Hong Kong........

So now that we've arrived at the airport the only thing to do now is wait. Wait to see if the next flight to Hong Kong has any available seats. Since Drake and I hadn't really slept, we were really tired. So we ended up setting our luggage down on the ground and taking a nap right in the middle of the terminal. People walking all around us but it didn't matter, we were out. We slept for about an hour.
We woke up and started tossing a tennis ball back and forth until I put together a game. You know those moveable posts with those straps that connect to eachother to make up the maze of lines that you find at the airports? Well we got two of those and put them together in the middle of the terminal and started playing a game of tennis, but without rackets just our hands. Nobody seemed to mind. A group of security guards even walked by and asked us what the score was. Another traveler was taking video of us as he walked by. Entertain ourselves while entertaining others in the process.
The next flight to Hong Kong was at 2:00 pm and when they called out the names of selected stand-bys, ours weren't called. There were two more flights leaving that night, one at 9:00 and the other at 12:00. Our first attempt for the stand by was doomed from the start since we were like the 36th and 37th names on the list. But this time we supposedly first in line, but its a full flight so we'd just have to wait and see what happens, no guarantees.
We ended up taking a free hotel shuttle to the In n'Out just outside of LAX, hung out there for a bit, and played a game of cribbage. Drake was able to get a hold of some friends from church, Aaron and Mariah, that live nearby that were happy to come swing by and pick us up for a few hours.
Later they dropped us off back at the airport and we soon found out that we made it on the flight. Finally, we're making some progress on our trip, actually making it on to a flight. The only bad thing was that we left the tennis ball at Aaron's house, but then we remembered that we had a case of them in the suit case of toys for the orphans, so we had to pull out a few for our entertainment.

The flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong is 15 hours, by far my longest flight. Since we were stand by we didn't get seated next to eachother. Originally when I booked our flight months ago I tried to reserve seats in the emergency exit isly because you get extra leg room, but those seats are usually reserved first. But I got lucky with my seats placement, thats right, emergency isle baby. And with my dead leg that I've had for going on 3 weeks now, this will be much needed.
Cathay Pacific is a really nice airline. Seats were comfortable, service was great, the two meals that we got were great, and every seat had their very own screen with probably 100 movies and tv shows to choose from. The flight for both of us was rather pleasant and passed quickly enough. We both slept thru a good portion of it.
We arrived in Hong Kong Wednesday morning, so that means we missed a whole day, left Los Angeles Monday night, arrive in Hong Kong Wednesday morning.
Our connecting flight to New Delhi wasn't leaving until 2:30 pm and that would also be a stand by flight, so we had a good 7 hours to spend until then. We decided to leave the airport and go to the island of Hong Kong. We checked in our luggage at an airport locker, took a train to the island, and then took a taxi to Lan Kwai Fong.




We're not too interested in the touristy stuff so we wanted to go check out downtown and get some local food. Stopped by a place and had a pork and vegetable soup and then a breakfast dish with fried eggs, mushed not mashed potatoes, and sweet beans and some sort of hot sweet milk to drink.
Next we went downtown to check out some street vendor stuff and some of the sights of the city.





(Apparently there were a lot of motorcycles jumping over cars so they had to put a stop to it by putting up these "No Jumping Over Cars with your Motorcyle" signs.)
We took a taxi back to the train station and the train back to the airport in time for us to find out that we again didn't make it on the 2:30 flight. But she put us on the list for the 9:15 flight, which means more time waiting in the airport. We sat around a bit and then decided to go and talk to a different worker to see if they could work their magic any better. I have no idea what those workers are doing when they try to get us on a flight, but whatever it is they sure type fast in the process. Every worker we talked to always asked us the same questions and we always had the same disappointing answer: Do you have an itinerary? No. Do you have a boarding pass? No. All we had was a little baggage claim sticker with a bar code. Our one checked bag was scheduled to be on the 9:15 pm flight, so our goal was to be on the same flight as our bag. The next guy we talked to was a champ and was able to do better than just stand by and booked us two seats, next to eachother even, on that flight.
So now we can relax, we know that we're on the next flight to India, no more stand by stress. Its now Wednesday and I hadn't showered since Saturday night and it was starting to catch up with us. They had showers there that you could use but it costs $20. So we decided to ghetto shower and just get butt naked in the public bathroom and use the hand soap and the sinks to clean ourselves up. There was this old man in there mopping the floor who didn't look too happy. I don't know if he wasn't happy because he was going to have to clean up our mess or the fact that he wasn't happy that he was having to watch to bearded naked men showering in the sinks. Ghetto but refreshing nonetheless.
We filled the next few hours with games with the raquetballs and convincing other travelers that we were wheelchair-ridden. I have to say that we were pretty convincing though. Later on the flight people on the plane would make eye contact with us, recognize where they had seen us before and then say "you can walk".
P.S. While we were in downtown Hong Kong we saw a ton of people but only one man with a beard, either beards aren't too common or asian men can grow them well. Later in the airport a waitor asked us if our beards were real. Ha.
Next stop New Delhi, India.........

Preparations for My Trip to India........

First things first, define procrastination. If you'll look it up in the dictionary, most likely you'll find a picture and me and Drake. We've known about our India trip for months now and still we left our preparations to the last minute.
I arrived in Ventura on Sunday, the day before our departure. We meet up at the mall and get right down to it. We're buying toys and underwear for the 23 orphans that we'll be spending time with while there in India. We go to Target, FootLocker, WalMart, Sports Chalet, Fry's, back to WalMart, and finally back to Target. Now we've got everything we need, now all we need to do is eat and organize everything in our luggage.
We get back to the house and deal with the eating situation first, of course. Our plan is to leave the house in the morning at 6:15 am. We're most likely not going to get too much sleep but we'll have plenty of time to sleep on the plane so we're not too worried about that. It's around 1 am and I start thinking about everything that I'm going to need to start packing when it hits me. When planning a trip, what is the number one thing you have to take with you? Toothbrush? Underwear? While these things are very important, its still not what I'm referring to. Let me rephrase the question. When planning an INTERNATIONAL trip, what is the number one thing you HAVE to take with you? That's right, my freaking PASSPORT. The very same one that is calmly sitting in a small pocket in my backpack which is in TAFT!!!!!

Taft is 2 hours away, we're leaving in 5 hours, we still haven't even touched anything to begin packing, so we have to leave now. We jump in Matt's car, the Lexus, which will get us there the fastest and the safest. As we're pulling out of the driveway I ask Drake how much gas we have, he takes a look and sees that we have plenty to get us there and back no problem. We decide to take the 33 back to Taft because even if you don't drive really fast its still faster and shorter. A bit more dangerous but when has that ever stopped us? Its been raining all weekend and we soon find out that there are a lot of little mud rock slides that have fallen in to the road which give us little obstacles, but nothing we can't handle. Drake is pretty tired, kind of delirious, but getting the job done safely so far. He looks down at the dash and notices a new light that has been illuminated. Yup, its the gas light.

When Drake has glanced at how much gas we had he read the gauge wrong thinking we had close to a full tank we in reality we had close to an empty tank.
So now we've found ourselves right in the middle of Ventura and Taft with no close gas station, no cell phone reception, and no time to run out of gas. Somehow Drake manages to use what little fuel we have left very efficiently on the up hills and coast our way down on the down hills. We make it to the Texaco station in Maricopa with the needle pointing well below E.
So we book it the rest of the way to Taft, grab my passport, and head back to Ventura, this time on the much safer Interstate 5. At this point Drake is beyond sleepy, he's unable to complete full thoughts or sentences and claims to be seeing things on the road that aren't really there. After the "face out the window scream" and the several slaps to the face that I deemed necesary to give him at random times we decided that I should drive. When we're driving through Oxnard I get a voicemail informing us that our flight from Chicago to Brussels has been cancelled due to a massive slow storm in Europe. I call the airlines and they tell us the soonest they can get us there in by the 25, Christmas Day, yeah right.
So we arrive at the house in Ventura at 6:05 am, still not having even packed a single sock. So we get right to it, pack our bags until they're full and hope that we got the essentials. Our plan was to leave by 6:15 but we agree now on a much more realistic 6:45, to make it there early enough for our flight leaving at 9:50. Our buddy Kevin shows up to take us to LAX and we take off. You know how we don't like things that are too easy and how we love a challenge, so what does that mean? More hurdles. We run into a detour and also traffic. But we arrive at LAX at 9:15. We don't necesarily have to make our flight to Chicago since we will most likely be rerouted anouther way.
After talking with some not-too-pleasant representatives from American Airlines, we find out that all flights to Europe are cancelled and they will be sending us through Hong Kong flying stand-by with Cathay Pacific.

Hong Kong here we come..............

Heads Up!!!

First things first, I know that I suck at the whole blogging thing. There's a few substantially important events that have happened in my life in the last 6 months that I haven't posted about. But I'll try to be better. This one has been screaming at me and had to be posted though, too funny to keep to myself.
So I'm taking an International Finance class at Utah Valley University, yeah Bo's in Utah...weird. But I had just got out of class and I'm walking to the Institute parking lot. To get in the parking lot you have to have this electronic card that you scan as you pull in which lifts the arm that allows you to enter the parking lot. When you leave the parking lot you don't need the card, the arm recognizes your car pulling out and lifts automatically for you.
So I'm walking towards the parking lot and I notice this girl just pulling out. She's got her head out the window watching for traffic so that she call pull out. Well she's really cute and I'm smiling at her and if my memory still serves me correctly she was smiling back. She then pulls out and I'm still a bit in a daze as I watch her drive away. SMACK!!!!! All of a sudden I get hit in the side of the head really hard, and I look and notice that I just got smacked in the head by the auotmatic arm that had just dropped down because the girl had just driven away. To my knowledge nobody saw, unless she was still looking in her rear view mirror or something. But I won't flatter myself, I don't think she saw.

So then I took this picture with my phone, I might write them a letter to see if we can get this sign enlarged or something. I'm mean come on, someone could get really hurt. Okay maybe I won't write the letter.

BYU-Hawaii Graduation 2010!!!

I attended my first semester of college in the fall of 2002 at Palomar College. I didn't take classes again until fall 2005 at Bakersfield College where I did two semesters. While there I applied to all three BYUs (Provo, Idaho, and Hawaii). Provo said "no" but I didn't care because I didn't really want to go there anyway. I got accepted to Hawaii where I wanted to go all along. So I started my first semester in the fall 2006. It seemed like I would never finish school. I'm not the best student, I always procrastinate and I'm very good at finding other things to do besides my homework. My last couple semesters I got a little bit better at it. I got very familiar with the library and was in there more than any person should ever be. But I feel like a hit a good balance between school and play time.
So here it is, April 2010 and I finally graduated. It felt a little bit anticlimactic, all of that work and all that money for a stupid piece of paper, that paper says bachelor's degree in International Business Management but really, that's it? We'll see what's in store for me next.
Here are some pictures from graduation...

I couldn't resist. I'm never going to wear this robe again, why not? Jansen opted to jump with me too, nice shot Dad.

Dad and Holly after graduation and all my leis.

Mom and Wayne.

Jansen and I are both still dry at this point, but not for too much longer.

CHEEHOO!!!!!!

Appropriate Greeting Card

So last semester I hung out with my good friend Gina a lot. BYU-Hawaii didn't have her major so she had to go back to BYU-Provo. Which was sad for me because I don't get to hang out with Gina anymore. We still talk every once in a while but not as often as when she was here. Anyways she sent me this card the other day...

I started cracking up when I read this. She said that she was looking for a birthday card for someone else, saw this one, and couldn't resist getting it for me. As many of you are aware I like to make my phone calls and keep in touch with people while I go to the bathroom. I usually have to normal contact who I call, and Gina is on my list. She said that she thinks its funny that I call her while pooping but she's honored to be on my bathroom contact list. I'm glad she's on there too, only the specialest of the special are on that list. Love ya Gina.

5K for Haiti

So this Saturday BYU-Hawaii put on a 5K charity run for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. It was $10 and it all went to relief efforts in Haiti.
I would say the last year has been the year that I've officially worked out the least. And when I say "officially" working out I mean what I'm about to do is for the sole purpose of doing exercise or working out. I stay active and I work out my body by doing other things. I don't go for a run just to go for a run. I've gone to the gym to lift weights maybe twice in the last 8 months. But I would still say that I'm in pretty good shape. Surfing is a good example of a way to get a really good work out without really knowing that you're getting a workout. You surf to surf not to exercise, but it keeps you in really good shape. I climb trees, I'm always doing flips and walking on my hands, and lifting girls on my shoulders or in some cases (with Jansen) even higher. What I'm getting at is that I like my regiment of keeping in shape better than "officially" working out.
I haven't gone for a run in probabley 3 months and I signed up to do the 5K this weekend. Before the race I was kinda sizing up the competition. For one because I'm competitive and I like winning and two because I wanted to find someone that I felt would push me at a solid pace. I didn't want to pace with my roommate David because I felt like he was going to smoke me, he's really fast. This other buddy of mine Zack I knew was an athletic guy, about my same size and build, so I thought he would be a good one but I still thought that I could beat him.

The race starts and I start out to a pretty fast pace, I was in the lead for probabley the first 200 meters or so. The guys on the cross country team from BYU-Hawaii were running in the race as well (but they didn't count as far as race finishings) so I got nervous thinking that I went out too fast. At about the first half mile mark the cross country guys had passed me and David, Zack, and I were together.
Zack pushed ahead to try to keep up with the cross country guys. I didn't know this but he's alot faster than I thought. At 18 years old he qualified for the Boston Marathon and in high school he ran a sub-16 5K, that's fast. My first mile time split was 5:40 and David was about three seconds ahead of that. At about the half way point I started hearing steps catching up to me, I turned around and saw a pack of cross country girls, darn those girls. Once they passed me I tried keeping up with their pace but it wasn't really working for me. I'm not sure what my 2 mile split time was but my end time was 20:11, that's pretty bad. That's two minutes slower than my slowest time in high school.

Since the cross country kids didn't count as finishers, the race results were Zack in first, David in second and me in third. I'll take third, I got a free 6-inch sub from subway and a gift certificate for Angel's Ice Cream, NICE!!!!

Honesty is the best policy?

So a buddy of mine, who reads my blog, that's weird because nobody reads my blog, but anyways, a buddy of mine read the story about the girl hitting the car in the parking lot and not leaving a note, and then returning later to leave a note because I called her out, he found this note somewhere in the vastness of the WORLD WIDE WEB and forwarded it to me. I was cracking up so I thought I'd share it with you, you who? I thought nobody read this thing, alright maybe I'm just posting it up here so that I can have it on file.
I wonder if the girl I called out left a note like this one. Hmmmm....I wonder.

Tsunami Warning!!!

A tsunami warning was in effect for Hawaii on Saturday following a massive 8.8 earthquake that struck central Chile at 3:30am that lasted about 3 minutes, that's a long time for an earthquake of that size. We got news of it before we went to bed and knew that we would be getting Tsnami warnings in the morning.
I woke up at 4am to Elza, my hometeachee calling me. I jumped out of bed and then realized she was out of my porch. I went outside and talked to her, she was wondering if we were going to stay or leave. While on the deck I saw across the street that a line had formed outside of Foodland. The store wasn't going to open for another two hours but already there was a line clear out to the street.
I went back to bed and woke up at 6am sharp to the screachingly loud tsunami alarm. Lucky or unlucky for us, I don't know which, the town alarm is located right across the street. It was so darn loud and I was so darn tired, and I wasn't like the annoying alarm clock that I can just hit to turn off.
All of us roommates packed up some supplies and decided to go to higher ground, so we hiked Laie falls and thought that we could witness any surge of water that might come. We waited and waited and nothing. Its funny the attitude that some people had. It was like we were disappointed that there was no distruction. Really? What kind of people are we to be disappointed that nobody lost their home or their life in Hawaii. We dodged the bullet. Chile wasn't so lucky. Remember those people that were effected by the earthquakes and tsunamis in your prayers.
I'm okay, the only thing bad that happened to me was that I didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked and I got a little bit of a sun burn.



The first waves were expected to arrive in Hawaii at 11:19 a.m. today (4:19 p.m. EST).

What To Do...

So I'm driving to school the other day and I pull into the little circle. There are parking spots all around the circle of flags and I was doing a lap around to see if there were any empty spots.

As I'm pulling around I see reverse lights and as she's reversing out she didn't pull out straight and totally scrapped on the car next to her. So I leave that spot and see one on the other side all the while looking back to see what the girl is going to do. I see her pull back into the spot, get out of the car, looks at the damage she did to the car, and then gets back into the car to leave. The little circle is one-way so she's going to drive by me so I decide to write down her license plate number. As she drives by me I realize that I know who the girl is. Awww crap, what do I do now?

I was running late to class so I go to class while I'm still debating what I'm going to do. The class is Leadership and Management and the lecture for the day was on "Making Ethical Decisions." Well isn't that appropriate? So I go tell the teacher my situation and she excuses me from class so that I can go take care of it.
I go back out to the little circle and write down the license plate of the other car too. So I have a few options: 1. Report her to security. 2. Talk to her about it. 3. Or do nothing at all. But #3 isn't an option now. So I decide to send her a text which went like this, "Hey I saw you hit that car, you did scratch it up pretty good and you didn't leave a note. I think you need to come back and atleast leave a note, they might not even care. It's the right thing to do." How do you think that sounded? I didn't want her to feel like a completely terrible person but at the same time she didn't do the right thing, sometimes we need others to help us make the right decision. Driving off was the easy way out, but not the right thing.
She texted back and said that she was planning on leaving a note, but she went home first to call her mom and ask her what she should do. Which I don't really think is what she was planning on doing. You can't just leave the scene and come back later and try to fix it. While I was sitting in class before I talked to my teacher I texted a few people asking for advice of what I should do. One friend of mine said that I was in a sucky position and that I should talk to her. A couple minutes later this friend of mine texted me back and said "Bo I totally know who the girl is that hit the car, she just texted me and told me the whole story." So my friend got both sides of the story.
So she ended up coming back and leaving a note on the car. I kinda wish that I didn't have to get involved but I witnessed it and I needed to do something. The whole "Making Ethical Decisions" topic in class got me off the fense. I think the girl feels dumb and thinks that I was judging her but whatever. I told her that I don't think she's a bad person and that it doesn't matter because the right thing has been done now. I haven't seen her yet, I wonder if it'll be awkward when I do, probabley.
I am Bo

B is for.........B-Date

So I've decided that I like dates, I think that I've known that but I might forget that I do sometimes. I've been hanging out with Jansen alot and I really like hanging out with her but I told her that I wanted to take her out on a date. What can I say, I like dates.
The first part of the date started when I went to her house between classes with a deck of cards. I had an idea of what I wanted to do but I needed the theme first. I pull out the deck of cards and start dropping cards on the ground and told her to tell me when to stop. She told me to stop and the card was the 2 of clubs...

Whatever card it would have been would have represented a letter. For example a '7' would represent a 'G' (the 7th letter in the alphabet). So in our case the 2 represents a 'B', now we have our theme. Everything that we're going to do on our date has to start with the letter B. I then pulled out 10-1 dollar bills and gave her 5 and told her that we would buy eachother something to exchange at the beginning of the date and it had to start with the letter B.
Later I picked her up and brought BLUE BALLOONS and she gave me a BEAR.

We first drove to the beach park by Chinaman's Hat where I had our first B activity. At the BEACH we BLEW BIG BUBBLES.





It took us a few tries to get the hang of it, well it took me alot of tries, her only a few and then I stole her method and had alot better luck. Chinaman's Hat and the Ko'olau mountains made for a good back drop don't you think?
My next plan was to go to this really good BRAZILIAN restaurant but when we arrived at the address that I got online it was no longer there. A Thai restaurant was in its place, and there's no B's in THAI. So we went to plan B, haha, get it, plan B. Anyways we decided to go to Bubba Gumps, somewhere we both hadn't been.

The waitress quizzed us on a few Forrest Gump trivia questions. I did pretty good until she stumped me on some random unknown fact on a second role in the movie that Sally Fields plays, I had no idea.
So we ordered onion rings, and then 2 entrees that we both would share, coconut shrimp and the seafood platter. We suited up in our BUBBA BIBS and went to town.



You can't go wrong with crab legs, lobster, mussles, clams, shrimp scampi, and drawn butter. I felt like I needed to wipe my mouth just now just thinking about it. So good.
We took a few random pictures at the Ala Moana mall on the way back to the car.

Jansen's jumping heel click.

And then mine.
From there we decided to take a BIG BUBBLE BATH together. Hold on, hold on, before anyone freaks out this activity we kind of stretched a little bit. It was more like a jacuzzi, alright it was a jacuzzi but we stayed in theme and I wore my BOARD shorts and she wore her BIKINI. We snuck in the marriot in Waikiki.
It was getting pretty late and we were getting tired so we drove back home, but don't worry I still have a few more B tricks up my sleeve. In the morning I picked her up and we had BANANA pancakes and BACON and later on that night we shared a BANANA split. Not too bad huh? Super fun time, super good food, and a SUPER cute girl. How could I go wrong?

FYI-B isn't the easiest letter to spell with your bodies. Especially when you're having complete strangers take the picture who probabley thought we were both crazy. But secretly they were really jealous of our BOMB B-Date.

Close Call

First things first, I know that I haven't been the best at posting my blogs on a "regular" basis but I'm going to try to be better. I think that I'll try to keep them shorter, because if I know they're going to be long I'll cringe away from doing it at all. I don't think anyone even reads this thing anyway, I'll be honest I wouldn't if I got an updated post once a month. Here we go...
So funny story, I already posted about the house that we live in. The deck is probably one of my favorite parts about our house.

One reason that I didn't mention the first time is that of accessibility. Let me explain....in the picture, down at the end you see the double doors, those doors are to my bedroom. In our house there are three bedroooms and two bathrooms. One downside is that both bathrooms are accessible only through the other two bedrooms. My bedroom is the only one without access to the bathroom, so you'd think.
Come on I'm a guy, where do you think I'm going to go. That's one of my favorite things about being a guy, I can pee almost whenever and where ever I want. So at night if I have to pee, I pee off the balcony, it's perfect. Since our balcony overlooks the popular Foodland shopping center I do only pee off of it at night, yes I am civilized.

So one night before I go to bed I get the call and walk over to the railing of the balcony. It's a nice night, stars are out, where else do you get a view like this while you pee, no bathroom wall can top this view. Right when I start going I have to stop mid-stream. Apparently Porter had to run across the street to the ATM and was returning back to the house via the short cut which cuts through the yard and over the fense. He didn't realize that I was peeing and he was about to walk right through my stream. But the good cousin that I am, I yelled and told him to stop while I managed to stop myself. Now that's love. Because in the words of Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey - Dumb and Dumber), "you can't start once you've started, it stings." I started to laugh as I imagined if it had gone down differently. Just imagine if he had walked through my pee stream. And by laughing the stream started back up again. So Porter had to stand there and wait until I was done before he came up.

Man I love being a guy.