Hawaii 2019

This March I had the great opportunity to spend a week in Hawaii. I did a Rotary trip to Oahu organized by Belo USA with over 50 other exchange students from all over the world that spend their exchange in the USA or Canada.

We all arrived Saturday night and met each other for the first time. After a long journey I was really tired and didn’t have a lot of energy to talk to lot of people and therefore went to bed very early. The next morning, we walked to Waikiki Beach and we all could enjoy the light blue Pacific Ocean for the first time.

On Monday we took a bus to the North Shore to surf the world-famous Hawaiian waves. On the bus rides our driver Eddy told us a lot about the Hawaiian culture and we even learned some Hawaiian words. When we arrived, we split up in groups and started surfing. I was really excited because I never went surfing before and I couldn’t wait to do it for the first time in my life. I took me a couple tries to until I could stand on the board, but I had very good help from experienced instructors and it made it lot easier. I really liked riding the waves and enjoyed every single second of it.

On Wednesday, trip guides told us that we are going to hike Diamond Head and I was very excited for a nice hike. As a person from Switzerland I probably had too high expectations when we the guides were talking about a hike and we ended up walking for about 2 miles. But I couldn’t complain because the beautiful view on the of the Volcano was unbelievable. We could see over Waikiki Beach to Honolulu.

I was really excited for the next day, because we visited Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the USS Arizona, which was attacked by the Japanese, is sinking and we couldn’t visit the ship because of maintenance works. But the tour was still very interesting, and we learned a lot of things about the attack to Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry to WW2.

After that we could spend two more days in Hawaii and enjoy the time with my new friends. Unfortunately, we had to say goodbye way too early and after one the best weeks in my life I had to go home to Massachusetts.