Anders Västfält

Wow, first 2 days in school has been quite nice… just in 2 days I got classes in all the 4 subject I will study here. Principles of Microeconomics, Principles och Macroeconimcs, Communication and Culture and Intro to Communication skills. I have maybe a average of 2 other Swedish people in each of my classes and a total average of 5 Scandinaviens per class. Maybe 5 Hawaii locals per class and 3 Germans and 4 Japanese.The size of the classes is different from Sweden, just 20-30 people in each class so it is more talking in the classroom and attendence is very important here, especially if you want to get good grades.

A met a bunch of interesting people and that is great, I like! Yeserday we went to The Moose Bar, it is kind of a studentclub. It has a $5 entrance fee but then the drinks just cost $1. Not the best drinks but hey, one dollar! That is really cheap!

And the Ala Moana Food Court which I said I should write about in next post! So here it comes, it is the food heaven! Just 5min away from our house, when I first entered the place I became a bit shocked(in a postive way, of course :), it is soo huge! I would guess at least 35 restaurants and there is also coffeshops, icecream bars, a cinnamon bun bakery! A lunch cost around $7-$9(45-60sek) which I think is a reasonable price!

Tomorrow I have lessons between 14:05-15:30. I will just have around one and a half hour lessons on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. I could change my schedule so I get 3 busy days instead but I dont know, it is nice to have classes everyday so I meet people, the other side of the coin is that it take 1hour to go to and back from the university with bus. I cant really decide how I should do…

Surf tomorrow, it is supposed to be bigger waves tomorrow and over the weekend so I am pretty excited about that. Have a nice day everyone! Aloha!

Today it is Labor day in USA which is similiar to 1 of May in Sweden. So because of that school starts tomorrow(tuesday). I am really excited about it! Tomorrow I will have Principles of Microeconomics(14:05-15:30) and Communication and Culture(17:15-20:10). I really hope that I will have nice classmates.

Yesterday I found tennisracquets on craigslist.com(similiar to blocket.se) and went to Waikiki to buy the racquets. The ones who wanted to sell the racquets were from Ohia and were just on Hawaii for the summer. So I asked them if they got more things to sell so I got all the things on the left pictures below for just $60(390sek), nice! Yesterday evening and today evening we have been practising, it is very fun to play tennis! It is also good that it is electrical light on the tennis court so we can play when the sun is set.

And about the sunset, I have to show you all our sunset view from our lovely balcony! It is wonderful! But I prefer seeing the sunset from a surfboard on the water, hehe…

Oohh, and about surfboards a picture with me and my beautiful surfboard! :D

Tomorrow morning it is time to surf and then first day in school! Next time I will tell you about the food court we have just 5min walk from our home, it is like heaven! :) And of course about the first time in school, someone told me today that it is around 400 students from Sweden(can it be true?) on my university(Hawaii Pacific University), not what I expected but I cant stop smiling anyway, hawaii is fantastic… Cheerio!

Hello and thanks for all the comments, also on msn and facebook! It is nice to hear from you all! I appreciate that!

I having a great time here! We just ate a fantastic dinner made by our chef Marc! He really do tasty and delicious food! Today we went to Surfgarage to buy surfboards, the rest of my roomates didnt bought anyone but I bought a 9,2feet longboard so now I am really excited about tomorrows surfing! It is expensive to rent boards here so I will go with this one for a while and then perhaps buy a shortboard when I am getting better. We have a very nice routine in the afternoon, surfing until the sunset, going back to lie in our outdoor jacuzzi, eat a lot of food on our balcony and then relax a bit before partying or sleeping.

I am looking forward to start the school on tuesday to hopefully meet some other nationalities. Yesterday we were at a birthday party with some locals who Sarah knows, it was pretty nice. But when we went out to a bar later it was so many Swedish people. We will see what happens, I will try my best to stay away from the swedish crowd :) We live close to the Hilton hotel and every friday at 8pm they have massive firework which we can look perfectly from our balcony, it is a sign for “now starts the weekend”.

I uploaded some pictures of our apartment and the view from our apartment in Gallery > Hawaii Sep-Aug 2008. Karel have a waterproof digitalcamera and Marc will probably buy a waterproof videocamera and then we can make some nice surfing pictures!

Time to sleep! Bye!

 

Back to Gallery

The time in Hawaii have been very busy so far… two days of apartment searching and two days of partying and a early morning to get up for school introduction. But I have great fun! :) Today I moved in to a flat with two Swedish guys Karel and Marc and one girl from Miami, Sara. We live at a perfect location on Ala Moana boulevard, 10min walk to Waikiki. We have ocean view, 200meter to the water, a pool and jacuzzi, tennis court and all furnished. We all have rented surfboards to get started with and later we will buy. Today was my first wavesurfing experience ever and it wonderful! just being there in the water, completely tired and look at the sunset and try to catch a nice wave! I managed to stand on the board once! yeah! :) tomorrow at 7am we are planing to surf again! I will try to upload some pictures with pictures of the flat and some nice views of Hawaii.

Now we have been 3days in San Francisco and it have been a really good time here. Even though the weather has been quite chilly, just around 20degress. The first day Arthur guided us around and it was very interesting to hear all his stories, we saw the two bridges, chinatown, cable car museum, beautiful victorian houses and some very steep streets. We stood up early that day so when we arrived at our hotel at 17:00 to have afternoon whine we were a bit tired but after some glasses of whine on the topfloor of the house with a beautiful view of the city we were in a good shape again :) George who lives here is a really great guy who loves Sweden. He goes to the Swedish westcoast every year(grebbestad). He owns some beautiful houses here in San Francisco and he told us interesting stories about the houses he owns. The day after we arrived we went to another of his house to have another afternoon whine :) 
That house is probabely one of the coolest and most beautiful houses i ever visited. It is famous from postcard of San Francisco and has been awarded as the best painted house in America(Painted ladies house). It has old furnitures, some of them is from the 18th century. He got a autograph from Mark Twain and other cool historical things.

We also saw the bush-man, which is famous from the Swedish program “100 Höjdare”, he is on the streets and when someone walks by he tries to scare them, hehe. I just got a bad picture of it but you can find it in my Gallery. Totally i uploaded 96pictures from my californian trip, enjoy!

We went out both saturday and sunday, it was ok but not as good parties as in Las Vegas and San Diego. Today we were in Sausalito and it was a place I like a lot. It was a bit warmer climate and it was located just next to the ocean with nice surroundings. To get there we just drove over the Golden Bridge, it is very easy to get there, just 15min away from the city centre of San Francisco.

Tomorrow “the gang” we will split up, it will be sad, it has been so great to travel with Wasse and Jöne! Not complicated at all, we want to do and see similiar things so we are never really even close to argue. Thanks a lot boys! A lot of nice memories to keep forever!

Hawaii here I come! Will arrive 5:50pm local time in Honolulu. I have will stay 6nights in a hostel, hope I will find a place to stay before school starts 1 of September! Weee, i am actually a bit nervous! Nice feeling! Time to sleep! Bye California!

Los Gatos is a small town next to St Jose and just an hour to San Francisco. It is a upperscale town so the citizen here are quite wealthy. We stay at Wasses relatives house and we having a good time here. A lot of the people who live here work in technology companies in Silicon Valley, so of course we took a ride there today to see google, yahoo, microsoft, and so on. It was a huge area. Google looked quite nice, and there was a gym and other stuffs in there for the employies.

But before that we got up quite early and went for some hiking in the Redwood forest with enormous, massive trees. I never seen such a big trees in my life before. Some of these tree you can drive trough with car but then you got to get way up north. I think you see on the pictures that they are quite big anyway!

After some relaxing time at family Beddesons pool we ate a nice dinner with american sausage, potatoesallad and a glas of red whine. Now we just came back from the cinema, we saw Batman “The Dark Knight”, it was great action and good actors, especially the evil Joker :P

Tomorrow, early in the morning we heading for San Francisco, I heard from a lot of people that it should be a beautiful city, so now I have great expectations :) I think we will have a great time there, Arthur, the man in this house will guide us around San Francisco tomorrow forenoon, so I think we will hit some nice spots. I will report about that later! Cheers m8s!

In Los Angeles we hanged out with Seb the whole monday, we first went by car to Rodeo drive, Bel air, the Hollywood sign and Beverly Hills. It is really nice areas close to the UCLA University. Definitely a place I can think about studying later :) In the evening we ate another 23inches pizza together and then we drank some beers before we went to a bar in town. It was super! Vielen dank Seb!

On Tuesday started our trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, we stayed one night in Pismo beach. It had a nice beach were we were throwing some frisbee and I took a swim, when I was in the water I saw 4seals swimming next to me, i was so suprised, i never been swimming next to seals before.

Today(wednesday) we have travelled on such a beautiful road. It is called “route 101” and is just next to the coast, i think it was build around 1930, very curvy. Look at the pictures below, they are amazing! On the way we saw this elephant seal and some squirrels…

Now we are in Santa Cruz, a place I dont like that much. We went to the main street here for dining but it was full of hippies and outliers, so sad… Anyway we find a cardroom on the way home so me and Jonas played texas holdem, unfortunatley Jonas didnt won but I had some luck and won $198, yeah!

Tomorrow we will go to Wasses relatives in Los Gatos near San Jose. It will be interesting to stay in a American family house, I think it will be great fun!

Take care and enjoy!

Hey hey hey! We having such a great time in America! Since we left San Clemente we have been doing really a lot, it feels like we being here for many weeks already.

After San Clemente we went to San Diego to meet up with a friend of Jonas from his hometown Båstad. We went out with them to eat and later it became a club. We spend two nice days in San Diego with some sieghtseeing, shopping, partying, beaching, bodysurfing, and more… San Diego is a beautiful relaxing town near the mexican border so it was a bit inspired by them. We stayed at Pacific beach and you went to parties just in shorts and a t-shirt. I also have to recommend the hotel we stayed at. I forgot my new camera and my mobilephone in the room, and when we came back from breakfast they had put a paper on our car that we have things to pick up in the reception. I dont remember the name of the place but it was opposite Hooters in pacific beach :)

On Thursday we went to Las Vegas, it took about 6-7hours with our nice car. We stayed in a place called Stratosphere. It is a tower which is around 350meter high and the hotel and casino is next to it. We arrived late so we didnt went out but we went out friday and saturday instead, Las Vegas parties is amazing! The only problem is to get in :) We first wanted to go to Pure in Bellagio but i guess it was about 600-900meter que at 23:00. So we then tried Tow before we came in to Jet club. I dont really like the style people dance here so far but maybe i will learn to like it. It didnt work out so well with our swedish “spik” dance! :)

On saturday we went to Red Rock Canyon and in the evening we went to a bar/club to and drank some beers. We were also playing 1cent machines in the Casino just to get free drinks, cheap way to get drunk, if you dont go tilt on the machines :) Las Vegas was the hottest place i ever visit and then i mean the temprature. It was around 45degress in the shadow, i never ever have been feeling something similiar. When we walked around in the evening it was terrible i thought i should loose my consciousness, important to drink a lot of water then.

Now we are in Los Angeles at Seb´s place. I friend of mine from Germany who is studying here for a month. He got a really nice flat, good located, very nice of him to let us all stay here, thanks Seb! Yesterday evening we were eating the biggest pizza i ever seen. We shared a 23inches(58,42cm) pizza. Now we will soon go Hollywood with him to explore the enviroment around here!

I uploaded a lot of pictures… Gallery -> California

Bye bye!