Back in the U.S.A.!! 4/22/08

For 12 glorious hours we docked in Honolulu… what an experience to step onto U.S. soil. It felt like home. I knew the language and the currency and the customs and had no trouble reading maps and street signs. Clearing the ship took awhile, but when we got off sometime after 9am it was a beautiful, breezy day. Many of the students had plans to go sky-diving but that was not on my agenda for the day. Instead Margie and I walked to the Honolulu Academy of Art and saw a fabulous exhibit of Bhutanese art never seen before in the West. Called “The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan”, the exhibit included over 100 restored paintings (“thangkas”) and hundreds of hours of video of sacred Buddhist dances. Bhutanese culture has stayed largely intact for many centuries because this small, remote country was never colonized. The government has an official policy of measuring the Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of the GDP but I have no idea how they actually do that. Sounds like an interesting place.

In other news, we boxed up a bunch of souvenirs and other stuff and sent it home via UPS. This will save us some time when we dock in Miami so we can hopefully make our plane home. With that chore out of the way we went down to Waikiki Beach with friend Bess and had a great meal at the Hula Grill: the Early Bird Special! We were due back on the ship by 9pm and got back with less than an hour to spare. Sadly, the rumor going around the ship was not true: we were not to stay an extra day in Hawaii, so back out into the Pacific Ocean we went.