Why one crazy landlady in the house is worse than two on the roof

So my landlady lost it. During the last couple of days I have been indited with a wide range of different house-crimes amongst those are the theft of my next door roomie's shampoo, and having entertained illigal company. More specifically my old and dear friend Flemming slept over one night because we were going camping in the morning. The young man next door ratted me out to the landlady and the shit hit the fan. A house meeting was called because the indian-jewish spirits of the house had been disturbed by the unrest. This last part is purely speculation by the way. I call it as I see it you know? So now im F'ed in the A basically, because my pride prevents me from staying much longer in the asylum I have called home for the last 3 months, and it is not easy getting a place to stay for a month and a half without paying an arm and a leg. But hey, at least camping was fun.

We went to the North Shore and set up camp. We found a nice little private camping site called Friends of Malei Kahana (I finally managed to memorize the name, but still cant get the hang of the spelling though). We arrived and it seemed we had gotten the perfect spot. No one around to complain about the noice and inappropriate behaviour and the beach only a stone's throw away. We went kitesurfing for about an hour and when we returned at whole frekin platoon of the Boy Scouts were setting up camp next to ours. When an actual platoon of army guys decided to visit our camp later in the evening I had a nagging notion that we might not be welcome the following day. But what the hell: Seize the Day, no?

It turned out we didnt get kicked out at all. Not one complaint. Very tolerant or very deaf people. Rent of the trip was spent surfing and boozing making it a pretty perfect weekend.

Booze cruise and beyond

Sam arrived not to long ago and since he touched down things have taken a turn for the worse. Heavy drinking has been the order of the day and my previous brand of clean Hawaiian living has been tainted. Will it ever be the same I wonder? Not to say that it hasn't been fun. This friday Flemming, Sam and myself decided to join the teenage tourist delinquents in Waikiki on the notorius booze cruise. The booze cruise is a short 1,5 hour journey on a catamaran equipped with a abundant bar. It costs 20 dollars and then the world is your oyster for the duration of the trip. Of course we missed the cruise by 10 minutes and had to watch the mothership of boozing take of without us. We have already booked tickets for next week. That trip we will most likely also miss. It takes more than a missed opportunity to knock us out however and we quickly re-organized and sat down at the nearest sea side bar. Its the first time ive been doing some Waikiki mainstream drinking and its certainly an experience. Its like driniking in the 80ties. After that we went to first friday downtown and did the boogie. The Honolulu nightlife is actually pretty happening when you figure out where to go. We ended up in what I assume is Honolulu's answer to Copenhagen's McKluud: Golden Gate Pub. We shot some pool with what appeared to be some local homeless people, and we shot some shots with each other. Much to my regret it turned out to be very difficult to find a decent kebab to finish of the evening, so we had to go for hotdogs!?! An unworthy ending to an otherwise epic night.

In case of an emergency the exits are located...

I jumped out of an airplane this saturday. A stupid thing to do some would say. Was there something wrong with the plane? some would want to know. Well actually there just might have been something wrong with the plane. It looked like prop from a 2. world war movie, except for the fact that it was covered in doodles apparently made by a kindergarten class. The padding inside the plane was hanging from the walls and ceilings, and the seats were very uncomfortable. In many ways it was a plane that suggested jumping as the safer option to landing. As the plane ascended to its destination at 16000 feet, we, the passengers, got the most amazing view of the North Shore of Oahu where the tiny skydiving airfield was located. Mountain ranges streched as far as the eye could see and the Hawaiian shoreline never looked more inviting. Unfortunately scenery like that makes you comtemplate how stupid you are to voluntarily be risking your life by jumping out of a resonably safe aircraft. On the other hand you know that your mind in bound to fuck with you, and try to persuade that little baby of a man living within you to abandon this idiotic notion that man were ever meant to fly without motorized assistance. So you tell the little voice to nutt up or shut up, and contrary to what you might expect it worked. What really helped me overcome my fear og jumping was the fact that the tiny red haired guy in front of me was obviously much more scared than I was. I mean this dude was pissing his pants. You can pretty much always pick out the really nervous guy by identifying the white knuckles that come with holding on to your seat way to hard. Also his very very quiet demeanour was a good clue. When someone that scared is sitting right next to you, it sort of takes the pressure of your shoulders. Hell I look like a regular daredevil compared to this guy. "Ha ha. Hey everybody come see how scared this pussy is." When they open the door at 16000 feet it IS freakin scary though. I was last out of the plane, and my instructor didnt see it prudent to stop at the door before jumping like everyone else. He just ran us straight from our seats and out the door, threw us into a backflip and it was ON! Sickest feeling ever. Two thumps up. Highly reccomended.

Why it's harder to go backwards than forwards

Glorious springbreak is upon us. No homework for an entire week, means time to finally do something meaningful with my time. Pretty much everyone else has fled the island to visit either family on the mainland og some of the other Hawaiian islands that are supposed to be much more beautiful than Oahu. I have no money so Oahu will have to do for me. The beautiful thing is that Oahu seems a lot "lighter" now that everyone has left as Devon from my sustainability class put it. The beaches are less crowded, the lineup has room for even chumps like me and traffic congestion seems a little less prevalent than normal. I have been surfing like a crazy motherbiatch during the week, and gotten a little better. A have also sprained both my albows and seem to be pouring water out of my skull on a constant basis but it's all good! Mike has taught me how to do the turtle roll where you flip over and use the bottom of the board as a shield against the biggest waves. This particular technique appararently causes the "water coming out of your head syndrome". I have no surf pictures yet but I do have a shot of the surf-ready Buick. Sweet!



The title of this posting refers to a bit of community work that I have had time to do this week. Along with an American Kailua-girl named Becky and a french Kailua-girl named Cloe I went to do work on a ancient Hawaiian Heiau (meaning temple). To get to the site we hade to go through a cement quarry, and the site itself lay right under the H-3 highway. This slightly parculiar coincidence is due to the fact the the temple was discovered during the construction of the highway. The city council wanted to build on top of the ancient ruins but some locals chose to oppose the decision by camping out under the construction site for 3 (!) years. Eventually it was decided to run the H-3 just next to the ruins rather than through them. Our particular job for the day was to clear the road leading to the temple because a funeral service was to be held there during the weekend. The old caretaker of the ground had just passed away and his dying whish was to be buried in the temple of his forfathers. So we did prison work basically, stading in a long line clearing bushes and rocks off the road. The grandson of the caretaker worked along side of us so everyone was happy to help. In the end we ate lunch a the temple site, and got a tour of the grounds which was lush with Papaya, Coconut, Avocado, Chili, Sugarcane and whatnot. I have never seen that sort of abundance in my life. The site is home to both the male and female heiau. Back in the day the women hung out in their temple (there was different places for playing, workig and giving birth) and the men fought and chilled in their penthouse heiau from which they could keep an eye on the women down below. Both temples are almost completely destroyed though and the restoration is going to take many year to complete if it ever happens. The people working on the highway ruined the remnants of the temples in a matter of months and it's gonna take forever to rebuild. Sometimes it really is a lot easier to move forwards than to go backwards.

In the pictures you can see our tourguide, Lelei (I think it was...), the grandson of the deceased caretaker.

Offshore property rights

When you first go out surfing you think: "Wauw the open ocean. Here every man is his own master and no one is gonna tell me what to do!" And then you learn how the world works. Mike, Flemming and I went surfing at Diamond Head the other day. It's a pretty mellow surf spot, and there is not real danger apart from the occational reef here and there. I went out on my longboard, Flemming brought his boogie board and Mike was on his much shorter 7 foot board. This particular board distribution meant that I got my ass handed to my on the way out, because I can't get under the waves with my supertanker of a board, while the boys just dove under the waves and got out real easy. I was pretty hammered when we reached the lineup on the far side of the reef, and took a long breather before engaging the waves. Which by this point were getting pretty big. Now once you line up for a wave, you have to know where the wave is coming, how fast it is and how big it is. Then you start paddling as if your life depended on it. You have to reach a certain speed before the waves catches up with you. Otherwise it's gonna either pass under you, or just slam you. For once I caught the first wave I went for and I quickly realised that it was in fact quite big. You can usually tell how big the wave is by how vertical you're going. And I was going pretty vertical by my standards. I managed to stay on the board however and sat in a hunched position to keep my balance. The wave took me almost all the way to the shore, and I was stoked that I had caught a wave that big. I merrily paddled back out to the line up, where I expect to be met with applause and cheering. In stead I run into the local guy who curses me out: "What the fuck you doin, huh? Its the second fucking time you steal my wave. Get back it man. Get the fuck back in." The guy is pissed. Now there is a golden rule in surfing that dictates that you have to get of the wave if someone cathches it before you do. But I'll let you in on a little secret. It's freakin impossible to keep an eye on all the other surfers in the lineup, while concentrating on getting on a wave without getting slammed. The dude curses me out for about 10 mins while I profusely apologize. In the end I tell him to accept the apology or get out of my face, and that seems to appeace him a little bit. Learned one lesson that day: People are just as territorial on the ocean as they are back on land.

Just driving along minding my own business.

Driving is easy. Really. I thought it would be much harder. It is especially easy in the US where you don't have to worry about some manual transmission making it all needlessly difficult. You got two pedals, one to make the car go forward, and one to make it stop again. Seems logical. In Denmark it would seem nuts to go on the freeway within the first hour of driving (ever), but in Hawaii that's just the way we roll. Feeling very safe with my mentor Flemming sitting next to me I took the wheel and drove the Golden Lightning up to the Northshore, and back down to Kailua on the freeway. Driving to the Northshore is quite easy as there is one very long two lane road that takes you all the way. I did fiddle around with a bit of backing up into traffic in Haleiwa, but still very manageble. The tricky thing seems to be to get some feeling of how big the car actually is. When you are in a Buick and a Hummer comes towards you (it happens all the time over here), you start to wonder: "How wide is this road? Was it really made to accomodate to tractor-size cars approaching each other?" So I end up in the very right portion of the lane quite a lot. It is equally tricky to stop yourself from turning in the direction you are looking. When looking over my shoulder, as ay good driver does when turning or changing lanes I inadvertantly turn the car in the same direction, which caused a bit of trouble. And a bit of panic on the part of my co-driver. Well we made it back alive and hopefully I shall soon be ready to face my biggest driving challenge so far: The Hawaiian drivers test!

What are the odds?

...that I would ever take a statistics class? Very freakin' slim I would have said not to long ago. But here I sit 12 hours after my first statistics exam wondering how that went. Answer is; Not to well probably. But in this case passing in itself must be considered a great succes. The class in question is COM 6070 and this is my story:
Actually the full name for the course is Quantitative methods in Communication and when I enrolled for it I honestly thought that qualitative studies had more to them that just doing statistics. Apparently they do not. I have been sitting for two months now crunching number in a program I don't understand (SPSS 17 anyone?) and getting result I can't read: "Unstandardized Coefficients: B = 6.847 Std. Error = 1.004" anyone? This relates to a popular analysis called a regression in which we try to predict future behaviour. But i'm getting ahead of myself. The major problem with this course, apart from the fact that its mindnumbingly boring, is that is normally requires two pre-requisites. One that introduces the student to the study of statistics and one that introduces the student to SPSS 17. As I have had neither I am royally screwed. This fact dawned on me quite quickly, because it felt as if I had missed quite a few classes even at the very first lecture (those of you who remember "Sproglig analyse" will know how I felt). People were cheerily conversing about Chi-Square functions and the difference between independent samples T-tests and dependent samples T-tests. And I said: Ok ok the professor can't hear you right now so give it a rest!. And i've been lost ever since. But did I give up? No sirreeebob! I purchased "Statistics for people who (think they) hate statistics" (SHS) and started reading. This amounted to pissing on a wildfire however, and so I secretly developed a tactic that would get me through this devious course. SHS has little guides after each chapter explaining how to compute data, regardsless of how well you understand the input and output. So this entire midterm I have crunched numbers I don't really understand and given answers I don't know how to enterpret. I am like a little baby mimicking the behaviour of the adults. I now write things like: "And the exact probability that a t-score of -2.449 was obtained by chance is .022 = very unlikely." Odds of passing are relatively slim I predict with my new found understanding of probability... Thank god I have found a new and even more lowbrow statistics book: