I exist!

Remember how three months and four days ago, I said I was horrible at mass emails, and that I was going to try this as an experiment? Yeah … just keep that in mind.

So here I am, exactly 3 months after my last post, and it occurs to me that if anyone is still checking this crazy thing, I’m long overdue for an update.

Randi gave you all a few observations on Hawaii; here are mine.

Do you like Asian food? Oh perfect! Because everything (or almost everything) in Hawaii has an Asian flare! From the rice with almost every meal (even at barbecues), to the omnipresent soy sauce–here called shoyu–to the popcorn seasoned with furikake (a mixture of dried and crushed seaweed and sesame seeds), you’re out of luck if you don’t like the stuff. The only problem, though, is that it’s not mainland Asian food. I have yet to see a crab rangoon anywhere, and if you want an egg roll, forget it. You have to ask for a spring roll, or you’ll get a “Uh … I dunno.”

And while we’re on the subject of food, what’s your take on SPAM? You love it? Oh good, because it’s all over the place, too. Restaurants are happy to serve spam and eggs, spam omelettes, or–get this–spam musubi. For you mainlanders, that’s a block of sushi rice topped with a slice of spam, then belted in seaweed. (See? I told you there was Asian influance.) Even McDonalds serves SPAM in Hawaii, and to make matters worse, they’re engaged in a battle with Burger King, because the latter has started serving SPAM as well.

If anyone would like a good indication of some popular and common Hawaiian cuisine, check out the website www.hawaiianbarbecue.com. It contains–among other things–the menu for the restaurant L&L, a Hawaiian-based restaurant that is carrying on the tradition of serving the basic four Hawaiian food groups–rice, macaroni salad, spam, and more rice.

The food isn’t all bad, though–and even some of the above can be very tasty. Portuguese sausage is in abundance here. On the mainland, we call that linguisa. The Hawaiians have a fine variety of fresh fruit, too, especially pineapple. One cannot neglect macadamia nuts (especially the chocolate-covered ones), and there’s also a coconut custard called haupia which is very tasty.

Here’s just a few more for the fun of it…

Laulau: a serving of shredded, spiced pork, sometimes mixed with butterfish for added flavor, then wrapped up in a taro leaf. That whole assembly is then wrapped in tea leaves, and it’s all steamed for four hours. When the laulau is finished, the tea leaves are snipped off and discarded, and the rest is eaten.

Locomoco: You’ll see this one on the hawaiian barbecue website if you go there. You take a hamburger patty, cook it up like normal, but instead of putting it on a bun, you drop it on a bed of steamed white rice instead. Then, you cover that hamburger with a fried egg, and smother the whole mess in brown gravy. Is it a wonder that Hawaii has the highest incidence of diabetes in the country?

Poi: This is the classic Hawaiian staple. I’ll definitely have to find a picture somewhere, but until I do, here’s a description. They take the root of the ever-popular taro plant, then crush the ever-loving daylights out of it until it forms a paste with the consistency of Elmer’s glue. God as my witness, I’m not being sarcastic, here. That’s really the texture. Poi doesn’t really have much taste, but for the Hawaiians, it’s a real treat–to the point of having religious significance. It’s usually eaten in conjunction with other Hawaiian foods. Not many people sit down and go “Hey, how about a heapin’ helpin’ of poi for dinner!” They do, however, feed it to babies as a substitute for all those delightful little jars of mashed spaghetti with carots and pickles. The funny part about that, though, is that poi starts to go sour very quickly after being made, and when poi goes sour, it ferments slightly. Get the picture? No wonder they’re so laid back here.

So what else besides the food?

There’s really not a whole lot to write when it comes to the weather. It’s always nice! It does, however, rain almost every day here. The weird thing about it, though, is that it’s not a good, hard, mainland downpour. Even when it’s pouring hard here, the raindrops are tiny, like a heavy sprinkle, and even that lasts for a few minutes at most. We have often joked in Nebraska that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes, and it will change. In Hawaii, that statement’s implications are even more drastic. At least once a week, we get hit with a pineapple shower–a steady rain while the sun is out. In Nebraska, we called that devil’s rain. Kind of makes you like Hawaiian optimism, doesn’t it?

Otherwise, it’s sunny and nice all the time. Even on hot days, you have a constant ten to fifteen-mile-an-hour breeze, so you don’t get too hot. Our apartment doesn’t have air conditioning in it, but it hasn’t bothered us yet. We just leave our lanai (balcony) door open day and night, and our ceiling fans on, and we’re perfectly comfortable.

Work is going extremely well. Randi has around 50 clients right now, and I’m teaching braille to 16 students. The work load is pretty heavy, but Ho`Opono is an amazing place to work, so we really don’t notice most days.

The students I teach range in age from 17 to 62, with a healthy mix in the middle. We’ve had everything from a lady wanting to go back to school for a PH.D., to a retired serviceman who now works as a coffee farmer. We even have a student now from the island of Chuuk. Ever heard of it? Me neither.

I realize this one is kind of scattered, but after working on this for over an hour, my brain is kind of cooked. As stuff happens, I’ll be sure to relate it with greater regularity. Remind me to write about garlic French fries.

We miss you all terribly, and when we come back to the mainland this fall, we’d love to see as many of you as possible. Do keep in touch, and check back here for updates. I promise I’ll write them!