Mai Tai & Pulled Pork Paved Road to Happiness Tour: Waking up in Waikiki

We managed to "join the human race" at around 10am, and it felt like we'd slept for ten minutes.

We needed coffee first and foremost so we headed off to the local Honolulu Coffee Shop. They say they're coffee tastes nutty. I disagree. I think it tastes OK.

I needed a change of clothes, like some shorts and a T-shirt, and some lighter shoes, like a pair of thongs (aka flip flops, to the rest of the world).

Oh, I forgot to tell you about our disastrous trip to Ala Moana Shopping Centre yesterday. It was a disaster. This shopping centre is messy, as in difficult to find shops and access them, by anyones standards.
It tends to cater for high end tourists, with Louis Vitton, YSL, Bottega Veneta etc, etc. Yeah, that's me, NOT.
We did find a Macy's but the young staff there were more interested in having a chat amongst each other and when they occasionally got around to serving a customer they looked like and spoke like they'd been sedated.
I stood in a cue of three for about 10 minutes and then gave up.

So today I was still looking for the three items of dress that I'd tried to buy yesterday.

We went for a walk down Kalakaua Avenue and came across The Flip Flop Shop, right next door to The Stupid Shop.

Here are but a few blog safe gems that they sell, as posters, on t-shirts and who knows what else.

The Flip Flop Shop sell thongs (again, not the ones boys like to see under girls outer clothing) and only thongs. I walked in thinking "Yep, I'll get something good for $10." WRONG
I ended of buying a pair of O'Neill's for $23 but they had units worth over $130.
Yes, they were leather and embossed and really really good BUT they were thongs. Thongs should not cost $130. Period.
The young bloke that served me, Dalten, was really nice and when asked as to where he buys his shorts and Tees he sent us over to Billabong.
So off went over the road and luckily the were having a sale and had "big boy" sizes. I ended with a pair of Billabong shorts and a T-shirt for $54, which is cheap for two items from a shop like that.

By now it was getting to be late afternoon and we could feel the need for a drink. We wandered over to the beach and set about finding a bar with an beach view.
That was a great idea and one that about 10,000 other people had had about an hour earlier.

Here we are on the beach discovering that every bar is full, and a bit.

The solution was easy and obvious. Everyone in Waikiki wants to sit at a bar with beach view, on the beach, but there are hundred of other bars way up in high rise building and in back alleys. We'd simply head off and find one! Simples!
As we walked down Kalakaua Avenue towards the apartment we came across an elevator that took patrons from street level to a Tanaki fromTokyo restaurant on level 3 and Buho Cocina y Cantina, a Mexican place, on the level 4 rooftop.
We'd had really great Japanese in Japan not that long ago so the hombres with a rooftop view won.

It was great night made even better by our waitress Josephine.

Josephine - friendly and helpful

...... is worth more money and works here

We had a feast at this place and it was our first experience with the much heard about phrase "We should have ordered one meal for all three of us. The serves were THAT big!"

Here are various shots of food, booze and assorted silliness.