Happy Birthday to Me

Today's my 65th birthday. I already got one present -- Medicare -- but today I got to do one of the things I like most in the world, which is to swim with the fishes at Hanauma Bay. This is the place I imagine when I'm trying to imagine something relaxing, and even though the water was, shall we say, brisk, I still loved it today. It was a nice sunny day, so a person could get warm after they got out of the water. And notice my Hawaiian Christmas shirt.


We decided to go to Chinatown this afternoon, because we had heard that there was a thriving art district in that part of town. Now here's a really cool thing: Every time you get on the bus and pay your senior dollar, they give you a transfer. So after we left Hanauma Bay, we came back to the hotel, took a shower, changed clothes, and went back to the bus stop and used our transfer to go downtown. We wandered around in Chinatown, where they have some very interesting vegetable an fruit for sale -- tiny bananas, jackfruit, breadfruit, star fruit, papayas, mangos, and some other tropical looking fruit I couldn't identify. We looked inside one shop and there was a whole cooked pig (head and all) in a box, presumably ready to be picked up for a luau or something. Another butcher shop had whole plucked chickens in the case, includng heads and feet. When we finally found the art area, most things were closed, though I think most of them were just closed on Monday, and not because it was after 4 p.m.

We got really lucky, though and just stumbled into a wonderful little Cuban restaurant called Soul de Cuba. I had a wonderful shrimp dish, and John had a great chicken dish. Unfortunately, I forgot to take the camera with me, so I have no pictures of all the cool stuff we saw today.

And of course, I can't think of a better way to end the day (or begin it, for that matter) than by having a Dole Whip. Dole Whip is a non-dairy soft serve, the best flavor being pineapple.

I can occasionally get a hint of it at one of the yogurt places in Sacramento, but it's not the same as at this cheesy stand here in the International Market in Honolulu. I think it was a really great birthday.