Further Evidence That Belinda Carlisle Might Be Right After All

So I woke up this morning at 5:30 or so, on account of the fact that I still think I'm in the Eastern time zone, and guess what? It wasn't butt-ass cold outside. It was, in fact, quite pleasant. Again, reminds me of mornings in SoCal, cool and kinda fresh-smelling. I'd get up earlier if all mornings were like this. First things first, breakfast. I needed to get away from the hotel; I don't think I could have handled another well-adjusted family on vacation sitting next to me. So I decided to find some place that could at least pass for "local" under casual scrutiny. I ended up, thanks to Mr. Breakfast, at Sam Choy's, which did appear to be patronized by locals, at least when I got there. Any of y'all thinking of going, you should go early. I was able to find parking pretty easily, but it was full up by about 7:45. Breakfast was something called a "pork moku". I figure that the guys who originally invented it had a conversation something like this: First Guy: I'm hungry, what's for breakfast? Second Guy: We got some rice. FG: That's good, but we need some meat too. SG: How 'bout we throw in a bunch of shredded pork? FG: Getting warmer. Now what can we put on it so that we can claim we ate our vegetables this morning? SG: Carmelized onions? FG: Nice, now you're thinking! The only problem is that this is a little bit on the dry side. SG: Why don't you pour a bunch of gravy over it? FG: Great idea. Now the only problem is selling it to the haole. SG: I know, let's top it with a fried egg. They like fried eggs on everything. FG: Bingo. God, that thing just sits in your stomach like I don't know what. But pretty good, all things considered. Tomorrow I will return and get the "catch of the day". Nothing beats starting out the morning with something that was swimming happily 4 hours ago. And wait, it gets better. Turns out that Sam Choy's is a brewery too. I picked up a growler of "Steamship Lager" which I'm enjoying as I write this. Good beer, balanced and not too heavy, nice (but not overwhelming) hoppiness. So I got back to my hotel room and holy fuck. I looked out my window and there's this huge ass rainbow: Nice. So anyway, I spent the better part of the day hoofing it around downtown Honolulu. Items of merit: Everyone is pissed off at the whole NSA spying thing. And I mean everyone. Yes, you can have a store devoted to nothing but kimchee. There's something you don't see every day. Anyway, I also had the chance to see the "King's Jubilee Celebration" this evening at the hotel, which is basically a pageant honoring the last king of Hawaii. The whole thing struck me as a little bit weird. There's this color guard which escorts an actor playing the king, and then an MC who does a little bit of biography on the king. The biography was kind of interesting in that it was strongly pro-native Hawaiian while at the same time being "we honor all the peoples all over" and stuff. Oh yeah, and they mentioned that the native Hawaiian population was decimated by diseases brought by mainlanders. And after that, the floor show, which was just so campy I couldn't really take it anymore.