Aloha!

Aloha from Hawaii!

Mary Beth and I have been enjoying our time away from our lives on the mainland and embracing the lovely culture of the island. We arrived in Honolulu last Wednesday and spent most of the day exploring the area around the hotel we are staying at in Waikiki. We are staying in the middle of the shopping district and we are a ten minute walk to the beach, so there is lots to see. We got up early yesterday to hit the waves. The water here is lovely and Waikiki has an amazing beginner's break. We took a surf lesson from Mike who had been teaching for about twenty years. We each caught at least seven waves in our first hour in the water and finished our lesson exhausted, but very happy.

me surfing!

Today, we took a trip up to the North Shore to check out the waves there and to get away from the mobs of tourists here in Waikiki. The beaches on the north shore are beautiful and the waves are intense! We didn't venture into the water here, but we got to see some amazing surfers ride the waves here.

The North Shore 

While we were out shopping yesterday, I discovered an artist local to the north shore of Oahu who creates these beautiful paintings and recently teamed up with Rip Curl to make some pretty awesome apparel. Her name is Heather Brown and be sure to check out her website and her blog.

We've also been meeting some pretty interesting people here. We met a pro surfer at the Rip Curl store named Edrick Baldwin and a hopeful singer-songwriter named Elijah who currently works at a Cheeseburger restaurant. There was also the two Japanese guys that came up to us on the beach tonight who run a cosmetics business in Japan and could not believe we were only 21 and 22 and that we really do work for NASA. 

Mary Beth and I have been spending the past few hours before bed playing our new ukeleles, which we are very excited about. They are quite possibly my new favorite instrument because it's small, easily portable and it is very difficult to make it sound bad. Tomorrow we will be taking free ukelele lessons from the music store in downtown Waikiki. The guy we talked to when we bought our ukeleles promised that by the end of the lesson, we would be able to play "Happy Birthday," "I'm Yours," and "Amazing Grace." We're hoping that by this time tomorrow, we will be ukelele masters.

"Surfer Girl" by Heather Brown