Summer Vacation Oh-Ten: August 12th-13th

August 12th

Our bus ride today was much shorter and much more manageable. We took a quick jaunt to downtown Honolulu where the royal residence resided residually. Iolani Palace was the home of the last two monarchs of an autonomous Hawaii before the white devil took it over in the name of freedom in the late 1800s. We again took an audio tour. This was the kind where you hold it up to your ear as though you're just on the phone with someone extremely garrulous, nodding your head at everything they ramble on about as though they can see you through the phone and tell that you're interested. Isn't that annoying? The phone is a blessing and a curse, I swear. Anyway, again the audio tour was not up to Steve Buscemi standards. To be honest, the audio tour wasn't all that impressive overall. It was a little biased, if you ask me. It painted the last king, King Kalakaua, in a bit too rosy of a light. There was a reason people protested against him and a reason that things declined the way they did. Just because he was Hawaiian doesn't automatically make him a good person. I'm sure he was an OK guy, but any monarch who spends the state money to build a lavish palace for himself while he's off traipsing around the world for a year is not the greatest monarch, if you ask me.

It was, however, educational. Things I learned on the Iolani Palace tour:

• Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House did.


• Grover Cleveland wanted to let Hawaii keep its independence, but the provincial American government of Hawaii would not give it up and eventually gave it to the U.S. under his successor, Benjamin Harrison. I guess by the time Grover Cleveland was re-elected, he stopped caring so much about Hawaii.


• Taking pictures inside the palace will damage it somehow.


• Hawaiians are blindly patriotic of their heritage. It's perfectly OK to be proud, but try to look at it more objectively, guys.


• I wish Iz was still alive. Maybe if he was, Hawaiians would stop abusing his music. I mean, look at the guy:

He doesn't need any more abuse. We also saw this bitchin' ride outside the palace. I hope it was the official royal pimp mobile. The rest of the day was spent doing laundry and shopping while Mom and Aunt Sue chilled out by the pool. We ended my last full day in Hawaii with a really awesome dinner at the Moana Surfrider Resort. It was a very nice place with outstanding food and wine.



We caught the tail end of a mediocre sunset and headed back to the hotel where we reminisced over more wine and cheese.

August 13th

This morning was spent at the overpriced breakfast buffet at the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani. At least they had some pretty exceptional pineapple. We ended up waiting an extra fifteen minutes for my airport shuttle, which is OK since I still got there on time and all the children were rejoicing. The goodbye was quicker than I would have preferred but there were people waiting on the shuttle and we're detrimentally polite people. My last look at Honolulu from the airport:

Since part of the flight was on the 13th, I will lump it in with this day just because I want to and it's my hot body and I can do what I want.

I flew in on Korean Air and flew out on Hawaiian. They were two very different experiences. Eventhough Hawaiian Air was rated the best in America, it still falls far short of the prowess of Korean Air. I can't say enough good things about Korean Air. I will fly with them whenever possible. That is not to say that I was unsatisfied with my Hawaiian Air flight. On the contrary, it was not unpleasant at all, and they made the 10 hours go by pretty painlessly. I'm just a princess because on Korean Air you get one additional meal and free alcohol whenever you want. And, you get your own personal screen on the back of the seat wherein you can watch whatever you want whenever you want and play games, etc. Princess Steve.

Speaking of, we watched a few movies on the Hawaiian Air flight. The first one was Princess Kaiulani, the namesake of the resort we stayed in. She was a princess when Amurrica took over control of Hawaii. It was a romance set against a historic backdrop, and it was cheesy and trite and not very satisfying. Next was Iron Man 2, which I had already seen so I read and listened to music, then Date Night, which was OK, and there was another one that escapes me right now. Haha, my banal description of my flight is probably getting as painful as the flight itself. And the flight attendants were almost exclusively men. Very strange.

I'll leave touching down in Manila and all that followed for another post since technically it was the next day. God speed.