Hawaii (Day 2)

Pix: Diamond Head as viewed from the beach outside the Outrigger Hotel

Just to remind you...the first few days of this trip consisted in doing the requisite eating with relatives. Unfortunately, we didn't get to do a lot of sightseeing. That'll come in part 2 of our trip--Kauai.

Day 2

While at Oahu, we stayed at the Waikiki Banyan, a time share that belongs to Uncle Thomas' friend. It was not one of the fancier hotels there but it had a great location and the lobby was beautiful (koi pond and wooden carvings everywhere). There was a very adequate kitchen, which we never used except to cut up some fruits for breakfast (when we weren't eating at a buffet).

We were taken to the Outrigger Hotel on Waikiki Beach (it was pouring again). The hotel is in the midst of being renovated, but what's already renovated looked good. You could walk right out of the hotel onto the beach but unfortunately, it was raining, so we couldn't do that.

The breakfast buffet lasted until 11 a.m. and was only $12 (good price for Waikiki). There was a wide selection of fruits, although not all of them were fresh. The pineapple was, and that was succulent (much better than the Malaysian variety, I think), honeydew melons, canteloupes, canned lychees and oranges. I found out later that only hotels and fine dining restaurants serve fruit in Hawaii (even though there's an abundance of it grown on the Big Island) for the tourists but the locals don't eat it. Just to give you an idea of local diet: the Hawaiians created a dish called potato mac, which is a combination of potato salad and macaroni.

It was there that I tried poi--starchy taro--for the first time. Not so good! It's tasteless so apparently it takes on the flavors of other dishes when it's mixed together, and that's how you're supposed to eat it. It tasted like glue (the kind I used to make out of starch at home)! Can't think of anything else memorable from that meal but there was a good selection. Mostly Western food though.

That afternoon, we went to the Ala Moana shopping mall--I believe it's the biggest shopping mall in Hawaii. There were so many branded stores there, it was amazing! Most of my shopping was done at Long's Drug Store, which has the cheapest Kona coffee and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts on the island (thanks for the tip, Sandy!).

At night, we went out with the Wongs' (Thomas and Sandy's) neighbors for dinner at a Chinese restaurant (can't remember the name). The food there was really good but Uncle Thomas ordered twice as much food as we could eat (literally, we had it for dinner the next night). The memorable dishes from that meal was the lobster, which was cooked with some sort of eggy sauce and some egg noodles, a Hawaiian creation--fried honey shrimp with walnuts (it had a sauce that had some mayo in it), and some braised beef ribs that tasted like it had five-spice powder in it.