Kane About Town

Got in last night about 8:00. Hard to believe I'm in Honolulu to build a ukulele. By the time I got settled in, I didn't have much time for more than a stroll around the neighborhood before bed. I wasn't wandering long before I had to pee (I think I drank a gallon of water on the plane), so I started to look for a restroom. Flashback: I'm 7 years old visting Hawaii for the first time and my family is at a secluded beach. The bathrooms are a few hundred yards away across a landscape of surprisingly sharp rocks. I make the painful barefooted walk to the restrooms and stand in front of two doors. They're labeled in Hawaiian. So I turn around and walk the long painful walk back to ask my mom what I am, then turn around and do it again so that I can confidently walk to the door labeled "kane."

Luckily, the restrooms I found last night were labeled in Hawaiian and English, because it was too late to call my mom, and I didn't want to walk in on any peeing wahines. Back at my apartment, I slept better than I might have expected, considering how excited I was to go to my first day of class, but it may have helped a bit that I went to bed at 6:00 in the morning, New York time (midnight here).

I got up with lots of time to spare, which was a good thing since after breakfast it took me about 20 minutes to find out how to get to my class, another 20 to wait for the bus. I'm a nerd about being on time to stuff. I always have this fear that I'll miss something super important. Before I took my first Spanish class a few years ago, I was terrified that if I showed up late to class I would miss the part where you learned to speak Spanish. I was on time though, and it was a good thing since the entire class was taught in Spanish--the teacher never uttered a word in English. If I hadn't gotten there on time, I would have thought that all my worst fears had been realized.

I wasn't so lucky in this case. I was 15 minutes late, and I just knew that everyone else would probably be done building their ukes by now. Well, they weren't, but they were all working industriously and seemed like they knew what they were doing. They didn't. Turns out we're all pretty much in the same boat skill-wise, so I jumped in and caught up quickly.

The class is a bit of a whirlwind. I worked on the front and the back of the uke, the neck, the interior bracing. Mike, my teacher says that it goes fast at first, when you're doing all the rough work, but slows down a lot when you get to the details. Regardless, we all felt like we were going to be finished making our ukes by the end of the day.

We weren't.

[view today's photos]