Michael We have also become quite old and sluggish by now and have recently started going to the same place in Hawaii every year. In the little town of Kailua on the east side of the main island of Oahu, there is a huge crescent-shaped beach with only gentle waves. We always stay, as we did this year at the end of May, in a small vacation apartment from which you can walk barefoot along a 100-meter private pathway to the beach.
When the Hawaiian neighbors are not tinkering with their houses or having their lawns mowed, both of which cause an infernal noise, you can relax quite well there. A gentle breeze blows through the windows, which are open all day and only protected by fly screens, so there is no need for air conditioning, despite the tropical heat!
The 5-hour flight from San Francisco went by incredibly quickly, after all, I had my new netbook. "Minime" and lots of TV movies stored on it! This time on Oahu, we didn't drive around much, but we did go to "Sandy Beach." After all, American media reported that our President Obama had also been bodysurfing in the waves there! However, we didn't go into the water because the oldest surfers there were around 25, and the waves crashed in so brutally that you can't even imagine!
And as quasi-Hawaiians, as we consider ourselves after more than 10 vacations on the islands, we naturally shop where the "locals," the natives, shop: at the supermarket "Don Quijote," pronounced "Don Quicksott" in American, not like in German or Spanish. The Japanese characters in illustration 4, I can tell you as an old connoisseur of everything Japanese, phonetically spell "Don Quijote" in Japanese as "Do-N-Ki-soh-te" in Katakana characters, which the Japanese use for foreign words that don't have a Japanese Kanji character. The store is not only incredibly cheap (sometimes only half as expensive as the "Safeway" across the street), but also offers all sorts of Japanese/Korean delicacies: fresh tuna poke and kimchi oysters, for example, super delicious!