I managed to drag myself out of bed at 8am (earlier than I have to get up for work!) to head over to Honolulu proper and hopefully beat the crowds at Pearl Harbour. Yes, all the signs say Pearl Harbor but I refuse to adhere to the mis-spellings of Americans. Fortified by a fabulously cheap cup of Kona coffee I jumped on the (late) bus and got there about 10.
As per the usual U.S. sense of terrified paranoia you have to leave your shit behind at the entrance (apart from your camera and money), and it was chucking it down. As you enter, you watch a 20 minute film about the Dec 7th bombing in 1941 which brought the Americans kicking and screaming into the Second World War. It's surprisingly informative and not too over-the-top in terms of sentimentality, which was a refreshing change, and then you get on a ferry to be taken over to the memorial itself. The memorial is for the USS Arizona, the main warship victim of the attack, on which almost 2000 people died.
The memorial itself isn't anything special but I was actually really interested in the history of it, probably because I don't know a lot about Pearl Harbour at all, apart from having watching half that terrible movie, during which I got so despondent about the level of acting and storylines in modern cinema that I turned my brain off entirely and could only ascertain that the story was set somewhere hot in America, which actually lead me into a false belief that Pearl Harbour was in Florida. Thanks for that, Ben Affleck.
I'm not sure if my lack of knowledge was because I didn't listen in History or because we don't really learn about it in the UK (being so saturated with our own rich history), but I was enthusiastic about the facts and genuinely moved, perhaps due to the uncharacteristic restraint shown by the US in showing what happened. I know this is probably due to the fact that half their revenue comes from Japanese tourists, and so going on about the 'savage murder of thousands of their best American boys by the Jap scumbags' isn't such a great idea, but nonetheless I found myself at the verge of tears on several occasions, even when nothing particularly emotional was going on.
Due to rain and not-worth-getting-wet-for waves, I am kind of bored in Waikiki and heading to the North Shore tomorrow.
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