Aloha ahiahi ia oukou! (Good evening to all of you!)
Happy St Patrick's day everybody!
The weatherforecast for today was 80°F, partly cloudy and 30% chance of rain” as always...
We set off an hour earlier than usual to go to the one of the most famous military bases in the world – Pearl Harbor, After a breakfast as delicious as always. After lunch we headed to a special beach on the east side of the island, where there weren't many people. We had the beach almost for ourselves! We ended our day with a real Hawaiian dinner at a hotel next to ours, plus some shopping afterwards.
In order to even get into the Pearl Harbor area, we first had to get a pass and our bus was getting checked. Also we weren't allowed to take any pictures on the bus until we got to the museum part – military rules! Once we got to the USS Missouri battleship, we were allowed to take pictures, but first we volunteered to clean (dust and swipe) the “deepest rooms” on the ship. After half an hour of “hard work”, we got a special tour throughout the entire ship, where we learned many things about how a everyday life on board was. They even had a bakery and a barber shop for the marines. As we were done, we left the USS Missouri and took the bus to the USS Arizona Memorial Theater and watched a short movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. The film explained what happened on that day and to the USS Arizona, the battleship where we went next. A ferry took us out the memorial, which was right above the sunken ship. The USS Arizona was bombed in the attack, sank, and took 1,177 men with it. It was really cool but sobering to see.
From Pearl Harbor we left to grab lunch. After delicious fast food lunch we stopped at an outlook with a beautiful view over the ocean on the other side of Oahu. There was a hole in the rocks down below, from which water splashed up in the air as the waves came in. We took a couple of nice group pictures and moved on to the Waimanalo beach. We spent the afternoon swimming and playing volleyball, football and soccer at the gorgeous, white sandy beach where we were practically alone.
On our way home Rapha gave us one of his funny yet wise and interesting speeches about life and being an exchange student. He got into being patriotic and had us all sing our national anthems. That was so much fun! We discovered new American Idols, and also those who couldn't remember their nation's song...haha!
Our hawaiian dinner was amazing and we all left satisfied for either a little more shopping or just relaxing in our rooms until we had a short meeting with the wonderful Belo staff. After hundreds of questions got answered about tomorrow, we went to bed and slept happily until the next morning when we woke up for our very last “real” day in Hawaii...
Aloha Beautiful People!
Greetings from Hawaii to all of our families and hostfamilies who had to stay home...
Nina from Germany
Karin from Sweden
and Anika from Germany
Hi-
ReplyDeleteMy name is Jane and I’m with Dwellable. I’d love to have this post featured on our site...Shoot me an email if you’re open to it and I can fill you in a little more.
jane (at) dwellable (dot) com
Really hope to hear from you,
Jane