Hawaii

One month ago today we took our trip to Hawaii to visit family and friends and here I am just now telling you about it. We had a great time, ate some ono (delish) food, Keira & Kainoa loved the beach, and were sad to leave. But it will be there for our next trip, right?

Highlights:
♥Seeing our friends, the Apanas, get sealed in the Laie LDS Temple. Ryan and I got to know Shelsea & Clayton before we left Hawaii a couple of years ago. Clayton got baptized, and they have been working towards going to the temple to seal their family together since. Seeing friends get sealed in the temple with their two young children is definitely a special experience, and I have to say that was probably the highlight of our trip. Don't ask me why I forgot my camera that day.

♥Shark Cage--I thought I'd never do it, but Ryan convinced me to take a boat 2 miles out of North Shore and jump into a cage to "swim" with some sharks. We swam with them for about 30 minutes. About 15-20 Galapagos sharks, ranging from 5-12 feet long. The guys (Hawaii Shark Encounter) said that they've fallen in the water before while feeding them, but that the sharks aren't aggressive, which put my mind and stomach at ease. I've seen sharks at aquariums before, but something more intriguing about being in the same water as them, able to reach out and touch one if I wanted to...and believe me, I wanted to. Their tiger-like eyes were the most intriguing thing, and watching their graceful movement up close was worth the scare.

♥I'm sorry, but food is always going to be on my highlights list of anything. You just can't find some of my favorite dishes prepared the way I like them but in Hawaii. Without going into much detail, at the top of our list were strangely all soups:

Phô--(pronounced fuh) Vietnamese soup--beef broth, beef, rice noodles, onions, with fresh basil, bean sprouts, lemon, and usually some hot sauce. Ryan likes phô from Ba Le, a kind of Vietnamese/French Indonesian chain. But my favorite phô is at Fort Street Cafe, right by Hawaii Pacific University, where I STARTED getting my Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language (before I met Ryan).

Tom Ka--a Thai soup. It has to be from Phuket Thai in Mililani Town Ctr. My favorite is vegetable, but you can get chicken or shrimp. The broth is coconut milk, with ginger, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, peppers, green onions. Ryan knows, if I'm ever on my deathbed to have some Fedex'd to me.

Kim chee ji gae--Kim chee soup--preferably from my favorite Korean place, So Gong Dong, at McCully Shopping Center on Kapiolani Blvd. It's a hot (have you had kim chee before?) soup, beef broth based (I think), with onions, Chinese cabbage, kim chee and other veggies, with noodles. Ry and I used to be the only non-Koreans eating there when we'd go for a late night dinner at their previous location, but not anymore.

There are many more, I mean, I haven't even gotten into Hawaiian food, but that's for another post.

♥Last but not least, I had a nice stroll sneezing down memory lane while going through old dusty boxes of mine that my father has so kindly been storing for years. He is moving to West Jordan next summer, so it was high time I cleared out his townhouse. Amongst my dozens of journals, high school and college papers and books, even elementary school stuff, I found the engagement pictures Ryan and I took in Makaha in 2005. That was before I decided, "To heck with the announcements and cake and reception," and we had a cozy little luncheon at Turtle Bay Resort after we were sealed in the temple. My sister took these photos for us...they make me happy.