Starting today, i'm going to write my texts in english, just because everything happens in the english language here and it is quite confusing to always switch between english & german. Let's hope my writing (and my grammar) improves over the next weeks... ;)
I started my first week of university with a morning surf and a membership at Moku Surfboard rentals for unlimited surfing - that's only one of the great things of having mondays off. While it was raining the rest of the day, i was really glad that i went out on the water at least once, because the rest of the day was full of preparations for the upcoming classes. The evening was fun though, we had our first WG-Gamenight!
Once more i startet my morning with some exercise. My first class on Tuesdays & Thursdays is at 10:30am, so i have enough time before that to go on a run. It was actually the first run i did here on Hawaii and i'm happy to say, that i really enjoyed it! It's nice to explore the neighbourhood, and see new places in Waikikii. The rest of the day was full with classes - four in total, and i was only done at 10pm. I can't remember anyone in Germany, who has classes that late, but somehow it's quite normal over here.
The good thing about those long days of classes is, that i am free on Mondays and Fridays, and Wednesday is only one class at 7pm. That's why Camilla and I took the chance to explore Waikikii and the surroundings by foot.
We started without any particular destination, only walking along the coastline in the direction of diamond head. On our way we passed the Diamond head lighthouse, had some beautiful views over the sea and finally found a secret beach (Cromwell's beach) where we took a short nap and enjoyed life. That was actually another one of those moments (which i have quite regulary), where i realized, that i'm REALLY on hawaii - cause sometimes i still can't believe it...
I spent my afternoon at the hilton lagoon beach with some girls and for the evening we got Wraps and beer at the beach again. That was also the evening where we decided to go to big island (stay tuned for that!;) ) the coming week, because there was a holiday on monday.
To follow the name of this blog, i obviously had to take a sunrise-hike at one point. That's what we tried thursday morning. Because some of us had class at 10:30 we startet the hike to the top of diamond head at 6am, which was one of our best decisicions so far! The sunrise and the views were beautiful, so it was definitely worth it to get up that early. But see for yourself!
Friday is hikingday. With a group of 30 people, we drove down to the westside of the island to take the pink pillbox hike. The hike was relatively short, but the views were amazing! Also it is a lot of fun to go hiking in a big group, it almost felt like a class-expedition with all the people in the bus. We could get to know more international students aswell, which was very nice.
After the hike, we went too Nanakuli Beach Park, which was easily the most beautiful beach i have seen on this island so far. We chilled at the beach for some time, enjoyed the clear turqouise water and got tanned - just what we needed, after the last days of university.. ;)
In the evening we were invited to a rooftop-barbeque-bingo-night from some skandinavien guys, which was more of the barbeque and less of the bingo in the end (because nobody was actually paying attention to that). We had a wonderful sunset over the rooftops of waikikii, delicious foods and nice conversations. After that, we also went to the beach again - Overall a perfect day in my opinion!
And the perfect days continue, as we went on our first road trip around the whole island of Oahu the following day. Together with Sverre, Christian, Isabella & Sirill we rented a car for seven people and followed the southern and eastern coastline up to the northshore. On our way we stopped at the China Walls and had a coffeebreak in a cute local cafe with banana bread and coffee cake. Ready and set for the day, we drove along beautiful scenic routes and made stopps whenever we felt like it.
One of those stops was at the Kualoa Ranch, pretty touristic, but still worth a visit! We might even come back here to go ziplining or do some hikes - it was also the place where a lot of movies and series were produced, like Jurassic Park or Hawaii five 0, so you could look at the places where they filmed it.
I also had my first coconut experience (which i was waiting for a long long time so far!) at a little street stall - which looked very cute in front of the mountain line.. Next destination was first a lunch spot and after that the turtle bay, unfortunately without any turtles - maybe it was too touristic or we didn't look at the right spots. But at least we met some other guys of our university which was also nice. Because we didn't get enough to eat this day (might be a big lie) we also payed a visit to the famous Sunrise Shack. I think it definitely deserves the popularity, because it is a really nice place with outstanding smoothies, smoothie bowls and coffee. I'm glad we also have one of those in Waikikii, so i can visit it more often. ;)
To end the trip decently we watched the sunset at the beach of Halei'wa, also known as the surfers town of Oahu.
All in all we had a beautiful day, all spontaneously with a nice group of people! <3
Sunday was a pretty relaxed day. We had a short surfing session at Waikiki Beach (and took our first pictures), and used the rest of the day for university stuff, while we hadn't given any thought to this the whole weekend..
