University of Hawaii & Chinatown

We toured around the University of Hawaii and Chinatown. The University has a beautiful Japanese Tea Garden, which was gifted to UH from Japan to show examples of the Japanese culture. Each tree in the garden had been planted by various prince and princesses of Japan over the last 30 years.
The UH campus was decently pretty. The architecture was all mid-60s, but the landscaping was incredible and the location of the campus was right in the middle of the downtown Honolulu. From what we saw, they have a pretty diverse student body - we expected it to be all local's , but there was a really good mix of all sorts of students.  *Side note: We walked through at least 3 plumes of marijuana smoke during the hour we were on campus. Each time we looked around to see where the students were that were smoking, but we never saw anyone.*
The campus has pretty much every popular major and a medical school.



We forgot to bring our camera, so these are the only two iphone shots we took.

After UH we drove about 5 minutes through downtown to Chinatown. Of course, this was Sarah's idea and she had big plans to eat lunch there. It was basically exactly what you would have expected - dirty, crowded, homeless/half dead old people sleeping on the sidewalks, TONS of vendors selling cheap stuff from China, noodle bars on every corner and vegetable and fish markets on every inch of the sidewalk. We did a Yelp search for the best place to eat and ended up at a highly rated dim sum restaurant. We walked in and out twice thinking we had somehow walked in the back of the restaurant and were accidentally in the kitchen before one of the employees smiled and waved us in. There was actually no restaurant at all, you placed your order in the middle of their kitchen right next to the cooks and the boiling water and stuff. Sarah placed the order and basically nodded her head to everything the employee suggested and then walked out with a box full of stuff (everything for $8). We walked across the street to a park and ate lunch while Piper played on the playground. There were huge skyscraper condos all around us, people speaking Chinese and Japanese everywhere, gorgeous tropical plants, the smell of ginger and lemongrass cooking and we both agreed that if we had to guess we would have sworn we were back in Bangkok. 

We wandered all around Chinatown and found some nice sections with cool Asian architecture and sculptures. In the center of the area was a big koi pond/tea garden surrounded by GIANT tiger statues that I think are there to signify the entrance to Chinatown. Chinatown leads directly into downtown and it was pretty interesting how Chinatown was seedy and dirty and pretty authentic and you literally cross the street and you are in the clean, bustling, busy business district of downtown with gorgeous, fancy high rise condos and big business skyscrapers.

Basically, Chinatown was interesting and very authentic and I could have stayed there all day to try all the different noodle bars...but dirty and probably not the best place to take a newborn as everyone looked like they had a host of diseases and germs that they wanted to breathe on Margot. (I used up almost an entire travel size bottle of hand sanitizer that day.)

Dim sum. Can't tell you what everything was, but Sarah liked it all. Patrick and Piper took a few bites and then asked where the closest McDonald's was.

Hawaii Theater, VERY pretty.

Chinatown

Chinatown markets

Adorable baby turtles they were selling in the market. Piper and I wanted one!