SpOrTs!!

The school week went by uneventfully - as in nothing fun was done Monday through Friday.  On the contrary, I had three quizzes, a lab procedure test, and a crazy lab to do this week.  So by Friday I was ready to listen to some tasteless Rebecca Black (for those of you who have ever encountered this and are interested, go here).

So the roommates and I went to the huge shopping center Ala Moana after we were all done with classes.  It was pretty impressive.  There are three floors, I believe, and countless shops.  You could probably spend an entire day there if you're a hardcore shopper.

Then we went to the beach for about a minute because we were all worn out from shopping.  We climbed back on the bus and met some fellow students on the journey back.  They were pretty cool and we spend the rest of the night hanging out with them and going between dorms trying to find something to do.

Saturday was the first home football game of the season!  It's a little different than football at Illinois because 1) the tickets are FREE and 2) Aloha Stadium (where they play) isn't on campus.  There were shuttles that could take students that didn't have a car.  Or option number two was to take the city bus and ride that for an hour.  And of course my group chose option #2.  But it wasn't terribly bad.

We got to the stadium a little over two hours before kickoff, thinking we would tailgate with the other students.  Would have been perfect if we had found the student section right away.  The parking lot was enormous.  But we eventually found them.  What a crazy bunch.  This guy offered us free margaritas.  He was making them in plain sight in the bed of his truck.  It was legit and they were super tasty.  We thanked him and went on our way.

We then met up with the kids we met on Friday, and had a merry time before we went into the stadium.  When we went to check our bags, though, they wouldn't let Kelsey in with her water bottle even though it was empty.  Her having paid good money for the water bottle and obviously not wanting to throw it away, we found some kids that had drove here and asked to put it in there.  She got the kid's phone number to track it down after the game.  But the guys ended up being pretty cool about it.  They were in the army.  More on them in a bit.

It was hot as hell in the stadium.  The game started at four, and the sun was right on our side of the stadium.  We were absolutely toasting in there.  It was miserable.  But I was excited to see some football and tried not to think about every square inch of my body that was sweating.

By halftime we were winning and we got up to walk around a bit.  We ran into the army guys that had Kelsey's water bottle and hung out with them for the rest of the game.  Hawaii ended up winning the game (and I was surprised 'cause I heard that we suck as a football team).  We left with the army guys to go get Kelsey's water bottle.  They were headed up to the north shore because that's where they lived, and they invited us to go to a bar there for a little while.  Figuring what the hell, we tagged along.  After the 50-minute drive up to the north shore, I was exhausted.  We didn't stay at the bar for long and went back to the one guy's apartment and put a movie in (something with Will Ferrell).

Before we finished the movie, I proclaimed that I was exhausted and the nice gentlemen offered to drive us back to campus.  Thank God, because I was feeling slightly vulnerable that we would have been stuck there overnight without a way to get back home because our lack of mode of transportation.  That was a bit creepy.

I will be all right with my life if I never see or hear from them again.

Sunday was a great day as well.  Janelle had found out about a program without our dorm that would take us to the beach and we could go surfing for like $7.  Apparently, though, nobody else knew about this program so it was just me, Janelle, and Kelsey with the two RA's that were putting on the program.  So we went to Waikiki beach and rented boards and paddled out, but the waves weren't  that good and there were a ton of people.  Rob and Ryan (the RA's) caught a few, but I was never facing the right way or someone else had caught the wave right before me so I didn't technically surf.  I stood up for a second on a weak wave but that was as exciting as that got.  But I'll definitely be doing it again before the semester is over.

After that, we all walked around Waikiki for a bit, nothing super interesting became of that.  We tried to find this event called Floatopia, which I guess is like a drinking fest in the water and a lot of people show up to it, but we weren't at the right beach.

So we came back to campus and went to a women's volleyball game which was super fun!  Hawaii played UCLA and it was supposed to be one of the really good games of the season because I guess we are really good at volleyball and UCLA was going to be one of our best competition, which they were.  We lost in 4 sets but the match was really fun to watch.  It made me miss volleyball so much!!  That was the grand finale for Sunday.

Today (Monday) was a fantastically eventful day as well.  The roommates and I were thinking about going to the North Shore for the day but that's like a 3.5 hour bus ride and we'd have to wake up at six in the morning to catch the bus and I was not having that.  So instead Rob and Ryan said they'd come with us to Manoa Falls.  There was a group of about six of us, and it was a really fun hike.  I'd recommend that over Diamond Head, although the hike itself was a little rough at times because the trail was rocks and uneven and the ground was wet from the rain.  At the end of the hike though was a waterfall which I'm just realizing now I had never seen one before today so that was pretty neat.

On our way back was another trail that deviated from the original and we decided to check that out.  Best decision of the day.  We found these giant trees that had really hard and sturdy vines or something grown alongside them.  So we spent an hour and just climbed these gargantuan trees.  Geek moment but I felt like I was in a combination of the movies Avatar and Fern Gully.  It was almost like rock climbing so I was real pumped about that.

When we got back from that we went to this little restaurant called the Rainbow Drive-In, which was all right.  It had native Hawaiian dishes and was tasty.  I got some chicken thing (real specific, I know).

So now I'm in my room blogging about the past week instead of attempting to get some reading done for my classes =/ I'm here in Hawaii to go to school, right?  Eh.

Maybe.

Aloha!

P.S.  I'll post pictures as soon as I get them.  My camera conveniently died right as we got to the waterfall today at Manoa Falls so I will be stealing pictures from my friends.  Enter creepy methodical plan laugh.