Breakfast with Amber

January 2020: LOONA and the Hawaiian Sunrise

Remember the start of the last chapter when I said Christmas break of 2019 was a blur? I lied. It was only the 2019 part that was a blur. The 2020 part is a bit more difficult to forget because that was the year we went to Hawaii. I did a presentation on this trip for my Japanese class in the coming fall, so let's see if I can translate that to English for you.

I went on this vacation with my mom, my dad, my brother, Alex, and his then-girlfriend, Madeline. We woke up at the buttcrack of dawn on January 3 so we could leave in time for our 10 am flight to Honolulu. After that, we had eight hours to kill, so I watched whatever Miitopia videos I still had on my phone, munched on some airplane snacks, watched the entirety of Ice Age, and just generally lost all perception of time. We landed at 2:30 pm Hawaiian time, which is 6:30 pm central time, so you can imagine how discombobulated I was getting off the plane as if I wasn't discombobulated enough just from waking up early. The first thing we did upon landing was go to a Safeway and pick up our groceries for the week, and then we checked in to our hotel.

We were staying at Aulani, the Disney resort in Hawaii. It was on the south coast of Oahu lined up with some other high-end resorts on the beach. The resort was beautiful and full of charm, not that I'd expect anything less from Disney. In classic Hawaiian fashion, they hand out leis at the door; flowers for the women and beads for the men. The lobby had Hawaiian-style drawings along the pointed ceiling, and the hotel was populated with statues of menehune in all sorts of random spots, and in classic Christmas fasion, they were wearing Santa hats. There were also a bunch of Christmas trees up decorated with shells and stuff. I think there's a picture of me standing next to one of them.

Our room was a one-bedroom, so the parents took the bedroom and left us kids to fight for the pullouts. Alex and Madeline might have slept in the pullout couch together, but that doesn't matter because I found a secret pullout directly beneath the TV, and I immediately claimed it as mine.

I don't remember if we waited all the way until 6 to eat dinner or gave in to our growling tummies and went earlier, but we ate dinner at an Asian place across the street that served all their food in to-go boxes. My mom was trying to get me to eat more rice to prepare me for the study abroad in Japan that I was applying for, and I could barely get through it because as a purist, I tried eating it completely plain. Completely plain rice is the blandest thing one could possibly eat. Today was the day she finally had the idea of adding soy sauce to it, and I made it at least halfway through. I must have devoured the teriyaki beef first.

Our room had a veranda facing the inside of the resort. If you need a visual, Aulani looks exactly like the building surrounding Mahi-Mahi Resort in Splatoon but instead of a battlefield in the middle of it, there's a water park. If getting the chance to go to Mahi-Mahi Resort doesn't convince you to join the Disney Vacation Club, I don't know what will. My favorite thing to do each morning was to go out onto that veranda and write in my travel journal about the previous day. I'd always be up before sunrise, so the most interesting thing to look at would be the lights along the paths of the water park and the people walking on them, usually staff members. Then the sun would come up, and I'd see the sky light up in pink and orange and yellow. I was also into the LOONA solo tracks during this vacation, and let me tell you, listening to "Eclipse" by Kim Lip while watching the sunrise just hits differently.

We'd always visit the water park when we had nothing else planned for the day. Now that I was 19, I could finally visit the adult pool, and I'd just float along in the water. Mom and Dad would also come down with me. Dad would sometimes come in the pool, but Mom would just sit in a pool chair and read. I also liked to take a few laps in the lazy river every now and then. Either way, all this chlorine was bad for my hair, which I'd discover by day 3 of our vacation.

That day was when we visited Pearl Harbor. We visited a couple museums and then took a boat ride out to the Arizona Memorial. I was feeling my chlorine-y, disgusting hair, which was somehow dry and greasy at the same time, and my mom said I could use her leave-in conditioner, which right now was at home. For the rest of my vacation, I'd have to use the shampoo and conditioner they left for us at the hotel. We saw a rainbow over the smoke stack of the Arizona that was peeking out of the water, and I'm sure that there's some deeper poetic meaning to that if I just look for it, but what I do know is that everyone had their cameras out once they saw it. There was also a gift shop that had Pearl Harbor themed Hello Kitty merchandise "Because nothing says reverence like Hello Kitty," said Mom in a Snapchat post.