Waterfalls and Sushi

Yesterday was beautiful.  Sunny, but not unbearably hot.  Here’s a recap of how I spent my day:

1. Worked until early afternoon.

2. Drove to Wailua Falls, which is a beautiful 80-foot waterfall. There’s a road that winds back to a bridge where you can park to look at it. There is a trail leading down to the base of the falls, but I decided to leave that for another time. On the way back out to the highway, I stopped at the Immaculate Conception Cemetery (just because the name is hilarious) and took a picture of a random cactus.

3. Went to Glass Beach. It’s a small, black sand beach in the industrial area of Ele’ele that is littered with thousands of tiny sea glass pebbles. Most of them are various shades of brown, but there are some green and blue glass pieces mixed in. All the glass comes from the western shore of Kauai, where broken bottles and auto glass were dumped by Swiss Cheese Shoreline. The beach was beautiful, and I collected a handful of greenish sea glass. Not sure what I’ll do with it, but I’ll think of something.   

4. Drove to 'Opaeka'a Falls, which is another waterfall accessible by an overlook. It was getting dark, so the picture isn’t that great.

5. Went to Kintaro with my friends Shikinah, her husband Ryan, Hosanna (who recently had a baby boy named Judah), her husband Joel, and a bunch of people I’d never met. It was a good thing we had reservations… the restaurant was packed, and by the time we left the parking lot was full.

Because there were so many of us (16? 18?) they gave us a special room toward the back. We all took off our shoes (side note: in Hawaii, everyone calls flip-flops “slippers”) and walked up a few steps to the platform holding our table, which looked like it was about a foot off the ground. The chairs had no legs but were just wicker mats with backs and cushions. I thought we were going to have to sit cross-legged on the ground for the whole meal (which I wouldn’t have minded), but under the table was a cut-out opening for our legs. Hard to picture? Think of it like an empty, in-ground swimming pool with all of us sitting on the edges.

With the input of Shikinah and company, I ordered a Hanalei sushi roll (smoked salmon, tuna, and avocado, all deep fried.) I learned how to use chopsticks to mix some sort of hot green stuff with soy sauce, dipped the roll in the concoction, and stuffed the whole thing in my mouth (I wasn’t being a pig; that’s how you’re supposed to do it.) It was interesting! Not bad at all. The first bite was my favorite because I hadn’t let myself stop to think about the fact that I was eating raw fish. The more I ate, the more I thought about it, and the less I enjoyed it… but at no point did I not like it. Here’s a shot of the sushi roll (sorry for the poor quality… restaurant pics were taken with my iPhone.)

And a shot of all our plates stacked on each other once we were finished. A really bad picture, but cool to see the Japanese style:

None of the girls could finish our rolls, so we kept sending our leftovers down the table for the guys to eat. They managed pretty well… but at the end of the night, this plate got sent back to our end:

All in all, it was a fun night. I enjoyed myself even though I didn’t know most of the people, and it was nice just to get out of the house and eat at a fun place… and not alone, for once.  Aloha!