Week 5 Learning the Lay of the Land
Aloha Family and Friends
We hit the month mark since our departure and as much as we miss all of you and our lovely home, we are adjusting quite well to life in Honolulu. It’s a bustling, busy city with a mix of beautiful buildings, fancy hotels and shopping malls along with old, run-down buildings, poorly marked streets and a lot of homelessness. The yin and yang of life; it’s all a part of the flow here. We’ve learned that we need to stay away from shopping on Saturdays; it’s nuts here. Perhaps we’ll stick with Amazon and Instacart.
Beautiful koi fish in the Ala Moana Center, fancy mall right next to Waikiki
We’re exploring different parts of the island, mostly the south shore. Yesterday we went to Waimanalo, a pretty white sand beach on the southeast coast, so clean, relatively quiet. We basked in the sun and swam in the water for a couple of hours which is all our fair skins could handle. We’ll likely head to the north shore next weekend and then again on Sept 23rd when we’ll attend the Laie Temple with our Honolulu zone.
Speaking of zones, we attended our first zone conference on Tuesday. This was a dual zone conference with Honolulu and Honolulu West zones. We were greatly impressed with the instruction developed and taught by missionary leaders. Our mission leaders, President and Sister Andersen are very inspirational leaders who we have come to appreciate and love for all they do to keep this mission running at a very high level of expectation. (This was my first zone conference ever, as Michael experienced many as a young missionary; I loved it.)
Our work in the office is full of unexpected calls from missionaries needing help with their cars or the devices that monitor their driving behaviors. At times we have had to be the bad cop who follows through on consequences for not following safety rules by taking away driving privileges for a day or two which is no fun for missionaries who need their cars to do their work. We do this with lots of love and hopefully we won’t have to do it again because missionaries are being so dutiful. 🙂 We are getting to know our office senior couples by doing fun things together. Last night we gathered to watch the BYU/Stanford game–so fun!
Michael and I are committed to working out at the nearby 24-hour fitness and I signed up for a tennis clinic on Tuesday nights, very near our apartment on courts that likely haven’t been resurfaced in 20 years. It’s all good; it’s a chance to swing the racket again!!
View of the tennis courts from our 29th floor apartment front door.