a very pleasant day in Hawaii. There was much confusion in the morning. As mentioned yesterday, we thought we were doing only immigration & not customs. But then, last minute, we were asked to fill out customs declaration forms also. Which none of us were really prepared to do. And that, of course, meant we could mail things after-all, but I wasn’t prepared for that either … we were awakened, though, as promised -- that part happened without delay -- at 6 am. The Deans sang to us at 6 am over the very-loud-speaker.
I spent the morning at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. After just being in Hiroshima, this was very different. The Hiroshima Peace Park seemed to me to be about healing. It was a place for people to come and pray and pay witness to the horror of what happened there. The Arizona Memorial seemed to be a historical account of what happened there. It was about war. You see a 20-minute movie that starts with Japanese aggression in 1931 and ends with Midway. “The tide of the war turned with Midway” and then the movie ends. Then you take a shuttle-boat out to the memorial itself which is the sunken USS Arizona with still 1000 people buried within. It’s a tomb. It is very beautifully done and there is a really impressive marble wall with the names of the dead, but they are marching tourists through on a 15-minute schedule. It’s a graveyard, but it’s hard to have time to stop and really reflect. At Hiroshima, you walked around the museum and the park at your own pace, doing whatever you needed to do absorb the enormity of the event. At Pearl Harbor, we were told a lot about the enormity of the event, but you are not given enough time to take it in. The memorials were also similar in interesting ways. As mentioned in my Japan post, the Hiroshima museum significantly tones down the issues of Japanese aggression. At Pearl Harbor, not once are we told that the U.S. ended the war by dropping nuclear bombs on Japan. The movie ends with Midway. I found that kind of astounding. It’s all about who tells the story.
The Arizona memorial is quite moving, I don’t mean to imply otherwise. It just feels primarily more like a tourist attraction than did Hiroshima, although Hiroshima is quite so also. The Hiroshima memorial (much like the Vietnam Vet memorial in D.C.) allows the visitor more time and space.
We did a little bit of a city tour after, seeing the National Cemetery:
And the statue of Kamehameha I, who established the kingdom of Hawaii in 1810:
We learned that Honolulu has the only state capitol building in the U.S. without a dome. And we learned that, despite customary practice, Hawaii does not fly the U.S. flag along with the Hawaii flag on it's public buildings. They are very happy to be a state (we were told), but like to hold on to that bit of independent resistance.
We got back to the ship late (we left late after all the customs confusion) and I was supposed to meet Kate & Robin for the afternoon, but they had already left. I ran into Dawn and we caught up with the others at a restaurant on the waterfront. I had a burger and endless refills of Diet Coke, which made me unbelievably happy after 3 ½ months. We walked around Honolulu in search of a post office and a pharmacy to run a few errands and then Dawn and I walked to the beach. We had three goals: post office, pharmacy, beach. In most places, if we went out with three goals and achieved just one of them we felt proud! It was always a cultural experience, but initial goals were quite often hard to meet. Here, we set out with three goals and accomplished three goals. It was very exciting! It definitely helps when you can speak the language and read the signs. The beach was small but lovely. Not Waikiki or any of the other famous, beautiful beaches … it seemed like a beach for normal people, but that was just lovely. We watched kids swim in the ocean. The water was colder than I expected.
And then we met back up with Robin and with Joyce and Bob and had a lovely dinner again on the waterfront. I had scallops and salad and endless refills of Diet Coke.
This scene struck me as funny. It was this morning as we waited in the Union for the trips to depart. Students back in U.S. cell-phone-contact:
Flickr photos for Hawaii are up at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/-erin/sets/72157600191044520/
Aloha and welcome home to the United States.
