Return to Pali

We visited the Pali lookout when we first visited Hawaii in 2012. We returned today with our sights on the Old Pali Road, not to be confused with the ancient Pali Road, which was the cobblestone pathway we hiked on to get to Likeke Falls.  The Old Pali Road is a nice trail that winds down from the Pali lookout.  The Pali Lookout, by the way, offers spectacular views of Windward Oahu and was the site where Kamehameha I drove the army of his enemy over the cliffs.  It's also overrun with tourists.  Xander met the Asian paparazzi, which made us think of our Korean home.  He has to be all over the Korean internet.

Not a bad place to fall to one's death

A cistern?  For flood control?  No idea.

There are Korean hikers here!

The paparazzi

Rice Keiki

X assimilates well.  He loves Korean food and the jam-packed craziness of Korean stores and public spaces.  While his dad and I prefer less of a crowd, X is energized by the hordes.

Now that we're in Hawaii, he has shown that he loves the ocean, ukelele music, and plate lunches.  Plate lunches are emblematic of Hawaii itself: usually a combo of short-grain rice, macaroni salad, and some Japanese or Korean inspired meat like kalbi or donkatsu, they are a mishmash of different cultures' foods.  X is a bit of a plate lunch baby, so to speak, so it's not a shock when he shovels fistfuls of macaroni salad and rice into his mouth.  He's actually so into rice that he won't eat any meals that don't include it, leading us to put things like spaghetti and pizza over rice for him.

We visited the zoo last week, which on a spectrum of 1 to 10, with 1 being Daegu's animal gulag and 10 being the Kansas City Zoo, I'd put Honolulu's at a six or seven.  Most of the habitats were not cringe-worthy.  X demonstrated that he likes animals that he has encountered in his books or toys, and thus was not a fan of the reptiles, to Bobby's disappointment.  He did get very excited to see the elephants, and was thrilled about the sheep and horses.  Our favorite moment was when he sat on his daddy's shoulders and watched the monkeys pick lice from each other,  then started picking at daddy's hair.

This morning, Bobby and I were on our computers while X puttered about busily, running from his toy box in his bedroom to the couch.  When I got up, I was surprised to see most of his wheeled toys lined up neatly on the couch.  Xander's garage.  He is obsessed with buses, trucks, motorcycles, airplanes, and trains.  He actually spent a good bit of his time at the zoo pointing out airplanes and trying to see the carts that the zookeepers drove around.

He loved the dic dics, possibly because he could say it.  It turned out they weren't dic dics, but oh well.

The fish were neat, too.

I couldn't convince him that this isn't an airplane.

Xander's garage.

Spam rolls are another local food that he loves.

He's determined to use chopsticks.