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Saturday, July 12, 2003 |
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July
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Stephanie woke up at six in the morning Hawaii Standard time. (That's noon for you folks in Kentucky, but early here). This is the first full day of our adventure.
We have noticed that many of the signs and brochures are translated into Japanese. Our shuttle driver explained that about 15% or so of the tourists were from Japan. This would help explain why our night stand contains a copy of The Teachings of Buddha along with the traditional Gideon New Testament.
This morning, we walked down to the Ala Moana shopping center. This is the largest mall in the state. We spent several hours exploring the many shops and Stephanie was amused that she had to go so far to finally visit a Macy's.
We bought a Polynesian dress at "Hilo Hattie's, The Store of Hawaii". For you Nashville folks, they have an outlet there as well.
We didn't get to the center of the mall in time to watch the local Junior Miss presentation, but we are sure that they all did very well.
One very popular chain here is "The ABC Store". We have already seen four of them in the day that we've been here. At this store, you can buy a little bit of everything from clothing to coffee to souvenirs.
Mid afternoon, we briefly rested in our room. We then decided to see if we could locate the church that we are going to visit tomorrow. This gave us an opportunity to see some of Waikiki. In addition to the ever present traffic, we have noticed both bicycles and skateboards as popular means of transportation.
After locating the church, we decided to look for some place to eat. We settled on the Harbor Pub where we had an excellent ham and pineapple pizza. Lori, our waitress recognized us as Southerners because Stephanie asked for sweet tea. It turns out that she had family in Lexington and Bowling Green. She invited us back for breakfast, claiming that they "served the best Eggs Benedict in the islands" and biscuits and gravy, but "not like you'd get in Kentucky". We just may have to take her up on this.