bunk'd i am sitting in shorts and a 5-year-old san francisco souvenir shirt whose yin and yang design has bled into the back part = my pjs. my brown rubber slippers - flip flops - were new when i bought them a couple of weeks ago, but now i can imagine what it feels like to walk barefoot in the sleepy sloping streets of this island.

nothing here opens before noon. i tried looking for a nearby place to eat sunday, but i had walked to the corner of market and main and there were only the gas stations that provide the usual sodium and sugar in cakes, chips, coffee, drinks and booze. i did find one that sold spam and rice wrapped in a strip of seaweed for $7.95 or so. (i took the one that offered a strip of fish because i had the spam the other day. mmmm.)

since arriving in hawaii i had eaten only two restaurant meals, the type that bursts your tummy and makes it hard, the type where you eat every grain of rice and every strip of sauce, but i had never been hungry. yesterday morning i went looking for food because i wanted something to keep in my cramped hostel room in case, as in chicago, my stomach announces emptiness and it is time to eat.

it's only been six (out of 15) days, but i had never yet been hungry. yay! i'm guessing the hills, streets, roads and activites have kept my body busy enough so that it feasts on body fat instead. hehehehe.

two hostel guests are giving me their frozen pizza, which might last me for a couple of days. they are leaving with the 9:40 a.m. shuttle today and had overpacked food. they live on oahu, the island of honolulu and tall buildings. i took their number because i want them to find us another local place to eat one of these days.

we met at the beach tour yesterday, little beach in makena, i think the beach is called. it is a small enough private beach where people go naked to celebrate... the sun. (you don't have to strip if you don't want to.) there is a circle of percussionists and a guitarist that pound out a relaxed rhythm that travelled across the island. a slim woman comfortable in her nakedness danced facing the surf, her crown of brown and blond swaying in the breeze.

you had to climb a sharp stoned, jagged rock jutting from the sea floor to join little beach. the rock towered three stories high, dividing the beaches and forming a natural barrier from the rest of the island. i met one of these rocks during my last visit with family to the island of guimaras - we secured a beach cove with the large rocks, leaving before the tide rolled in. i hated the kind of scraped this kind of rock gave. in little beach, the cliffs are decorated with trees, or at least their branches, that snake rooted from the cliffs into the beach. natural benches for all.

i met oahu locals ann, holly and the brit jay when holly decided she was hungry. i heard they were going to get food, and stood - no introductions because we were too busy navigating nudists, the surf, the soft brown sand with stone, wood chips and leaves, and the large, jagged rock. we had one of the longest dinners i have had the opportunity to have at fred's mexican restaurant, because the waitress misplaced our ticket. she bought a round of free drinks for us, but i thought we deserved more than just one round.

last night a man with a bloody face joined us at the corner a couple of houses from the hostel, he said someone threw him a bottle because he owed them money for drugs - ice, or crystal meth, or methamphetamine, is staple in these parts. two hours later or so, maybe because i was willing it because i had on these stupidly short shorts i bought at a local mall and one of my favorite tank tops; exposing too much skin; the cops came. they rode with two blue dots on the squad's roof. "you live in the hostel? time to go home," he said.  ¶ 6/26/2006 01:51:00 PM