Flowers, Thai, Lilikoi and shopping

July 25, 2012

I woke up super early today so I could shower and have a leisurely walk into work. I have been pushing my ankle a bit hard lately so I wanted to take extra time to walk slowly. I am very happy I did since it was beautiful this morning. Each day as I walk there are plumeria blossoms that have blown and fallen off the trees onto the sidewalk. Some days the blossoms are all bruised and I just leave them where they fell. Other mornings they are beautiful and it is like walking through a carpet of flowers. I usually find one or more that are in good shape and tuck them into my hair for the day. This morning there were a lot of lovely flowers. So my morning started out with a handful.

Susan showed me something neat. Apparently you used to see this a lot in offices of public health but now it is rare. This is an envelope made out of the paper wrapper around a ream of paper. I thought it was a super neat idea so took a photo!

I enjoyed my morning tiny box of cereal (Frosted Flakes) then washed my mug and made my coffee milk. While I was making it I talked a bit with Shu's daughter. She is adorable. She gave me a whole family of paper cranes. The smallest is about the size of my thumbnail.

Today Ann had me start working on some Filipino data, comparing locals and naturalized Filipino versus Immigrant Filipino health status. There is a PhD student who is helping Ann by putting it into SPSS and the analysis. I have a bit of time so Ann is having me help (another publication hopefully!). So I started looking over it to get a handle on the variables.

Ann had her car today (she and her husband share it) so we went to lunch with Lisa. We went to Hilo Hattie's so I could pick up some Hawaiian shirts as gifts for folks, plus a dress for myself. I got a lovely dress that I plan to wear to work. I will get a photo of me wearing it tomorrow. There were some lovely murals on the walls outside Hilo Hattie's. I particularly liked the pillars so I took a photo.

  After I got those items we went to lunch at Siam Garden. Ok, this is the sign for the daily specials. First was "Yaowarat Soup" (look towards the bottom of the link page) made with fish maw (whatever that is), quail eggs, bamboo strips and mushrooms. I cannot imagine wanting to eat that. Second was "Fried Chicken Elbows" which are chicken nuggets made from the joint so it contains cartilage. Gag. What the HELL? Third and Fourth were two types of sausage. I stopped looking after the chicken elbows. Just no. Suffice to say we ordered NOTHING off this board.

This is what we actually ordered. We shared all these dishes. Thai Spring Rolls (Poh Piah Tod). Apparently they eat them here by taking a piece of lettuce, piling on shredded cabbage and carrot, place the spring roll on top, drizzle with the sweet syrupy sauce, wrap the lettuce around and eat it that way as a lettuce wrap. Very tasty. I like it this was and just eating them.

 Next was fried calamari fried in a coconut milk batter. Ann loves calamari. This was big thicker pieces, not the little tiny ones we get at Sam Choi's. It came with a sweet and spicy type sauce. I didn't care as much for these as the smaller ones, but they were good.

 This is beef salad (Yum Neua). Thin sliced beef, lettuce, oinions, tomato and cucumber in a tangy dressing. I liked this quite a bit. I just wish the dressing would stay on the salad and not all pool in the plate underneath.

 Thai fried noodles (Pad Thai) with pork served with bean sprouts, finely chopped peanuts, shredded carrots and cabbage. This was good but I actually liked it best with some of the tangy dressing from the salad above.

 Drunkard's noodles (Pad Kee mao). These were very very thick and wide noodles, almost more like a dense dumpling with shrimp, chinese broccoli, egg, basil, chilis and garlic. It was a little spicy but not too much. I liked this one quite a bit.

We went back to work and I dove back into the data. Earlier this morning Terri (MCH branch chief) had brought me a lilikoi (passionfruit). I was saving it for this afternoon. She came by and we sliced it open. It is a yellow color fruit on the outside with a tough outer shell. It is full of seeds and the walls on the inside of the lilikoi have these little cilia type protrusions that seem to hold the juice filled pulp. There are seeds about the size of sunflower kernels all within the pulp. You just eat it with a spoon and ignore or chew the seeds, they are crunchy and really have no flavor themselves. The juice is very orange and is a citrus tart flavor. I liked it a lot. It was really quite unusual. Kind of a flavor between an orange and grapefruit combined.

I was having some trouble with the data so I spent the afternoon trying to resolve those issues by talking to Cecelia (the PhD student) and Ann. We set up a conference call for tomorrow afternoon. That gives me most of the day to sort through it and get some solid questions and maybe even find some answers myself.

Ann offered to give me a ride home so I took her up on it. We stayed late since we had a longer lunch today. I appreciate her taking me to pick up those items, it is so hard to travel anywhere the bus doesn't drop me right off at the door to do shopping. So we left work and stopped briefly at an Indian store. I got some mint chutney and methi khakhra. I am very fond of mint chutney. Methi is fenugreek and the khakhra is a whole wheat thing cracker type thing. I love this as a snack with the mint chutney. When I want something crunchy I just break off small pieces, dip int he mint chutney and enjoy. I also got a jar of honey with layers of different types of nuts to send home. It is Tazah honey with nuts. It looked lovely and I have never seen such a thing before. If you go to the link you can make the photo bigger and see how many varieties and layers of nuts there are!

After this we went to Safeway (a grocery store here) briefly so Ann could get a couple of items. I got some Gatorade, a Sun Drop soda, a french baguette, an apple and a bag of cherries. I didn't need much but it was heavy and I didn't want to carry it while walking home up the hill of doom. Ann dropped me off at home and I was able to put everything away and get off my ankle. I am afraid it is getting worse by the day. I have the ballet left to attend (Alice in Wonderland!! WOWOWOWOW!!!!!) After that I really want to try to hike up Diamond Head Crater before I leave. I'm going to do this unless I just cannot walk at all. I'm planning to do this the morning I leave so it won't matter if my ankle is hurt worse since I'll be headed home.

So now I am relaxing for the evening. I am going to post more from the Big Island trip. It has been a lovely and wonderful day. I am so fortunate in the wonderful people I have met here. I love working with the data and get such an incredible sense of accomplishment when I take a bunch of data and can organize and analyze it and find something useful from it. Happy day :)

Aloha ahiahi, (Good evening)
~Melissa