Poi Boy

I’ve been writing much of this blog in my hotel lobby, listening to the Hawaiian music they have piped in. One of the reasons I’m here is to listen to Hawaiian music, and normally I enjoy it, but the hotel has only one CD on constant repeat. It’s the same album all day, every day. The lyrics to the songs are in Hawaiian, and despite the fact that I don’t understand a word of them, I think I could probably karaoke the whole album at this point. One song in particular is quite the earworm, and I wake up singing it to myself every morning. I feel sorry for the folks who work the front desk.

At Mike’s shop, the radio is always set to KINE 105, as is practically every radio in the city. KINE is all Hawaiian music too, but thankfully they have more than one album.

Now just because I’ve barely been to the beach since I’ve been here doesn’t mean I haven’t seen my share of sand. It’s just that the sand I see is glued to paper and wrapped around sanding blocks. After hammering in the last two frets, sanding is about all I did today. It’s slow work and, to make matters worse, when I measured the thickness of my uke’s neck and compared it to the ones I measured at the store last night, I decided mine was too thick. So I pulled out the Microplane again and zested my neck down some more, in effect undoing an hour’s worth of sanding that I did yesterday, which meant I had to re-sand it. By the end of the day I had a nice little pile of wood shavings at my feet (and all over my clothes), so it was kind of like being on Waikiki Beach, without the bikinis.

Before heading home, I drilled the tuner holes in my headstock, which gives me a chance to teach you my favorite Hawaiian word: puka. Pronouced “pooka,” it means “hole,” and Mike uses it a lot--“You take the drill and put one little puka here, and another little puka over here.” I’m definitely bringing that one back to New York.

Tonight I went to a luau where we ate kalua pork, which is not cooked in coffee-flavored liquor, but in a hole that’s dug into the beach, filled with heated lava rocks, covered and left to roast all day. Good stuff. I also ate poi for the first time. Poi is the root of the taro plant mashed into a paste-like substance. A lot of people will tell you that poi is a flavorless muck, but I’m here to tell you they’re wrong. It actually has a subtly disgusting taste. The luau entertainment was pretty cheesey, but I can’t say it was without charm. It’s the kind of thing you do once and never have to do again, like nude bungee jumping (or so I’ve heard). There was hula and drumming and fire twirling and just about everything you might expect, but guess what they didn’t have. Yeah, you guessed it. How can you call yourself a luau without ukuleles?

Q: If the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition hadn’t had any ukuleles, what would I be doing today?
A: Crying.

Oh, and that hotel-lobby earworm song I mentioned: The luau band played it too, so now I'll be going to bed with it stuck in my head.

[view today's photos]