E-Mail from Linda

Linda is a faithful reader of my blog who grew up in Hawaii but now lives in California. She is the one who shared the Mustard Cabbage and Pork recipe with me a few months back. I enjoyed this e-mail she just sent me, and wanted to share it with you.

Hi Jalna,

The Hawaii Kai Chili festival you went to touched off small kid time memories that I have of Hawaii Kai when people called it Kokohead. 50 something years ago when I was little I lived on a farm up the road from there. Lunalilo Home was the next property over. I remember taking the bus home from nursery school. Can you believe they would let 4 year olds go on public transit to go home from school back in those days? I sometimes missed my stop in front of Lunalilo Home and the bus driver would walk me across the road when he dropped me off when he was going back the other direction. Good thing because I never would have gotten across the road. I was too scared. (Note from jalna: I remember walking to and from school by myself from as young as 5 years old, and the school was a good distance away. Once my Aunty Mabel said that while she was riding the bus, she saw me walking. She said that I was barefooted and she scolded me.)

Attached are pictures from the Nikkei Matsuri festival this past weekend. This Nikkei Matsuri festival was in Japantown in San Jose, California. In recent years there seems to be a lot more of stuff going on that has to do with Hawaii in the Bay Area. Maybe it has always been there and I just did not know. But there are quite a number of Hawaiian plate lunch places now in San Jose and the surrounding area. Hula is big and ukulele too. There is even an ukulele store that sells handcrafted ukulele from Hawaii.

I mostly took flower arrangement pictures. I did not exhibit any this time. I only sent you one picture of flowers because I don't want to bore you with flowers in bad gymnasium lighting. There were ukulele students playing music. There were some hula students from the nearby halau that was going to dance to the ukulele group... but turned out they did not need to but they were all dressed up and ready to go dance.

Thanks for sharing Linda. I really enjoyed your story and the pictures!