Filed under: Activities, Hawaii, Sport | Tags: frisbee, polar bears, sports, ultimate
If you are reading the title of this post and thinking, “The ultimate what?” then you are in need of a serious education.
Ultimate frisbee is perhaps the ultimate sport, combining, as it does, the best of football, basketball and soccer with high-flying frisbee action. The only reason it has not shot to international prominence is that it is perpetually the sport of choice of the slacker, and enjoys a reputation as such. However, when played by experienced and athletic performers, the sport truly rises to levels of excitement that have potential far beyond the semi-underground place where the it resides today.
Like the ping-pong tables of our youth, frisbee has always been there, ever-present, under-respected.
I was introduced to ultimate in college, via the disorganized pickup game, and the slightly more organized intramural game. Later on in Tokyo I played pickup games in Yoyogi Park on weekends, but as the kids came my involvement gradually trailed off. Here in Honolulu I’ve gotten more involved than I ever have, joining the Hawaii Ultimate fall league. The folks in the league are pretty serious about the game, and I’m actually learning plays and formations for the first time in my life. The team I’m on, Polar Bears for Pipelines, is 3-1, but I’ve started to discover that there are differences between what I was able to do five years ago and now. It now takes me a whole week to recover from the hamstring strains and calf pulls that seem to slow me up in each and every game.
Filed under: Dining, Hawaii, Honolulu | Tags: burgers, focaccia, Honolulu, on the edge, safeway
I did something inadvisable today. I had burgers for both lunch and dinner, consuming over a pound of beef on the day. While I realize this is a modest achievement compared to the eating habits of my average countryman, I find myself tending toward a balanced diet full of variety, and a 2-burger day seemed excessively indulgent. And immensely enjoyable.
My first burger of the day came courtesy of Kua ‘Aina, which is a mere half step up from fast food. But the second made Kua ‘Aina look like a McDonald’s cheeseburger (complete with limp pickles and dehydrated onion specks).
Burgers on the Edge, located across the parking lot from Safeway off Kapahulu, is the home of serious beef and buns action! Part of the fun is assembling your own creation, starting with the tantalizing choice of USDA premium chuck or wagyu, moving on to a range of cheeses (I went bleu), sauces (I went Cabernet wine), and toppings (I went apple wood smoked bacon, portabella mushroom and sliced red onions) on a thick focaccia-like bun that holds the meat well, doesn’t get soggy and tastes amazing.
Filed under: Dining, Hawaii, Honolulu | Tags: chinatown, Dining, Honolulu, indigo, thai
Chinatown is like a championship-winning basketball team; it has depth off the bench. I have only scraped the surface of what it has to offer, and one of the places that began my exploration was Indigo.
Housed in a couple of buildings that have been joined together like Siamese twins by a shared open-air passageway at the rear, Indigo is a bohemian nest of loosely connected bars and dining spaces. The entrance begins to give you hints of what is in store; it is literally the space between the two decayed buildings, two sheer walls of beautifully eroded brick with giant paper lanterns suspended from the looming darkness above.
I had reserved a table in the veranda that looks out onto the small park next to the Hawaii Theatre. I sipped an Anchor Steam and soaked in the ambiance while I waited for my tardy friend to show. I people-watched as I waited, and confirmed what I had heard: Indigo is the haunt of Honolulu’s more fortunate. But that is not to say the menu is super-painful on the wallet. While the wines run a little steep, the food is fairly priced.
As it should be. Indigo’s modern Thai fare hovers on that infuriating no-man’s-land between the well-prepared and the great. The assorted rolls and won-tons arrived at the table a little cold, but were still good. The fish I ordered was better, wrapped in leaves to allow the spices to burrow deep into the tender, flaky meat. Still, some elements like the pared baby tomatoes on the side seemed a little half-assed.
But the white wine that went with it all had a lot to say for itself. And so did the vaulted ceilings, the warm flickering lights, the adjacent spaces visible through windows, lattices and cracks in the walls. They said, come back anytime, you’ve found a special place.
Filed under: Events, Hawaii, Honolulu | Tags: chinatown, first fridays, Honolulu, slumming
First Fridays is a monthly event held to promote business in Chinatown, featuring an assortment of street entertainment and gallery openings. Chinatown is a Honolulu neighborhood in a state of flux: at once a historical district gone to rot, now undergoing a gradual gentrification from the business district. This makes for a charming mix of urban decay and beautifully renovated spaces, rendering Chinatown the de facto cultural heart of Honolulu. There are still a few too many homeless drug addicts lingering in the shadows, a few too many dive bars (the scary kind you wouldn’t venture into even for the fun of “slumming it”) and a few too many boarded up condemned buildings for it to be truly comfortable, but even this dark side contributes to a pulsating organic soul that provides a real reprieve from the plastic, Vegas-like atmosphere of Waikiki.
We had been hankering to go for a few months, but had always got caught up in something up until the most recent First Friday. We brought the kids, but soon realized these events are geared toward adults. Next time it will have to be parents night out.
Plenty of gallery openings and free wine.
We ducked inside the Hawaii Theatre for a few minutes and listened to a few tunes on the ol’ pipe organ. It’s a surprisingly beautiful venue.
Many a boutique have settled in the neighborhood alongside the bars, restaurants and galleries, the kind that are just fun to rummage through.
A lot of Chinatown still looks like this.
Filed under: Dining, Hawaii, Honolulu | Tags: crepe paper, food, maria bonita's, mexican
I have already written about a couple different Mexican restaurants, but I had to go to Chinatown to get the best Mexican in Hawaii (that I know of). Go figure.
I suppose this means, logically, that I’ll have to go all the way to Mexicotown to get some decent Chinese.
No, that’s just stupid.
While I’ve grown pretty fond of Wahoo’s Fish Tacos – partly because there is one near my office, allowing me to gorge frequently – but there is still something distinctly fast food about the place, plasticky and prepackaged. Whereas Maria Bonita’s is nothing more than a hole in the wall, a grungy little diner decorated with crepe paper and cheap knick knacks. It is so unassuming a place that when I told my colleague I went there for dinner, he said, “Didn’t that place close?”
I find it hard to believe that anyone who has eaten there would utter those words. While it may look like it is run on a shoestring budget – and probably is – it brings in the business in an area where there is plenty of competition.
The food has a homey taste, as if you were eating in a Texan Mexican grandmother’s kitchen. The thin, soupy salsa that came out with the obligatory chips was surprisingly delish. I was ready to sip from the bowl when the chips ran out. And the burritos were loaded with little anomalies like potatoes and carrots that you don’t usually think of as Mexican but which fit and added extra dimensions of flavor.
The place has no liquor license to speak of, but you are free to take a little adventure down the street to the local liquor store and byoc (bring your own Corona).
The intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Hawaiian culture are starting to make themselves known. Bits of slang, custom, the residue of ancient ritual hovers all around, and like child entering a world of language, it slowly becomes intelligible to me. On the surface, it is easy to think of this place as just another American state, but there are signs all around – aside from the palm trees and beaches – to remind you of how foreign this place really is. Like the way locals, even the haole locals, will sprinkle their speech with Hawaiian.
One of my favorite examples, which is not Hawaiian, but pidgin, is “talk story.” You could translate this term to mean simply “shoot the breeze,” but there is a more profound, ritual element to it. It is about people sharing information, revealing their history and personality and bonding through story. One imagines local gatherings hundreds of years ago, weather-beaten men gathered around a massive urn of kava, relating local news and ancient myth in a continuous stream of give and take.
Filed under: Dining, Hawaii, Honolulu | Tags: Dining, Duke's, Honolulu, kitsch, Waikiki
More than any other restaurant in Honolulu, Waikiki’s Duke’s is the one I can legitimately claim to be an expert on. I’ve had the opportunity to eat there for breakfast, lunch and dinner, on numerous occasions. It’s not that it’s my favorite, or that it blows everything else out of the water. It’s just that it has a combination of factors going in its favor that has caused it to be our de facto go-to place when we need to entertain with a minimum of stress in Waikiki.
Some of the things we like about it: it’s right on the beach with ocean-view tables, walkable from almost anywhere in Waikiki, kid-friendly, reasonably priced with quality monster buffets, and oozing historical kitsch value.
The downsides – hit-and-miss food and service – are more endemic to Waikiki than to the place itself. Seafood is the specialty of the house, and they do it pretty well. Don’t even think about getting a steak there, however.
While dinner is decent, we prefer the breakfast and lunch buffets. There is enough variety to keep your sense of taste entertained and your belly bloated, but the options are always fresh and provoking (if consistently the same over time). There is a blackbean corn salad that I am particularly enamored of.
While you are eating you can either gaze out to sea or catch an eyeful of the Duke Kahanamoku memorabilia that lines the walls. Duke is the godfather of surfing, and apparently even lobbied the Olympic committee of back in the day (as a medalist in swimming) to make it a medal sport. To which the Olympic committee replied, “Nah, we’re going to go with a hot new trend in sporting called ‘rhythmic gymnastics.’ That’s where the real marketing potential is.”
Man I was really blown away by Taiyo’s birthday. Mizuho did an incredible job of rallying the troops (her rapidly expanding network of friends). My sole accomplishment was to get a square-foot miniature charcoal grill to produce hot dogs and hamburgers in a strong headwind to feed the women, children and assorted daddies. I was surprised at the turnout, but it really hit home when Taiyo started opening his presents. They just kept coming and coming, piling up like so much junk made in China. It is a good thing we left half of the boys toys back in Japan, because he made up the difference in one fell swoop. Best of all, he got the skateboard he wanted. So now I don’t have to hear him say, “Daddy, when’s my skateboard coming?” anymore.
Filed under: Events, Hawaii, Honolulu | Tags: beach, Honolulu, movies, pirates, vodka
Every so often, particularly during peak tourist season, they show a weekend evening movie at Queen’s Surf Beach, down at the end of Waikiki, across from the zoo. You bring a dinner (or buy one of a dozen plate lunches from one of the several vendors), arrive before sunset, dig a pit in the sand to prop yourself up if you forgot to bring a chair, take a few swigs from the illicit pet bottle full of vodka orange, and enjoy the local bands until the sun goes down and it’s movie time.
The night we went we saw the third Pirates of the Caribbean, which made absolutely no sense to me, especially since I hadn’t seen the previous one. Taiyo watched about five minutes before losing focus, yet still managed to come out of it with a greater interest in pirates than he had before.
Way back before the conventions, Obama made his first stop of the campaign in his home state of Hawaii. Not to campaign, of course – Hawaii is Dem country (which fails to account for the Republican governor at the helm, but anyway). Like everyone else, he came to Hawaii to go on vacation.
When they made the surprise announcement that Obama would make a courtesy appearance for his adoring fans at a park near the airport, I started contemplating skipping out of work on Friday to bear witness. There were, however, a few mitigating factors: 1. I would have to make it out to the airport on my bike – doable, but a hot, sweaty, draining ride. 2. He would be most likely appearing for a short time, not making a full blown campaign speech. 3. It would be a tough sell to my employer, for whom I had been working only a few weeks.
Instead I watch the live feed online, complete with shaky camera and delayed sound. I was glad I didn’t go. The sun was blazing, the lines were long, the local politicians were annoying and Obama’s appearance was brief and uninspired.
That was probably as close as I’ll come to the man. I suppose we could have headed over to Kailua and stalked him, tailed him to the beach and bodysurfed with him, but we have better things to do – or at least my wife does.
While I’m on the tangential subject, I might as well weigh in with my prognostication for the election. Although I’m a supporter (of the non-rabid variety, i.e. the minority), I see him going down to McCain. Let’s face it, it’s not a good sign when McCain can deliver a feeble, flawed speech in front of a poorly choreographed laugh-track crowd and still bounce ahead in the polls.
Obama peaked in the primaries, wasted his best stuff on Hilary. Oprah, the race speech, change. Not only did he waste his best stuff, he’s been a shadow of the superstar he was a few months ago. In the primaries, he dictated the conversation. Now every move is an inexplicable response to McCain – pulling out of the townhall, choosing Mr. Foreign Policy Experience Biden, giving an acceptance speech heavy on policy. Every time he answers his critics, he acknowledges they have a point. I’m not saying he needs to be Mr. No-regrets Bush, he just needs to stop playing reactionary and get back in the driver seat. Otherwise, get ready for one year of McCain and three of moose hockey pitbull bookburner. While that idea scares the bejeebus out of me, I don’t see Obama doing anything to stop it short of FINDING THE MAGIC.
