Chinatown in Honolulu

 On our second full day in Honolulu, we spent a lot of the time scheduling things.  Linda did much of the scheduling.

Things did not start off well.  At about 3:15 AM, I was awakened by loud music and/or singing outside.  I was never certain if it was live or recorded, but it was loud.  We are on the 6th floor, looking out over solar panels over parking garages and apartments.  The room has windows that function like Venetian blinds — slats of glass about 3 inches high and 3 feet long which all slant up or down to open or (almost) close.  Linda likes them partially open to cool the room down.  No screens, so I guess there is no bug problem here.  But with an open window, noise comes in, as well as air.

After about a half an hour, the music quit.  It wasn’t until an hour later that the trash trucks came around emptying dumpsters.

We started off with an in-room breakfast of yogurt and granola. And bananas.  Then we went out to check on the price of renting a car for just one day.  Looks like it would be about $100.  But, at least for today, there were none available.  The next few days are a combination of weekend and holiday, so finding things open may be a problem.

As a case in point, I am running low on money, so figured I should find an ATM.  My credit union is part of a network of credit unions that agree to allow members to use their ATMs for free, so I tried to find one here in Honolulu.  Unfortunately, the web site for the network just lists the branches, not the ATMs.  The closest branch appeared to be Honolulu Federal Credit Union which was located inside the Sheraton Hotel, in the “Manor Wing”, but when we got there, no one seemed to know where that was.  When we finally found it, they were “unexpectedly closed” and there was no ATM to be found.

We had similar problems with getting a bus pass.  TheBus (that’s what they call it) uses a Holo card — a refillable plastic card to pay for using the bus.  But to get a senior card, you had to go to the main transit site to show you were over 60 and (a) that’s back by the airport, so a long way away, and (b) was closed today anyway since it was a Saturday.  We could buy just a plain adult Holo card at the local ABC stores (a local convenience store that just saturates this part of town), but they only sold the one day cards ($7 plus a $2 card fee) which is good for only one day.  The week cards are $30 and a month is $80.  But the cards can be refilled online.  So we bought two one day cards, and will refill them to make them a week card. 

After all that, we used the 1-day Holo card to ride 45 minutes across town to Chinatown.  We looked around a bit, but mainly just got lunch — salmon from Maguro Brothers.  They have a new location in the Waikiki Shopping Plaza not far from our place, so we may try that out later.

But otherwise, it looked to me that Chinatown was slowly going away.  There were a lot of shops and buildings that were just empty.  Of course the buildings were from 1920 and such.  We walked to the Chinatown Cultural Plaza, but again, it seemed mostly empty.

We had come to Chinatown on the #2 bus, but while waiting to return, noticed that Google said we could take the #2 or the #13 back (among a bunch of others).  The #13 took a little longer, but would arrive sooner and so we would still get home earlier on it.  So when it showed up, we got on, and sat in the back, looking at the other bus riders and the city as the bus went back to Waikiki.  After a while tho, it seemed we were off track to go to Waikiki, and sure enough, it took us away from the beach, inland, up the hills, thru residential neighborhoods before finally stopping at a high school behind the other side of Diamond Head.  Which was all very interesting, but didn’t get us home.  We talked to the driver and it turns out the #2 buses also stopped by the high school, so we got off and got on a #2 bus, which, when it finally left — we were apparently at a rest stop for the buses — took us up past Diamond Head and back down to Waikiki, and home.

We went home and continued to schedule things, and plan out the next 5 days or so.  Pearl Harbor, for example, requires a ticket to see the Arizona, and the soonest available was 10 January.  We leave Honolulu on the 11th. 

While Linda was getting tickets and reservations, and entering everything in a calendar so we could keep track of it — let’s see, snorkeling with turtles is as 9:30, but you have to be there half an hour early, and it will take 32 minutes by bus to get there, so we should leave here for the bus by 8:20.  While Linda was doing that, I was trying to get the TV to work for her.  She had tried it the first day we got here, but …

The TV has two remotes — one for the TV and one for the cable box.  We used to have something like that for our last TV.  We could sort of get the TV to come on, but there was nothing for it to display.  It seemed like a problem with the cable box.  But the cable box had its own remote.  Each remote had dozens, hundreds it seems, of buttons and it wasn’t clear most of them did.  Plus the cable box itself had 2 buttons, with no real indication what they did.  So I asked our hosts how to make it work.  They didn’t seem to know either.  And what they did know was sort of vague — “Press the power button”, but there are 3 power buttons: one on the cable box (although it wasn’t clear which of the two buttons was power) and one on each of the two remotes.  It took hours (from 5 until 7), and lots of messages back and forth before they finally suggested to pull the plug on everything, wait and then plug it back in.  When I did that the TV came on fine, waiting for input from HDMI2, and the cable box showed up on HDMI2 as rebooting.  From experience, we know that the Specturm cable boxes take over 15 minutes to reboot, and sure enough 17 minutes later we had a working TV.

Then we went out to eat.  There is an Udon restaurant (Marugame Udon) just around the corner that had long lines every time we went by, so we tried it out.  It took about an hour to get in and order.  Linda got a spicy curry udon, while I got a milder umami udon.  Plus you could have a side of tempura.  I was able to eat the udon, but didn’t have room for the tempura, so more left overs for me!