Friday, October 21, 2022

Hawaii Day 2 (Honolulu, HI): Breakfast Take-Out, Lots of Shopping and Even More Walking

Today we did an insane amount of walking!


The breakfast buffet at our hotel lets you take a plate to go! It was crazy! Best believe I took a to go plate after we ate. After breakfast we headed out on a mile and a half walk to Don Quijote then a little further to the Ala Moana mall. 


The Don Quijote is an Asian super market surrounded by a bunch of other stores and walk up cafes. When I say supermarket I mean, "super," like, “omg-how-do-they-fit-all-these-items-in-a-store-in-an-even-bigger-store-in-a-single-block,” super. They had groceries, housewares, clothes, electronics and street food. I’m pretty sure the market took up the whole block. 


The Ala Moana mall also felt really big. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m not familiar with it or if it really is legitimately huge. It was fun to navigate because the floors were staggered. Some areas were a single story, others were 4, there were half floors and lots of areas were hidden around corners like a maze. There were also streets between the surface streets and the parking garages integrated with other stores on the bottom 2 floors. Finding a way out was a little difficult. We got there before most of the stores opened and spent most of the morning there. They have everything there from your regular mall stores to the ridiculous high end stuff that us average Joe’s can’t afford. The Macy's occupies 4 floors. On top of all of those stores, there’s also a full sized 2 story Walmart, 3 story Target and Sam’s Club! I felt like we covered an insane amount of ground and we still had a mile and a half walk back. 


We got back to the hotel, had lunch, lounged around the room for a bit and went to the pool. We had a bit more time to kill, ended up heading out again, came back and people watched from our window for a while. While we were out and about we ran into what looked like a high end convenient store next to the Ritz Carleton. It was just a rebranded standard ABC Store! The outside was a bit nicer and it did have a hot bar and coffee bar but those were the only differences. The items they carried were exactly the same and even the price tags looked exactly the same! 


Our mom was out doing hula workshops all day and had hula practice when she got back to the hotel so my sister and I went to the poke bar at the fancy rebranded ABC Store.


After that it was time to call it a night. We’ll pick another direction to walk in tomorrow or maybe hop on a bus somewhere. This walking thing is not the business

No comments:

Post a Comment