Hawaii

My college friend Chris is getting married later this year, and he just moved out to Hawaii, so a bunch of us flew out there for a little bachelor party.

The first night, we went to a luau.

Me with my mai tai and my Hawaiian shirt.

Luau dinner: kahlua pork, some form of fried chicken with a creamy macadamia sauce, pineapple, and poi.

The next morning, we went to a Japanese buffet, which was probably one of the best buffets I've ever been to.

The sushi select was good. They were not doing the standard cheap-ass buffet tricks of using small/thin pieces of fish on overly large bricks of rice.

The rolls were also very good. They even offer "fancy" rolls like Spider rolls (fried soft-shell crab) which are normally fairly expensive in normal sushi restaurants, so it was impressive to have them provide it on an all-you-can-eat basis.

Uni! (Sea urchin roe!) This is another expensive item (often $6-$8 for two pieces of uni gunkan zushi in restaurants) that I was impressed to see offered. I probably ate my buffet price in uni alone (I forget, it was probably six or seven dishes of it).

A close up of one of my uni runs. It was also served with a piece of octopus.

That evening, we drove up to the northeast side of the island to go ATV riding. After that, we spotted a road side stand where we got some sort of pork. It was a smoked or salted pork wrapped in taro leaves, served with a side of poke (a kind of Hawaiian sashimi).

Very, very yummy.

The actual stand/truck.

The next day, we ended up at the Honolulu swap meet somehow.

Sweet smells of something fried...

It's sort of like a donut, but not filled with anything.

We made another sushi run before I headed to the airport.

Mmmm... Natto! This natto was probably the most similar to the natto that I had in Japan in 2002. Most of the natto that I've had in the states up to this point did not really have that full "mucousy" effect that I guess fresh natto is supposed to have.

Soft-shell crab hand roll.

Dole freeze (frozen pineapple ice-cream-like product). Ever since I had this stuff as a kid in DisneyWorld way back when, I've always liked Dole Freeze and get it whenever I can (which is not very often).