BYU-H and new adventures!

Tahna and I swimming at the pool

Our first bus ride

Visiting BYU-H campus

Beautiful flowers in Hawaii--not sure of the name?

Way cool board racks--I've never seen them before. They even have locks!

Flags of different nationalities

In front of BYU-H

Shellee and Jelisa

Shellee and Jelisa

Sandy feet:)

Jen, Tahna, and Shellee

Our friend January that we met at the beach. She stopped and gave us a ride!

First time trying Malasada--it was heaven! This is for Cindy:)

Eating malasada

Jen and Tahna eating at the Kahuku Grill

Shellee trying her first coconut shrimp--haha actually first time trying shrimp ever!

Kahuku Grill=yummy!

We've had the opportunity to do a lot more here now which is nice. We have such a long time over here that we've just been taking our sweet time to get to things. It's been nice because we run into locals over here and they give us all kinds of tips of where we can find things which has been extremely helpful! To explain the photos above, I'll start from top to bottom. The top photo is us swimming in one of the pools at Turtle Bay. As mentioned in the previous post, there are like 5 or 6 pools so we've taken advantage of that and have such a blast there. Shellee has taken on the role of being our water aerobics instructor which gives us a good laugh and is quite enjoyable:) The pool bottom is a beautiful deep blue that I've never seen before which I love!

We finally got our bus passes a couple of days ago. A local told us where to find them which was extremely helpful! We went to Food Land which is in Laie (a grocery store near Turtle Bay) and purchased our passes. They were $60.00 until the end of May--they only go by calendar month, not a month from the time you buy them which is a complete rip off if you ask me! It's been very helpful to have our passes though and it makes it so we can ride as often as we want without worrying about paying every time. The bus system is really great here. It comes around about every 15 to 20 minutes and the buses are quite clean. Haha, we get such a kick out of the drivers there because they drive insanely fast and then slam their brakes on at every stop. I think we've commented and laughed every time we've ridden it so far.

One of our "To do's" was going to BYU-H to see the campus. We walked through the bookstore and a few other buildings which was very interesting. The campus is clean and beautiful, but much smaller than I had imagined it. Each classroom is accessed from the outside rather than the inside--a little different for a university I thought. School is in at BYU right now so we were able to see lots of students and soon realized that if you are Caucasian, you're definitely the minority. We felt quite out of place haha! I was walking around with my camera and Shellee was getting so embarrassed because she said that I looked like a tourist and that I was making everyone stare at us. There are such beautiful flowers in Hawaii and especially on campus. The white flowers in the photo are my favorite here. I have no clue what they're called? Plumerias? We also saw skateboard racks that are very similar to bike racks. They even have cords that people can lock their boards up to. I thought it was pretty cool!

We've spent a decent amount of time at the beach so far. We haven't made it out to any other beach except the one in Turtle Bay, but a local told us where another good one is so we're hoping to go try that within the next couple of days. They say that the ocean here has this thing called an "under toe" which is dangerous if you get stuck in because it will keep pulling you out to sea so we've been trying to watch out for that. Haha, we've had many people tell us how to get out of it as well so I'm sure we'll manage just fine:)

The Stake President of the singles wards in Laie owns the Kahuku Grill so we decided to go try it out. As we were sitting, waiting for the bus, this lady that we had run into twice the last couple of days (who is also on vacation) at the beach drove by. She passed us and we were like, oh my heck was that our beach lady?! She drove out of Turtle Bay and then like 2 minutes later she came back in a asked us if we wanted a ride somewhere. We were happy because the bus was taking forever! We found out that her name is January and that she's on an extended vacation as well. We got to Kahuku Sugar Mill and we weren't hungry quite yet so we explored around and ran into a place to get malasada. My boss Cindy had told me that I have to try it so I was so stoked that we found somewhere to get it! Oh it was heavenly! It's like fried dough dipped in cinnamon and sugar and I'm sure other things as well but I have no clue what? Once we were done, we went back to Kahuku Grill to eat and the food was delicious! They serve coconut shrimp, Teriyaki chicken, etc. We were in heaven! Shellee even tried her first ever shrimp! It was a fun little trip over there and we're happy that we're getting to know people!

Today, we went to church for the first time and Jen knew a guy there so we sat by him and he kinda showed us around. It was interesting because they have church in the classrooms at BYU. Sacrament meeting was in the Auditorium and Sunday school and Relief Society were in classrooms around campus. The culture here is so different because people are so loud and quite disruptive during the meetings. They are however, very nice and welcoming so we had a good time:) We came home and cooked us a Costco pizza which was great and we've just been hanging out at the condo since it's Sunday.