This YEAR, alone again, Naturally.

[DFW]

54. It is a very special place

Each Island has its own character. We only visited 4 of them, Oahu, Maui, the Big Island and Kaua'i. It is literally the other side of the world for us--twelve time zones. Go any further, and you start to come back to Germany from the other direction. So when we went, we made it a special occasion. My wife only came twice, and the second time was for our daughter's graduation. Our favorite was the Big Island with Kaua'i a close second.

You probably know this from hearing about it, but the culture does seep into you if you stay a while. At my daughter's school, they offered three languages, and you had to take one: French, Spanish and Hawaiian. She had taken French here in Germany, so she decided to continue with it. I approved though I love the exotic, and would have been just as happy if she had decided to learn Hawaiian, useless in Germany as it would have been. Well, after her first year there, we were in a car while I was visiting the States and a song in Hawaiian came on the radio. She started translating it for us, and telling us what it was about. I said, "hey, wait, I thought you weren't studying Hawaiian!" She looked at me in that all-knowing teenager's look reserved for the hopelessly ignorant parents, and said "I'm not taking Hawaiian, but ANYBODY can understand THAT much, sheeesh!" Yeah, anybody except her poor stupid Haole parents.