Honolulu: Pearl Harbour Day

Our 10 day cruise has finally come to an end. We had an amazing time getting to know Rony’s family and Frony’s friends. We will definitely miss getting our room cleaned twice a day, going to Windjammer/Park Café/Cascade for food, playing games with everybody, enjoying new experiences with my family, and overall just travelling with a big group of friends and family. On the other hand, Norm and I are really looking forward to doing our own thing J

Everybody woke up around 7-8am to pack up their suitcases, grab a quick breakfast and make it off the ship. My parents had a flight out of Honolulu back to Toronto that night at 10pm so Norm and I spent one more day with them. We got off the ship and walked to the nearby Enterprise where we made a car rental reservation. Since a lot of people made reservations at that Enterprise, it took over an hour to pick up our car. Luckily we told my parents to wait at the cruise terminal and Frony, Irene, and Jeff were with them for most of the time. For some reason, the rental policy in Honolulu is that you bring the car back at the same gas level you got it with. Our car had almost 0 gas so we had to visit the gas station before picking up my parents. (How strange!)

The first stop after picking up my parents was to drop off our luggage at our Airbnb. I read online that there’s free parking on the street so we parked our car and nobody seemed to have paid the parking meter and there were no signs. (We later got a parking ticket and I realized we parked on the wrong street L) We rested for a few minutes and we went to Marukame Udon for lunch. It was sweltering hot outside and it wasn’t that comfortable eating hot noodle soup but the udon was delicious!! We went before the lunch rush so we got our food with the quickness and slurped it all down. My parents really liked it too since it was tasty and affordable. After lunch we went back to our Airbnb (saw our parking ticket) and drove to pearl harbour for a history lesson.

The fried chicken was def the best side

Niku is the bomb

Happy parents :)

Niku udon with shrimp tempura

Curry udon + spam mutsubi for Norm

 The Pearl Harbour memorial site commemorates the 1941 Pearl Harbor Attack with a free 20-minute video recap of what happened that day and a visit to the USS Arizona Memorial which is built on top of the sunken USS Arizona ship. Similar to other memorial sites all over the world, Pearl Harbour was very quaint and calm. We aren’t allowed to bring any bags or purses onto the site but just a camera and whatever we can fit in our pocket. I pre-booked tickets online with a $1.50 admin fee and we were supposed to meet with May to give her the ticket. However, she was running late and I only got to see her for a second before I ran back in line to watch the scheduled video. We also ran into Susan and Ben with Rony’s parents there.

Rare venture into the sun (it was hot!)

Facing the USS Arizona stern (back of the ship)

Memorial

The view from the USS Arizona Memorial

Beautiful day

After spending a few hours at the memorial site, sweating like crazy, we went to the Ala Moana Centre for some air conditioning! Ala Moana is the largest mall in Hawaii but we realized that it’s an open mall shopping centre which means it wasn’t as cool as we would like it to be. My parents grabbed some food from the foodcourt which was just as expensive as Marukame but definitely not as good. At the mall we bumped into May, Jen, Chi, and Freeman. Most people were flying out that night so we were bound to see them at all the touristy spots. Before we left the mall, Norm and I found a Japanese food court which looked 1000 times better than the food court my parents ate at L We didn’t end up buy anything other than these green tea bread cubes. We picked up my parents luggage from our Airbnb and off to the airport we went. Finally we’re freeeee! =P We stopped by a Walmart on our way back to buy some macadamia nuts as souvenirs and some KFC for a quick late night dinner. Tomorrow we’re off to the North Shore for a different side of Honolulu!