Tuesday, February 1st, 2005- Honolulu, Hawaii

Last night Amanda and I slept out on lounge chairs on Deck 7. However, I woke up at 4:21am to look over and see she wasn’t there anymore (way for waking me up). This morning we headed to China Town with our History of Modern China class. In our travels we came across markets, medicine shops, a Japanese Shinto Temple, and a Buddhist Temple. We picked up lunch at a Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant.
Afterwards, Amanda and I perused at shops throughout China Town and then headed to the top of Aloha Towers, a tower down by the pier that you can see all of Honolulu and beyond from. In the evening, all the Semester at Sea students and staff went to Germaine’s Luau on the west side of the island on the water. We all fit onto 15 different buses and each bus had a liaison from Germaine’s that would give us a little background on Hawaii culture and what the evening was going to entail. Our leader was Cousin Jerry, a retired guy in his 60’s, and he really got us ready to party for the luau (later on we found out by comparison of other people’s accounts of their bus, Cousin Jerry and our bus was definitely the best).
Random Stuff:
On the bus ride back from the luau Cousin Jerry gave us all 4 options to vote on to do:
1) Turn off the lights and put on the radio
2) Sing some songs
3) Keep the party going
4) Turn into the sugar cane fields, get in a huge circle, light a bonfire, take off our clothes and criticize each other (Cousin Jerry immediately realized after he said it that he shouldn’t have made a fourth option)
-We ended up going against the vote and sang some Hawaiian songs on the way back.