As of mid-April, I've moved my blog ... you can find all the past and current posts here:

www.BigIslandHawaiiBlog.com

See you there!

Mahalo,

Kelly

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kelly H. Moran, CCIM, CIPS, REALTOR
Hilo Brokers, Ltd.
www.KellyMoran.com

The Pidgin You Need - Part 2

          As promised in Part 1, here are some "pidgin" words and phrases.  Most were originally Hawaiian, but have become colloquial expressions, familiar in everyday conversation.  You will probably want to try them out, sooner or later, when you're here.  Just be prepared: some people may respond to your first attempts with indulgent smiles or amused exasperation.

          "Pau" - A multipurpose word for finished [doing something], as in "pau hana" - done working.   But "pau" or "all pau" can also mean empty or used up.

          "Hui" - a group [of people].  Many local organizations use this word in their names, as it implies having a common purpose.

          "Hana hou" - Although "hana" means work, audiences will shout "hana hou," meaning Encore! - do it again.

          "Opala" means trash or rubbish, but is not used in a negative sense.  When something is inherently dirty, or at least smells bad, it's "pilau."

          "Keiki" is literally the offshoot of a plant (e.g., bananas reproduce that way), but it's affectionately used to mean child.

          "B'm bye" - or "bumbye" - is a contraction of the English "bye and bye," generally construed to mean "sooner or later but probably later."

          "Shibai" is Japanese for B.S., and is used remarkably often by contending politicians.

          "Chicken skin" is the goose-bumps you get when you're scared or awed.

          "Shave Ice" is shaved ice, but nobody pronounces the "d."  It's a snowcone, dredged with sweet syrup; try one, sometime, with sweet adzuki beans inside.

Until next time ....

 "Eh, Brah - you kaukau a'ready?"

 "Nah.  Bumbye."

 "Get grinds?"

 "Shoot!  Brok' da mout'."

After you've been here a while, that exchange will make perfect sense.  It's spoken in what's locally called pidgin, which has a long history in Hawaii, and is still heard, though not as much as it used to be. But before we get into translations, let's clarify something: it's not really "Pidgin English."

          Linguists consider a pidgin to be an abbreviated form of a standard language, with a tiny vocabulary and a very regular grammar, neither of which changes much, over time.  A pidgin will also have been deliberately imposed, to enable speakers of different languages to conduct trade and other business.  The word "pidgin" itself was coined because it sounds a little like the English word "business."

          In the European colonies of Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, there is a true Pidgin English (also a Pidgin Dutch and a Pidgin French).  But that Pidgin English does not resemble Hawaii's pidgin, because - as linguists insist - what's spoken in Hawaii is actually a "creole.".

          A creole, they say, is a real language, which is fairly complex in both vocabulary and grammar; and although it may be rooted in one or more conventional languages, it's continually evolving and expanding on its own.

          In the 19th century, Pidgin English was introduced to Hawaii to enable communication between sugarcane field-hands and overseers from diverse backgrounds: Hawaii, Japan, China, the Portuguese Azores, etc.  But that early (true) pidgin quickly became a creole, as it absorbed vocabulary words and grammatical constructions from the workers' own native languages, and especially as it became the first language of local children.

          Until World War II, pidgin was the lingua franca (pun intended) of Hawaii's people.  Everyone who'd grown up here, and quite a few newcomers and regular visitors, could understand it.  But it was always disdained by sophisticated people, and actively discouraged in schools.  Anyone who wanted a white-collar job had to be able to speak "regular" or "standard"
English.

          But in the 1970s, when historically significant art and music styles were being revived, many local comedians began doing routines in pidgin; and local writers began creating skits, pageants and plays in pidgin.  They did this not only to keep the language from dying out, but to revel in its innate charm and colorful idiomatic expressions.

          The dialog above can be rendered as follows, but I think you'll agree that it loses something in translation:

          "Hey, Brother [or friend], have you eaten?"

          "No.  I will, later."

          "Do you have any food?"

          "Of course.   And it's delicious."

          Be forewarned: it's not advisable to try speaking pidgin with strangers - you will probably "make A" (make an ass of yourself).  But there are several pidgin words and phrases that everybody in Hawaii does know and use - I'll give you some, next time.

          If you want a head start on that, go get the book called "Pidgin to da Max" - a humorous guide to this intriguing, enjoyable pid - oops! - creole language.

 Stay tuned for Pidgin - Part 2 ......

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND  -  VOG

          Every once in a while, here, you will be reminded - in a way that you would rather not be reminded - that you are living on a living volcano.

          It looks like haze, but you sniff it, and . . . you're reminded.   It's the volcanic smog known as "vog."

Wherever Kilauea erupts, sulfur bubbles out.  Hot lava cooks it with water vapor from the air (you may have done something like this over a Bunsen-burner in high-school chem.) which produces two noxious gasses.  One is hydrogen sulfide, a.k.a. "rotten eggs," which is bad enough.  But the other is a choke-hazard called sulfur dioxide.  When you visit Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and the rangers have put up warning signs to keep you back from an eruption site, it's not only because the lava crust may be too brittle to walk on.  It's also because too much hydrogen sulfide is being vented, and you'd be walking right into it.

          Sometimes there's hardly any vog from Kilauea; other times there's a lot.  The prevailing Northeast trade winds will send vog southwest over Ka'u; and if there's enough vog, it will eddy around the southern end of Mauna Loa and drift north up the Kona coast.  But once in a while the wind shifts, and a warm southerly breeze sends the vog up through Puna to Hilo, Hamakua and Kohala.

          One reason people say they like to live here is that there's no air pollution.  It would be more accurate to say there are no smoggy industries here.  Vog is, uhh . . . air pollution.  But hey, it's "natural!"

          For current visitor access to Kilauea, The Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is at: www.nps.gov/havo

          To find out what's happening inside Kilauea, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory is at:  http://volcano.wr.usgs.gov/kilaueastatus.php

          And to know which way the wind blows, the National Weather Service is at: www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/

          There's a Grammy Award given for "Hawaiian Music," but that's just one category.  And as most local musicians and enthusiasts can tell you, there are many varieties of "Hawaiian" music in Hawaii.

          More often than not, that Grammy goes to a "slack key" artist, whose finger-picking guitar style involves loosening one or more of the six strings.  So, there are dozens of slack-key tunings, some of which originated 100 or more years ago, when players who did not know the instrument's "correct" tuning began to invent their own.

          Slack key may be widely recognized - and rewarded - but it is not the Islands' only musical style.  The earliest Hawaiian music comes from their oral tradition of aboriginal chants, known collectively as mele.

These include invocations, prayers, rituals, and mythological stories, usually sung unaccompanied or with gourd drums or rattles.  Mele are widely heard, today, especially in official or public events and dedications, and as accompaniment for traditional hula.

          During the 19th century, haoles brought Old-World music to Hawaii.

It was immediately popular with the ali'i (royalty), who set Hawaiian poems to Western-style melodies, with harmonies they'd learned from singing Christian hymns.  By the 1880s, King Kalakaua had a royal band, and his bandmaster had set the monarch's poem "Hawaii Pono'e" to stately music.  You hear it now, as the State anthem, typically sung at the start of a public event.  At the end of that event, however, many people will spontaneously sing "Hawaii Aloha" - the beloved though unofficial anthem, written around 1860 by a commoner, Makua Laiana.  And by the time she was deposed, at the turn of the century, Queen Liliuokalani had written dozens of popular songs, most famously "Aloha Oe."

          But most of what people call "Hawaiian music" today had its origins in the 20th century.  I'll tell you about that in my next column.

Click here to go to "Part 2"

          Newspapers have been published on the Big Island since the mid-19th century.  Most have been in English, though there were Hawaiian language papers here until the 1920's, and Japanese language papers (the largest was the Hilo Times) until the 1980's.

          Two daily newspapers circulate here now: the Hawaii Tribune-Herald covers the whole island from Hilo, while West Hawaii Today, focuses on the Kona and Kohala districts.  Both are owned by a Mainland chain called the Stephens Media Group, headquartered in Las Vegas, NV.  Being the only local dailies, they run nationally syndicated news, features and columnists, but also cover Big Island politics and issues, and provide extensive coverage of local sports.  And both run a list every day, of islanders who have been arrested or charged.

          The dailies are delivered to subscribers' homes throughout the island, and can also be purchased from coin-boxes in commercial areas, alongside boxes for the two Honolulu dailies: the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, which are home-delivered only within Hilo, Waimea, and Kailua-Kona.

          Two tabloid-size newspapers also serve the Big Island, and while they can be subscribed to by mail, they are free of charge in boxes around the island, and so are mainly picked up that way.  The feisty Hawaii Island Journal, published every two weeks, is owned in Honolulu by the publishers of the city tabloid Honolulu Weekly.  The Big Island Weekly, though owned by Stephens Media, is editorially quite independent.  Both are "alternative"
papers: staunchly pro-environment, giving plenty of "ink" to counter-cultural topics, and intensely supportive of Native Hawaiian issues.
Both also run a column locally written in "pidgin" English.

          To be fully informed, it's worth reading at least one daily and one alternative paper regularly; and all four are available online, at:

          While coverage of local issues may not be as comprehensive as some readers would like, the Big Island is about as good a newspaper market as you'll find in any rural American county that's 200 miles from the nearest big city.

A Far-Sighted Solution

          Over the past 30 years, observatories have been built on many of the cinder cones at Mauna Kea's summit.  And although a Hawaiian ceremonial structure stands on the very highest peak, science and religion have not always dwelled there in harmony.  But the aloha spirit has prevailed since
2005 with the opening of 'Imiloa, the Astronomy Center of Hawaii, in Hilo.

      Conceived and built not as a museum but as an "interpretive center," its three shiny conical roofs evoke the Big Island's largest volcanoes; and all the landscaping is in native Hawaiian plants.  More importantly, inside, 'Imiloa honors the Hawaiians' culture and religion - especially their concept of creation, which is presented in considerable detail, right alongside the findings of today's astrophysicists about "black holes" and the "big bang."

          Another large permanent exhibit showcases the Polynesians' voyages around the Pacific.  Reaching Hawaii would have been impossible without their (literally) astronomical navigational skills.  Wherever links can be made between modern astronomy and Hawaiian cosmology, they are made.  And everything at 'Imiloa (which means "far-seeing") is captioned in both Hawaiian and English.

      The work of the various observatories is also explained in plain language, with interactive, hands-on exhibits - something that probably should have been done, somewhere on the Big Island, decades ago.  Mauna Kea is particularly well suited for telescopes that use infrared and "submillimeter" wavelengths of light, which reveal far more details about the stars and galaxies than can be seen in ordinary "visible" light.

          'Imiloa (www.imiloahawaii.org) also has a planetarium, with various star-shows several times a day, and a café run by a local celebrity chef.  It's just mauka of the University of Hawaii's Hilo campus, and open Tues.-Sun. from 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Nature and Culture

          It's the oldest wood-frame building on the island.  Many of its ohia posts and beams, erected in 1839, are still holding it up; and you can still walk on its wide koa floorboards.  What's different, now, is what's on top (originally thatch, but by mid-century wood shingles) and what's inside: a "house museum."

          It was built by and for David and Sarah Lyman, the first New England missionaries to settle in Hilo.  Progressive educators, they founded two schools, but were also eager to teach local kids about the world beyond Hawaii.  So they asked friends, visitors and sailors to send them mineral rocks, seashells, and man-made artifacts from foreign lands.

          In 1932, the Lyman's youngest daughter (then in her 80s) saved the house from demolition, and it was turned into a museum.  In 1972 a modern museum building was erected next door, to showcase what had become an enormous and eclectic collection.

          Today, the Lyman Museum is the Big Island's only natural-history museum, with a permanent display of minerals and shells, plus dioramas and models explaining Hawaii's oceanic and terrestrial climate zones.  It's the island's only cultural museum too, featuring early Hawaiian artifacts, Chinese fine arts, everyday objects from all of the local immigrant cultures, and tours of the original Mission House.

          Currently, there is also a reproduction of an early 20th century Korean homestead; a stunning half-hour film about Kilauea's eruptions that overran Kalapana in the 1990s; and through April - in celebration of the museum's 75th anniversary - a display of some odd but memorable objects that have been in storage for years.

The museum (www.lymanmuseum.org) is at 276 Haili St., just mauka of downtown Hilo, and is open Mon-Sat from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
 

Rainy City

          Somebody always asks, "Does it really rain a lot in Hilo?"

          Most of the year, Hawaii's weather comes from the northeast tradewinds, and Hilo's on the northeast side.  Being in the middle of the ocean, though, the island gets most of its rain in brief squalls, from small clouds that drift ashore and empty themselves in a couple of minutes.  You can look out to sea from Hilo and watch them coming in, so there's plenty of time to get under shelter.  On average, though, most of Hilo's rain falls late in the afternoon or at night, when the land is cooler, and those squall clouds pile up against Mauna Kea before condensing.

          And occasionally we get two or three or four days of rain in a row.  So Hilo does have the reputation of a rainy city.  But it's all relative.  Seattle, with about 40 inches of precip a year, gets a rainy reputation.  New York gets forty, too, but not the rep.

          Hilo does get more rain than any other city in Hawaii, and more than the other northeast-facing towns on the Big Island: annual rainfall goes down as you go up the Hamakua Coast.  In a normal year, Hilo will get about 120 inches - one is tempted to say "ten feet" - of rain.  When less than eight feet falls in a year, people here will say we're in a drought.

So, yes, by Mainland standards, Hilo is a rainy city. 

But hey! Hilo's most famous natural attraction isn't called "Rainbow Falls" for nothing.  

You may see a lot of rain here, but you see a lot of rainbows too - like this one just offshore from the beach parks in Keaukaha.

And anyway, Hilo isn't the wettest place in Hawaii.  Far from it. Literally.  That honor belongs to Waialeale, on Kauai, which every year gets nearly 500 inches - some forty feet of rain.

Driving Local

          Driving on the Big Island takes a little getting used to.  You can go up to 55 on only a few highway stretches; almost everywhere the limit is 45 or less.  Passing lanes are rare; and off the highways, most roads are skinny, with narrow shoulders.

          You may be surprised at other drivers' courtesy: many will wait to let you make a left turn in front of them.  And at their informality: some people drive barefoot, or in zoris ("flip-flop" sandals).  To the delight of car-renters, the nearest gas station to the Hilo Airport - aptly, the Aloha brand - is also among the least expensive.

          At the urging of astronomers to minimize the island's nighttime glow, streetlights use low-pressure sodium lamps that have a yellowish color, similar to the "caution" light in a red/yellow/green traffic signal.  That unfamiliar hue may be disconcerting, but it's easy to see by, especially in the rain.

          Unlike houses, car roofs don't have overhangs.  So a lot of drivers here get "rain-guards" installed.  They're rigid strips of transparent plastic that are fastened to the top edge of the car door's windows; so you can keep the glass rolled down an inch or so yet stay dry when it's pouring outside, or cool the inside temp a bit when you have to park and lock in the sun.   (Makes you wonder why they aren't standard equipment. But they're available online from WeatherTech (www.weathertech.com), which catalogs them as "side window deflectors.")

 <Auto Rain Guard>

          Whenever you're driving, though, please be alert.  Remember that motorcyclists here are not required to wear helmets; and that nearly all Big Island police cars are unmarked.

HERE IN HAWAII

Snow

The Big Island’s summits are once again wearing their white diadems. The first snow of . . . yes, winter is upon both the "white" and the "long" mountain. Snow comes to Hawaii in a storm, with thunder and lightning; wind and rain. Local TV newscasts originate in Honolulu; they do run video clips of snow-capped Mauna Kea. But their big weather story is what the storm leaves there: a soggy mess of drains overwhelmed, puddles for intersections, and stuff washed out to sea.Though snow on Mauna Loa is a rarer event than snow on Mauna Kea, it often goes under-appreciated. So big and broad is Mauna Loa that, on TV, it doesn’t look like a snow-capped peak; it looks like a snow-capped stadium roof. Better to see it in person; though the only way to make snowballs there is to make a high-altitude hike first.You can get to the snow on Mauna Kea, however, sitting down. A car or truck with four-wheel drive can get you up to where there’s enough to play on. Some winters, there’s even enough to ski on. You still have high altitude to reckon with; and sunburn; but (for a change) it helps to have had experience driving through snow and ice.If you don’t visit the snow, you will at least take delight in seeing what it does to the vistas of our tallest mountains. And you will probably grin every time you see a four-wheel-drive pickup come down from the Saddle, its bed heaped high with snow, to play with back home.

Weed FruitOn the mainland people carefully tend house-plants, such as tradescantia and philodendron, that - they are surprised to learn - are wild weeds in Hawaii. But some tropical fruits are weeds here, too.Guava is a real pest, especially the smaller "strawberry guava" known as waiawi (though colloquially pronounced "vy-vee").  Both were introduced in the 19th century, but escaped cultivation. Ripe fruit falls quickly, drawing not only flies but birds, pigs, and rats that transport the seeds. The wood is incredibly hard, and the saplings form impenetrable thickets.

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