowls are sculpted, very thin, with fascinating grain running through them. The loveliest one, which would be used as a salad bowl, I guess, cost $500.

Speaking off expensive things, a fisherman we talked to for a while says that Hawaii is getting so expensive that many people are retiring to Las Vegas. Interesting how we are supporting our children’s education, and our old people through the questionable proceeds of gambling. I have heard that Las Vegas has its charms, but it would be quite a letdown from Hawaii.

I asked in the fish store if the fish was fresh, and got an ambivalent answer about when they were cutting the fish. The man who had just delivered his catch engaged us in a long conversation. He fishes near Nihau, the island off the western coast of Kauai which is owned by the Robinson family. There are 250 Hawaiians living more or less as they have always lived on Nihau, supported in part by the Robinson family, and tourists are not allowed. Nobody but the residents and the Robinsons are allowed, in fact. Rumor has it that if courtesy doesn’t do the trick, some very large Hawaiians make their appearance to make sure nobody trespasses.

This fisherman fishes around, not on, the island. He says that ocean fish should be hung for three days before cutting them up. Eating them straight out of the sea results in a rubbery texture. The secret is that the fish must be put on ice the minute they are caught, and then “hung”(how you can hang something on ice I don’t know) for the three days, after which the meat has somehow matured and become more tasty. His favorite fish is sea bass, but very few are caught near Hawaii. They have mostly tuna of various kinds, shark, snappers, and some fish whose names were in Hawaiian and I have no idea what they were. We bought ahpoh and something I should have written down, but is something like musti ghaou. We’re hoping for the best. We can cook at the B&B. The other night we had a nice dinner of leftover restaurant bouillabaisse and grilled vegetables and fruits. It was delicious. Tonight it’s eggplant, cucumbers and tomatoes, a salad, and the mystery fish.

He says the dark meat tuna is good only for sushi. Cooked, it tastes like Chicken of the Sea. I agree. In his opinion albacore tuna isn’t good for anything at all. I might agree with that, too.

The plan now is to drive to Princeville (the 7^th most expensive vacation home community in the country) and watch the rich people while we have a drink on the terrace well known for sunset-watching. No eating there is planned.

I was tired of living in everybody else’s world and took a nap and lazed around this morning. We then watched the end of the Yankees-Mets game and just missed the Preakness, but saw a rerun. It felt good to do something we would ordinarily do at home. This might be a good night for a laze in the hot tub too.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 3

Last night we walked to Waihina’s little shop, the Hanalei version of the 7/11. The leisure of walking drew us closer into the community along the road. Many of the houses are modernized and interesting architecturally. About a third of them are occupied by families who have been here a long time, with old tools rusting in the front yard, overgrown back yards, falling down front porches. Without changes of season, there are never any deadlines for cleaning things up. As with everything else in Hawaii, much is obscured by the huge fronds and spraying flowers. One old Hawaiian woman wearing a brightly patterned pareo was sitting in the front yard of her house, almost camouflaged in the heavy foliage around her. She was wearing a lei around her neck, and smiled warmly as I greeted her, white teeth in dark skin.

The hostess at the B&B, Kirby, taught me how to tie my pareo, and I wear it around the B&B. Kirby and her friends wear pareos when they go out, but I will not. I would feel fake. Kirby goes to hula class twice a week. The hula unites the women in her class into a very special kind of friendship, which has lasted for years.

We walked over the two-lane bridge on the way to Waihina’s. Efforts to widen the bridges on this part of the island were resisted by the locals, who wanted to limit construction in this part of the island. Since cement trucks and other heavy trucks can’t traverse the one-lane bridges, building is restricted without bothering with zoning.

As we walked over the bridge bullfrogs honked loudly in the water below. There were rings spreading outward in the water where the frogs were moving around. On the road were two paper-thin roadkill bullfrogs. Even after losing a couple of their number to automobiles, there were still enough to make a hell of a racket.

We played GO last night seated at the kitchen bar, with the host, Toby, kibbitzing. He arrived in Hawaii 29 years ago with a bicycle and $450, on his way to China from Wyoming, and never left. He makes his living with the B&B and doing odd jobs. His next job was painting somebody’s truck. He didn’t like his given name, Milton, and so named himself after his dog, Toby. The hostess is named after her uncle, Kirby. Toby thinks the World Trade Center was an inside job. Bush and Silverstein. One can pretty much think whatever one wants at such a remove from Ground Zero. I think the reverberations from Pearl Harbor have passed, and Hawaii, especially Kauai, doesn't feel like any kind of target now.

As we were leaving for Waimea Canyon this morning I said, “Okey dokey,” to Kirby.

“You’re really catching onto the language,” Terry teased. The language is all vowels and lilt.

We drove to the 40 miles to the other side of the island to see Waimea Canyon. Legend has it that Mark Twain dubbed it the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” but legend is wrong, because Mark Twain never visited Kauai. Its moniker is not, however, wrong. It was too vast to capture in photographs -- layers of geological eternity, with the Hawaiian touch of green.

Around the canyon were masses of white egrets. About 30 of them were spread over a soccer field, reminding me of the plague of geese in N.J. They looked like so many white flags on a golf course.

At the top of the canyon someone was asking if anyone had lost a dog. During a short hike down one of the side trails we found a transparent corn chips bag with a note inside it lying on a bright green towel. The note asked anyone who found a dog to call the number on the note. We asked around at the top, then drove down to the lodge, where the woman at the counter knew the couple with the dog (everyone knows everyone around here), and said it would be either at the lost dog pound halfway down the mountain, or the people who found the dog would take it home with them and call the people who had lost it. The whole of Kauai is like a small town.

Passion fruit, called “lolikoi,” is a tasteless experience in New Jersey, but in Hawaii it is fresh, and ubiquitous. The salad dressing at lunch at the Moke’e Park Lodge was Honey Mustard, with lolikoi wasabe. We had a Passion Fruit Chiffon Pie at Gaylord’s, the top end restaurant on the island, a former plantation house. We had excellent wine, good food, and delightful service. The dining tables sit under a horseshoe shaped covered patio, with flowers in the grassy middle, craggy mountains in the distance. Beauty is simply taken for granted everywhere you go here, though much of it reminds me of elsewhere, from Tuscany to Greece to New England. The difference in Hawaii is that you don’t have to drive to see the beauty, it surrounds you almost everywhere.

The religious wars started by American missionaries so long ago continue on Hawaii, as evidenced by the variety and persistent presence of churches of all sorts – far more churches than would fit the population. I counted the churches on the way back from Waimea Canyon today, driving the 40 miles back to the B&B. Here is a list, incomplete, of course, because I wasn’t paying attention everywhere:

Seventh Day Adventist (2) Kaliki Adventist Park and School Baptist

Latter Day Saints First Hawaiian Church

Holy Cross Catholic Kapa’a Missionary Church

Methodist All Saints Episcopal

Zen Temple Kapa’a First Hawaiian Church

United Church of Christ Church of the Pacific (United Church

Hanapepe Mission Church of Christ)

Kalaheo Missionary Church Mormon Center

Kalako Bible Church

The landmarks in Hawaii are mileposts and elementary schools. The schools are on the map as a church might be in a New England town. Hawaiian royalty left the proceeds from selling most of Waikiki and Honolulu’s land to a foundation for the education of Hawaiian children. There has been disgraceful fraud involving those funds, but they are getting it under control, and the money will once again be used to educate Hawaiian children, not to buy golf courses outside of Washington DC where the members of the foundation’s board can entertain Washington policymakers for their own purposes.

We stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company to poke around. They are the largest producer of coffee in the U.S., with 3,100 acres. (No sooner do the acres and acres of coffee plants end than the acres and acres of sugar cane begin.) Terry noted that all they needed now was a dairy farm and they’d have coffee with milk and sugar. There was, in fact, a dairy farm a little farther on. Or maybe they were beef cattle.

The Kona coffee came in different shapes and sizes, and was expensive. They had a tasting room with tiny cups for sipping each variety of coffee. I didn’t find it that much better, if better all, than some kinds of coffee I get at home. The peaberry was $16 a pound, and the decaf $19 a pound. It wasn’t worth the extra money to us.

Back at the B&B after an adventurous and tiring day, we played some GO (split the games, with me playing at a handicap) and thudded into our round yellow bed in the Pineapple Room worn out and in need of some rejuvenating sleep before another day on Kauai.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 2

In a blog called Don’t Tell Me No, there is very little to say about Hawaii, which generally says “yes.” It is a non-confrontational place.

At Waimea Beach, for example, I had a chat with an “American Adventurer” who hauls his home, a converted VW beatle painted with red, white and blue stripes, around behind his motorcycle. He comes from Alaska and has been to all 50 states but found Hawaii the most hospitable. He says nobody bothers him here. His choice was aided by the weather I am sure, which allows him to sleep in his VW trailer without freezing to death. He lives on donations and odd jobs. I was wearing only my bathing suit so was carrying no money, and I felt badly taking pictures of him and his gear without making a donation, but he was happy to tell tales. He was married once, but the experiences he had as a child in a broken family hindered his embracing commitment, and the marriage ended. His former wife is now a lawyer, and he took off on his motorcycle. There are free spirits, or maybe lost souls, like this peppered around Hawaii. They seem to cause less trouble here than they would in, say, New York City, though I don’t know Hawaii well enough to say.

The birds, plants, and trees provide a textured background to every move in Hawaii. One small soft grey dove sat placidly as if on an egg in the middle of the road at the Waimea Audubon Center yesterday. We had to stop the car for it, the way drivers have to stop for a herd of goats in Spain, or a crossing deer in Pennsylvania.

I love the cardinals in my New Jersey back yard, but the cardinals here were more flamboyantly red. Like the American Adventurer, this bird is not afraid of making a display. We also saw peacocks, which are not native to Hawaii, but were walking around as if they owned the place. A flock of tiny birds barely bigger than hummingbirds flocked together, pecking seeds out of the ground. I thought at first they were leaves, but they swarmed upward and flitted to another seed mine. Studying the Audubon materials didn’t completely satisfy my desire to name these tiny creatures, but they looked like the plover in a photograph which was twice the size of the bird itself.

The Waimea Valley was a wonder. We saw our first Banyan Tree, and enormous, arching, tentacled, reaching trees of several sorts. People swam in the pool beneath a waterfall. The snack bar had great smoothies. There was peace and hushing all over. The Hawaiians lived there until floods and drought drove them out in 1895 and they never came back. Don’t know why. Can’t imagine why not. There were replicas of their huts, the huts being optional, used only in bad weather.

The whole windward side from Waikiki to Waimea, is lined with white beaches, most of them deserted. With so many beaches, it would take an invasion of many more tourists to fill them all. Further into our Hawaiian trip, we came to be more wary of the seas around the islands, more hesitant to simply jump in. The waters are treacherous, sometimes dangerous. These islands are isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by sea life, currents and winds which belong in the open sea. In the way that opposites are often contained in the same object, the stunning waters bear danger. The beautiful sea is a Circe.

Since Sunset Beach, the Banzai Pipeline, and Waimea are the world centers of surfing, there were a lot more people on those beaches, though the people were spread widely apart. Waimea River flows through the Waimea Valley and opens onto Waimea Bay, a pocket of beauty which was once reserved for royalty. Only royalty could surf there. The surf yesterday was as tame as the Jersey shore, but everywhere are posters and instructions about what to do when the surf is 30 feet high. One poster told of an unsuspecting tourist who sauntered out onto the rocks, only to run for his life when a 30 foot wave bore down on him, and then a second, and then a third, and a fourth. The waves come in sets of three or four.

I swam laps of the beach at Puukua. I felt in the water the way I sometimes felt on the land in Africa. I didn’t know what life was swimming near me, could not read the tides and waters well, and would have needed several more swims to get comfortable.

Hawaiian names sound the same to me. English flows from consonant to consonant, with vowels in between. In the Hawaiian language words flow from vowel to vowel. Kakaako, Kaimuki, Kaaawa, Kahala, Kailua, Kalihi, Kaneohe, Makakilo, Mililani, Nuuano, Wahiawa, Waianae, Waipahu, Waimanalo. They look and sound the same, though I am getting used to them and am more capable than before of remembering which street to take, Kalakaua, Kahala, or Kalanianaole.

The hostess at the B&B had given the room we originally booked to another couple. The husband of the other couple had health problems, which we heard all about at breakfast; past knee problems were all solved with a knee knee replacement (which he actually didn’t take that long to recover from, which surprised him). Now he suffers diabetic peripheral neuropathy, which bothers his feet some of the time – not all of the time, mind you – when he goes up steps. He asked his daughter for a garage door opener so that when he visits her, he can go up the stairs from the garage rather than the entry stairs. The stairs going up to the room we had originally wanted were difficult. They gave him pain in his this and pain in his that, and he is so grateful that we were willing to change rooms. Whew.

In the new room we are sleeping on an enormous bed, which was at one time the bed or Princess Ruth, a 400 pound titan of Hawaiian aristocracy. I lost Terry in it a couple of times during the night.

Breakfast was fresh fruit (half a papaya, mango, pineapple, strawberries, bananas), hard boiled egg, delicious toast with some exotic marmalade, and asparagus wrapped in cheese and ham. It was served by Sumiko, a humorous Japanese elderly lady, whose precise and tidy hand is everywhere in evidence in the house. The friendly, American-type owner is a pack rat whose overwhelmed but tasteful hand is also in evidence everywhere.

After breakfast the sun was shining, the breeze was breezing, and wandered through Waikiki.

Hawaii journal: 2008 part 1

The birds frantically greeting the day seem as happy to be in Hawaii as I am.

I am seated on a piece of furniture unique to me – a couch four feet deep. My legs are as comfortable as they would be on a chaise lounge, and I am wondering how this would go in the apartment in Hoboken. The couch is in the sitting room of of our B&B apartment in Waikiki, on a hill a ten minute walk from the beach. The ornate ceiling fan looks as if it came from Thailand.

The “& B” part of our stay is wafting across the spacious open porch called a lanai ten lush feet from me, barely visible through the foliage. It is as if nature were upholstered, so naturally does the furniture live on the lanai. Am I outdoors, or indoors? It is the meeting place for all the people who live here or are staying here. Exactly who lives here is a little inconclusive. The rooms and living quarters are splayed over a large footprint which it is difficult to comprehend, so dense is the vegetation.

Terry spotted a red-white-and-blue scavenging sort of bird unlike anything I had ever seen before alight on the road ahead of us yesterday, then fly away. I have no confidence that either the trees, flowers, or birds are anything that I am familiar with, so would never even try to figure out what it was. What was that enormous spreading tree with the gnarled embracing aboveground roots and the dry-looking tentacles hanging down from its branches, hanging down to the ground, where their tentacles spread out to make structures like the base of a table? The tree with sideway-reaching branches as long as my house is tall is a double-pod acacia. I saw no flowers on the hedge along the driveway yesterday, but last night there were large white flowers dotting it. They were fast fading flowers, with the last night’s blossoms lying limp and spent on the ground.

My brain was a gumbo when I arrived. Where was I? What time was it? I felt as I often do on New Year’s Eve – okay, now it’s time to get excited. But I wasn’t, just a little awestruck. This morning my tummy is giggling with excitement, after a fish dinner on the beach, sitting comfortably watching the sun go down over Honolulu, and ten hours of sleep.

Privacy is a mutable concept. In Europe, for example, I sometimes feel violated by peoples’ standing “too close” to me, or touching me "too often." In Zimbabwe, one had to figure in servants, who were going about their business, but often on a path that collided with mine. Giving access to my private life to a total stranger, even if that stranger was an employee, felt odd. In Hawaii, privacy is commonly secured by visual blocks – huge plant leaves, draping vegetation, screens of all sorts – that windows are wide and open. Air is so vital that even the bathroom has small rectangular open screened windows high on the wall. Terry and the hostess of this B&B were talking on the lanai while I peed three feet away in the bathroom, with two open windows. I was aware of a slight embarrassment, but aware also that sounds are dispersed here, coming from all directions, and constantly. My sounds were swallowed in the chirping of birds, the sighing of wind, the movement of leaves, the sounds of other people in the open house. It was not as if two people were having a conversation in the hallway outside my bathroom where the sound of tinkling would be the only sound they heard. There are doors in our apartment, both between its rooms and to the outside, but I can’t even figure out how to close some of them, or haven’t yet attempted to do so.

The beach in Hawaii is the center of far more varied activity than anywhere I have ever been. Last night, in the two hours we sat in the lanai restaurant in the New Otani Hotel, we saw a cruise to nowhere pass from right to left, then an hour or so later, come back left to right, smaller sailboats and yachts, five outrigger canoes, a young boy paddling on a surfboard, getting his sealegs, surfers, swimmers (and I mean swimmers – swimming parallel to the shore for long distances), paddlers and dabblers, kayakers. Nothing with a motor on it, and no fishing so far as we could see.

The fish at the restaurant was freshly caught, and tasty. It was mother’s day, and many of the women at the restaurant tables had a lei, or two, or three, around their necks.

There was also a surfeit of buff bodies, a depressing surfeit of buff bodies. We’ll get to work today, with a drive to Waiamea Beach and a swim someplace. SWIMMING in the ocean – that’s my kind of place.