Lau Lau

Our visionist leader Smiley Burrows

Today I joined the Green Lake Gardening crew in harvesting taro and making laulau.   Laulau (literally means leaf leaf in Hawaiian) is meat or fish and sometimes with hunks of sweet potato wrapped in taro leaves and baked in an umu.  I learned that umu is the Hawaiian method of cooking above ground using heated lava rocks and banana and ti leaves for steaming as opposed to the below ground imu that is used for cooking kalua pig at a luau.

This small group of Kapoho neighbors have been meeting regularly since November, when they planted their “lava flow” garden (see my earlier posts for details about the lava flow).  

Prepping taro leaves

This community garden is a step towards Kapoho’s sustainability in preparing for a future crisis in which we might become cut off from mainland or even inter-island food sources.   This  group has become a small community within the larger community of Kapoho.  I’ve known most of these people for years by acquaintance, walking their dogs or riding by my house on bikes, but after spending just a few hours bound together by a common goal, I felt a deeper connection to them and also euphoric.

The Green Lake and Green Mountain property is heaven on earth beautiful and Smiley’s husband Gerald gave us a gift by sharing his culture.  As I harvested taro leaves I was thinking of the stuffed cabbage I make from a recipe passed down to my mother by my Hungarian grandmother.   How cool it was to harvest the leaves we would be “stuffing” and cooking the little lau lau in an oven made of rocks and sticks also from the property.  Smiley, who has embraced the Hawaiian culture of her husband, had only made lau lau in this matter once herself and by repeating the process, can now pass the recipe and the process down to her children when they’re ready.

Mahalo Gerald and Smiley for bringing so much to our community!

Ono!

The Pagoda Hotel

A few weeks ago we flew to Oahu for my daughter’s ankle surgery.  On the Big Island there is a shortage of medical specialists, so our insurance company flew us to Honolulu.  

We arrived at Honolulu International Airport in the early evening and took a taxi to the Pagoda Hotel which had been reserved and paid for by our insurance company.  Earlier in the week I had checked out the hotel’s website.  It looked like a boutique hotel comparable to the Ala Moana Hotel, where we’ve stayed a few times in the past, but with a definitely oriental motif and color scheme.  I also asked a few friends about the Pagoda.  Mostly they rolled their eyes knowing the type of hotels where we usually stay.  One even offered me the use of her Waikiki condo in case we couldn’t handle it at the Pagoda.

The hotel front and signage are retro, calling to mind Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  The lobby is smallish, unlike the expansive, impressive lobbies on the strip at Waikiki.  The furniture in both the lobby and rooms has nice style, is comfortable and has recently been updated but the bones of the hotel are shabby.  What sets the Pagoda hotel apart from your average 2-2.5 star hotel is the friendliness of the staff.  They really made us feel welcome.  When I spoke to the maid about a television problem, she directed us to another room on our floor, which when I peaked in, looked just like our room, but seemed to be an employee break room just like the one described in Paul Theroux’s “The Hotel Honolulu” that my husband ironically had given me to read on this trip.  At that point my daughter was laying in bed in a pain fog, having had her surgery earlier in the day.  Within 5 minutes the repairman, returned with me to our room and solved the problem, which was an issue with the remote batteries.  Because of the care we received from the staff, we began to feel at home in our room.  The shabbiness turned into coziness because we felt safe and cared for, which helped my daughter and I get through a really long day, which for her was the most painful of her young life.

The Hotel Honolulu is about a well known novelist with writer’s block, who arrives “to these mute islands humbled and broke again” to work as a manager of a 2 star hotel for his friend Buddy.  The hotel, as Theroux describes it, could be the Pagoda Hotel.   "We were the last small, old hotel in Honolulu.  The rooms were small, the elevator narrow, the lobby was tiny and the bar (the Momi's Paradise Lounge) was just a nook.”  I couldn’t find the bar at the Pagoda Hotel (even though there was a card in the room advertising it’s “happy hour” drinks).  I assume the bar they were speaking of was in the Floating Pagoda restaurant (which was not open at “happy hour” the days I was there) that is attached to the hotel.   The book is a series of vignettes about his staff, Buddy the hotel’s owner, his few friends outside of the hotel and his much younger Filipino wife and small daughter.   The hotel’s repeat visitors are also featured as main characters.  For me one of the best chapters is when the main character joins his staff in a game of Scrabble, thinking he will easily win because he thinks that as a intellectual and a writer he is so superior.  What he doesn't count on is that by their "local rules" all pidgin and Hawaiian slang words are legal.  He plays several games and finishes last or near last in every one.

On the last day after we checked out of our room, we spent 2 hours in the lobby waiting with our luggage.  We checked emails and surfed the internet to pass the time, but most entertaining was watching the hotel goings on and the interactions between the guests and the staff.  We created back stories for each group.  At one point we saw a uniformed security guard hurrying through the lobby following a male guest.   We noticed her uniform looked new and that the badge was ultra shiny.  Later we saw her speaking with what I took to be the hotel manager.  After some time I began reading the “Hotel Honolulu” again and realized we had ourselves “become” characters in the Hotel Pagoda.

By Jill Steele

In an Old Hawaiian Garden

This pic is on the cover one of my most beloved floral books.  It's an album of Hawaii's flowers called, "In an old Hawaiian Garden" with word pics by Don Blanding and floral pics by T.J. Mundorff.   Here is the first poem, which inspires me to get out into my own garden and also to share Hawaii's flowers with the world through my Hawaiian Flower business.

"There are no days throughout the year
 without some sort of flowers here
In sweet profusion, uncontrolled.
If all their many names were told
You'd weary of the endless list.
No color, tint or shape is missed
In Nature's wondrous gift to me.

I hope that I can make you see
This sun-lit, moon-witched, rainbow place
Of Beauty.  Just a little space
Quite filled with flowers, vines and trees.
Walled in with stone, the haunt of bees
And butterflies and lunar moths.
When you are passing will you pause.
Or--if you will--you will drop in and see
The garden that belongs to me.
By Don Blanding