Pearl Harbor and the North Shore

Last weekend I went on a field trip (the last one of orientation!) to the Arizona memorial (aka Pearl Harbor) and the North Shore. It was interesting visiting the Arizona memorial, although I have to say I was turned off by the number of people posing in front of the names of the dead.

And now I live in Hawaii!

So, about a week ago I moved to the lovely state of Hawaii, where I'll be living for the next two years while I get my Master's degree in Philosophy (and Japanese). I'm living on the East West Center campus at UH Manoa with about 500 other students from the Asia-Pacific region. I think there are about 150 new students, and together we represent 42 countries.
Yesterday we took a field trip to the Kahana valley, where we cleaned trash from the beach (there wasn't much, but we did find an old carpet), then were fed a traditional Hawaiian lunch (rice with poi, which is smushed up taro, which is like a sweet potato, pork, chicken with taro leaves, pineapple, bananas, and coconut gelly-like things) and weeded a taro patch.