Man, put a hat on that China!

One item of business: Do any of you have a pinterest account? Let me know. E-mail me. Comment. Thanks

Now, on to the adventure. I went to Chinaman's hat. It's this way cool place on the west shore of Oahu. I love it. Its right here:

You see that island Mokoli'i? Yeah that's Chinaman's hat. It kinda looks like this:

And from the ground view

So. we decided that we were going to walk there

Don't worry. We're not irresponsible college students *cough* Tons of people do this all the time, even though some people didn't make it and had to go back :( But, with the right tide, you can walk the whole way there!

That's my friend Erica. We eat breakfast together on Tue/Thur before we both have to go to work. I am in the back just about to walk onto the island right now in the white/gray bathing suit. And then when you get there, it's a straight climb to the top

Ok, it's really not that bad. It's mostly a clear path, but the last part you need to climb up those rocks. But seriously? This is where I live.

It was kind of a cloudy day, but it's still beautiful. It is one of those moments when you just have to say Mahalo (thank you in Hawaiian) to God for creating this incredible Earth that we live on. 

Please remove your shoes

Hello everyone! I've made some changes to this blog. NOW, you can post comments! (I thought you could before, but that option was blocked, but now you can!) Also, you know how you like to read about all the cool things I do in Hawaii? And you know how you don't like waiting until I post on facebook that I have a new post? Well, don't you worry. Look at the column on the right. Now type your e-mail address at the very top. Now, you will receive an e-mail every time I post a new adventure! Convenient, right? I thought so :) Would you like more changes? Make a comment (now that you can!)

Today, I went to the city of Kaneohe. It is one of the major suburbs on Oahu outside of Honolulu. Fun stuff to do! So, I went with my friend Christy who owns this seat cover

 

Isn't that legit? Everyone loves cows, right? I wonder if she could get a discount at Chick-Fil-A for owning that. Or, if Chick-Fil-A should sell these as promo items. That would be cool. Well, we went to the auto mechanic to get her car checked out. Fortunately, nothing was wrong. Got some advice on how to help her car start and no $$ was spent. BUT, because nothing was wrong, we had some time to burn in Kaneohe. 

So, we went through Kaneohe

And drove through some tunnels

And ended up looking out over the whole West Shore of Oahu

Before I get too ahead of myself. Do you realize how cool tunnels are? Lets think about this for a second. You are literally driving through a mountain

Hold on. Take a second to think about that. Take another second. And another. Wait there for at least 30 seconds before moving on. YOU ARE DRIVING THROUGH A MOUNTAIN! K, go ahead.

You see how big this mountain is? No, you don't. Because the picture is cut off. But it's big! I'm not a geologist or anything, but I imagine that if you were going to dig out a hole through a mountain, a simple mistake might mean the whole mountain would fall. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. But it's a cool thought.

So, we leave this place and drive to

A cemetery. That's really weird, you might say. Why would you go to a cemetery? Well, we were actually going to the Byodo-in temple. It is a replica of the one in japan. This is the front

My mom likes to collect bells. She loves them. But she has never had a bell this big

It is 5 feet tall. Weighs 3 tons. And brings good fortune

I hope they aren't mad. I don't spread the eternal teachings of Buddha

For the record, I never saw a peacock

I was slightly disappointed. But, I did remove my shoes

As a side note, I would normally be really disgusted taking off my shoes in a public place, but not at all. It was very clean. Like...almost disturbingly clean. It actually felt nice. Which is a good thing because it's a special place for some people. We saw this gigantic statue of Buddha

If you have a statue of yourself that big, one of two things. Either you are extremely vain and full of yourself or you are very well respected. Buddha is the well respected kind of guy. But, if you look at his hands, it kinda looks like the hand signal people use to represent the bloods

Almost? Yeah? Anyone else agree? Well, thanks for reading. I think it's funny that I ended on a gang sign.... :) But I'm not gonna change it. Til next time everybody!

I'm pretty much Tarzan

Aloha! Today was a great adventure! I started out by doing some laundry and eating breakfast - frosted flakes. But, I did laundry a little different today. I decided that, to save 75 cents, I was simply going to hang my clothes out to dry. If I average 2 loads of laundry per week (1 white, 1 color) for 13 weeks in the semester, I would save $9.75 on laundry. That's 2 2-scoop ice cream cones : )

SO, me and my good friend Jay meet up and started walking towards the bus stop. We realized the bus would get there in 2 minutes, so we decided to run. We were obviously in flip flops and running is quite difficult in flip flops, but it was worth it because no more than 20 seconds after we arrived at the bus stop, the bus came around the corner and pulled over to pick us up. Our destination?

Wahiawa, Hawaii!!

I was going there to buy this:

Or, something like it. A '97 dodge caravan for $700. I was going to test drive it and see if it was functioning enough to spend that kind of money on it. It's not a lot of money for a car, but it is a lot of money for me to spend on ANYTHING, so I was a little cautious. But, if it ran well, I had every intention of buying it. Alas, at 

AM

We decided to leave our meeting place because he was 30 minutes late and he sends me a text that says, "sold the car yesterday. sorry bro" -_-

But, because we were in WAHIAWA! We decided to check out the town. Neither of us had spent any time there, so we went to:

I was excited. Part of me thought it was going to be super lame, but part of me thought, why not. I'm in Hawaii. Might as well give it a shot. So, we saw a couple cool trees and flowers like this one

Nothing crazy special. But THEN! We found this tree that had vines hanging down from it. We immediately said, "Those are like tarzan vines!" I wonder if we can swing on them! So we did a little bit. This was the result:

THEN, we were walking around some more and we found MORE! The vines were intertwined with each other that allowed a thicker grip. It was amazing how strong those vines were. Only an elephant could have broken those vines. Dang strong. So, here are some videos of our swinging on the vines. I was going to edit these so that I don't sound so much like a girl in the end, but I think raw footage explains how dang nervous I was swinging from a vine :P

So yeah! We're pretty much Tarzan. Be jealous :) Until next time!

New Years Resolution

Happy New Year Everyone! I love celebrating New Years for a few reasons. I love change. I think when people transition from one phase of life to the next, it allows a great opportunity to step back from the day-to-day grunge of life and reflect on what matters most in your life and on ways that you can improve. I know a lot of people joke that New Years Resolutions are dumb and that they don't last more than a week or so. Although this is often true, I feel like there can be goals made at any time in your life that can be personally meaningful. As a student, the start of each semester is a great chance to make some new goals and areas to improve. If you're just a normal adult, maybe your birthday in the middle of the year is a good chance to re-evaluate your life and make some changes. Another good time is the 4th of July. It's in the middle of the year. You could also choose a random day that you're going to make some new goals for yourself.  For example, March 19th or August 8th. Why those days? No reason. So, my resolutions this year can be broken up into 3 basic parts:

1. Plan out what I'm going to do each week
2. Spend more time doing productive things
3. Spend less time being unproductive

I feel like this is a really simple concept, but is often overlooked. However, when you simply define what would be productive in your life and what would be unproductive in your life, magical things happen. For example, if you spend 4 hours each day playing video games or watching TV after work or school, you may decide that you're only allowed 1 hour a day or two days with 3 hours. If you've always wanted to be better at cooking, you can replace that time you would spend on video games to look up recipes, watch the food network, and actually cook dinner for yourself.

For me, the things I feel are unproductive are the amount of time I spend on espn, facebook, and texting throughout the day. The texting one is tricky. I love texting, but I don't want to make a habit out of "conversation texts" because then my relationship with that person is extremely casual and sometimes obligatory. Whereas, I feel that a friendship can last a lot longer if once a week or once a month I would chat with them on facebook or google chat or gave them a phone call or skype or whatever. That's where I'm at

The things that I want to do a little bit more productive would be exercising more, spending more time reading, and learning how to play the piano. Those are things I would love to do. Also, I would like to write in this blog about once a week with new exciting things I've done (which require that I do new fun exciting things on a weekly basis - sometimes will be difficult).

If you have new years resolutions or goals, comment. I'd love to hear about it :) Happy New Years!