First we walked the 2 miles or so to the Japanese, or Asian, supermarket. This is not as boring as it sounds since we can walk straight along the beach for at least a third of the way, and then have the people watching factor for another third or so as we walk past all the big hotels and designer stores such as Coach, Cartier and Dior. Once we got to the supermarket and found our way through all the electronics (including massage chairs, rice cookers galore, handy electric frying pans etc) clothes, perfumes, “seasonal” items etc, we kicked back and spent a while trying to figure out what some of the stuff was that we were looking at. My perennial favourites are the veggie, fish, sushi and “freshly pickled stuff” aisles. The veggie aisle always has at least 10 types of Asian “greens for cooking” and about 20 different types of cabbage. We are currently trying to work our way through most of them and have found all the “greens for cooking” have been perfect for stir fry!
The “freshly pickled stuff” aisle is in a class of its own though. It is always fascinating and has all kinds of stuff, including about 1,700 different types of Kim Chee…minimum! And I always thought kim chee was just pickled cabbage…! I love trying to figure out what on earth that “squishy green thing” is or what that big container with lots of different coloured “squishy and not squishy things” has in it. Or what on earth is in that kim chee? One day we will pluck up the courage to try some maybe!
We always like to try some of the different kinds of poke. Poke is a Hawaiian dish. It is usually raw fish like tuni or salmon, but can also be tofu or veggie. The fish is then marinated with different spices and flavours and marinated. It is delicious and completely addictive…if you like raw fish I guess…Out current favourite is the wasabi ahi tuna poke. Yum!!!! The tuna is marinated in (I think) a base of soy, green onion and wasabi, a Japanese spicy mustard of some type that is green and which totally blows your head off if you have to much. It’s great! Very spicy. And like I said totally addictive - maybe I could even tempt you if you don’t like raw fish…Good thing is that it’s pretty inexpensive here, we buy a lot of it!
Once we had loaded up we walk to the bus stop which is fortunately very near by and catch the bus back down to Waikiki to unload and start in on that poke! Obviously Safeway isn’t any where near as exciting. - it’s now Wednesday night and we still haven’t managed to make it there…though they do have a very impressive Italian gelato bar which I can attest is very tasty! Especially the double dark chocolate gelato!
Sunday we decided to try and get to the Byodo In Temple. It is a copy of an original and very famous Buddhist temple in Japan dating from over 900 years ago and is part of the Garden of Remembrance here in Oahu. The gardens were beautiful and very peaceful. I thought it was a lovely idea: each different culture and religion had it’s own area. So there were Buddhist gardens, Chinese gardens, Catholic gardens and churches, protestant gardens etc. All in one place nestled up against the side of the pali. (Quiz time – what does pali mean again?!). Very civilized.
The beach at Puuni with another storm moving in and Nick in the beach
It took us pretty much the whole day to get there. We had a vague idea that it was on the other side of Kane’ohe so we took the Island circle bus up there. When we arrived in Kane’ohe though, it was torrential rain, so we decided to stay on the bus and head a little further north. The original plan had been to see the temple and then hit a beach, so we just did it the other way around. Except it really wasn’t very nice when we got off the bus either and we hadn’t chosen a great beach. The waves were too high and there wasn’t really any chance of swimming, though we did see a couple of “diver down” signs – way too close to the shore for me to get in and go out there! We walked down the beach a little ways and then as the weather cleared up a little decided to try our luck again.
Back on the bus we asked the very friendly bus driver how we could. She told us where to get off and what bus to catch next. Unfortunately it was Sunday, and the next bus wasn’t for an hour…we walked down a stop and then waited as we really didn’t know where we where going. We took bets on the fact that it was probably right around the next corner…When the bus finally showed up it went all over so we though maybe we had done the right thing…and then we realized that we had just been criss-crossing the main road that we had been on and it would have 
taken us maybe 10 minutes to walk there…max!!! Oh well. At least we made it before it closed (just!). The temple was lovely though and nice and peaceful since we were lucky to be leaving just as the tour buses arrived! 
Back on the bus we asked the very friendly bus driver how we could. She told us where to get off and what bus to catch next. Unfortunately it was Sunday, and the next bus wasn’t for an hour…we walked down a stop and then waited as we really didn’t know where we where going. We took bets on the fact that it was probably right around the next corner…When the bus finally showed up it went all over so we though maybe we had done the right thing…and then we realized that we had just been criss-crossing the main road that we had been on and it would have 
taken us maybe 10 minutes to walk there…max!!! Oh well. At least we made it before it closed (just!). The temple was lovely though and nice and peaceful since we were lucky to be leaving just as the tour buses arrived! 
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