Update from Hawaii
Greg Malivuk
I'm now staying with Howard Takahashi, who I guess might be considered
my uncle-in-law, if such a thing exists. (He's my dad's brother's
wife's brother, a relationship which almost certainly has its own word
in several non-English languages.)
(Aside: It's so weird to suddenly be hearing news spoken with an
American accent again. I keep wondering what US story of
international importance is being reported in Australia...)
I'll most likely be staying here with him (and his daughters) until
next weekend, at which point I booked a few nights at a hostel in
Waikiki, which according to the online Lonely Planet guide, has cheap
deals on day trips and such. Whether staying here or there, I don't
plan on doing anything too exciting (read: expensive). Instead, I've
decided I kind of need to relax after being on vacation. :-)
One thing I never would have expected to say before leaving the US
back in October is that our TV commercials really aren't that bad. It
seems our advertisers at least occasionally attempt to do something
clever, whereas it seems at least 2/3 of the ones I saw in Oz were of
the sort where the owner of some local business spent the entire
commercial yelling loudly at you about how low his prices were. This
is usually accompanied by large, garishly colored text showing the
prices, superimposed over a bad stock photo of whatever item is being
sold at such an amazingly low price.
Don't tell any Aussies I said this, but I think New Zealand has much
better commercials than they do, as well.
--
-greg
Read about my traveals in New Zealand and Australia (and Hawaii) at
http://groups.google.com/group/gmalivuktravel or
http://gmalivuk.livejournal.com.
To see pictures, go to http://mail.google.com and login as
"gmalivuktravel.pics" with password "newzealand".
(Just sending them there as email attachments will be about the
easiest way for me to do it.)
For *urgent* messages, please contact me at both this address
(greg.m...@gmail.com) and at gmalivu...@gmail.com.
(If I have only a short time at a computer, I'll make sure to at least
check the latter, even if I don't have time for the former.)