travel Honolulu: Check.

Posted July 29, 2005 • Comments Off on Honolulu: Check.

Honolulu is like Miami. It’s utterly commercial, it’s incredibly crowded, there are chain restaurants and convenience stores on every block, and honestly the beach isn’t that great. It can’t compare to the Big Island, and I don’t really feel the need to ever come back.

I mean, it’s nice and all. It’s soft-breezy and sunny, like I suspect the whole state is, and it’s been in the low- to mid-80s instead of in the 90s and low 100s as it has been on the mainland this week, but as far as I can tell, Oahu is simply just not as wonderful as Hawaii was.

There are exceptions to the lack of wonderfulness, of course. This morning I had a truly awesome cheeseburger at a restaurant called Cheeseburger in Paradise. And Wayne and I went to Pearl Harbor yesterday. Julie and Paul didn’t want to go, which I think is a decision that, had I made it, I would have regretted.

I felt somewhat obligated to go, but I’m glad I did. There wasn’t a whole lot to see, but it felt very similar to going to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial or pretty much any of the memorials in DC that I’m so familiar with. There was a 20-minute movie with actual footage of the attack and pictures from the war in the Pacific, and the rangers made a point of telling everyone to be quiet and respectful. For the most part, and to my surprise, pretty much everyone was.

After we came back off the ferry, I overheard a child talking to her mother about the veterans in their family. The child’s great-grandmother had been living in Hawaii in 1941, and the mother remembered hearing about the air-raid sirens and the alert that all the military personnel (pretty much every adult man on the islands) had to report to duty that day. The child’s uncle had been stationed at Pearl Harbor (but much, much later than 1941), and the child’s father had been in Saudi in the first Gulf War. But the child didn’t understand the passage of time between these events, and kept asking if her relatives’ names were on the wall in the Arizona memorial (the 1,100-plus names of the sailors and Marines on the ship). The mother explained that that was a long time ago, a different war, and the child said, “Oh. I get them confused sometimes.”

It made me sad to stand on the Arizona memorial, with the Arizona below me where she sank and the Missouri docked nearby along what was Battleship Row, and try to imagine 350 Japanese planes flying overhead, dropping bombs and torpedos, and smoke and fire and explosions … but it made me sadder to hear an eight-year-old say there are so many wars that she gets them confused.

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