HAWAII?!?!?!?

I GOT TO GO TO HAWAII!!!!!!

This summer, my cheer team went to a UCA camp (Universal Cheerleading Association, they're like one of the biggest cheer companies and are prestigious, and even work to make rules for comps/overall rules for schools, their brand is Varsity, which makes the highest quality cheer stuff that you can get). They have an option to try out for this team called All-American, where people from all over the country try out. They can't choose more than 5 girls, and sometimes don't choose any from a team. Well, this year I tried out and made it! There's like 5 locations you can go to for different parades to preform (Philly for Thanksgiving, London for New Years, Disney for a winter spectacular) and this year I got to go to Honolulu for the Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade. It was so epic! Last year, I went to Philly and danced on the Rocky stairs for the finale at the art museum, and I met two really fun girls from Kentucky! But this year, Hawaii was sooooooooo funnnnnnnnnn. There were 800 cheerleaders there with All-American from across the country. It was crazy.

My favorite food we got was called a poke bowl (we got them two days). Mine had salmon and shrimp in it with pineapple and some veggies, but my mom just got shrimp. She's weirded out by eating raw fish, and shrimp always has to be cooked unlike fish like salmon. 

We walked around EVERYWHERE. The weather was super nice, it wasn't too hot but it was definitely warm. Almost every morning it would drizzle and pass over fairly quickly, then the rest of the day would be nice. The first day my group was scheduled to go to Pearl Harbor, which I didn't realize was an active military base to this day. We toured the USS Missouri, which is where Japan signed their surrender after WWII. It was set up both like a museum and an active naval ship throughout the whole thing, which was really interesting to see. It was the last active battleship, and was taken out of work in the 90s I believe. I really enjoyed seeing it because my grandpa was a marine in Vietnam, and he was stationed on a ship probably similar to the Missouri. During his time on the ship, they even went to Hawaii. I wonder if he went to Pearl Harbor, he never told me he did but he might have. 

On the ship, there was also a whole kamikaze little exhibit. During the battle of Okinawa, a kamikaze piolet crashed his right wing into the side of the Missouri, but luckily hardly damaged the ship and didn't hurt anyone. The baker was at the top of the boat because he heard sirens, and he took 12 or 15 pictures as the plane was coming in. Miraculously, with his clunky camera, he was able to snap a shot of the plane as it hit the ship, which is crazy considering the technology and how he wouldn't even have been able to really tell what he was taking a photo of at that moment. Afterwards, while the soldiers were cleaning up, they found the kamikaze piolet's body, and the captain ordered him to have a sea burial, which was so out of the ordinary. They sewed him a Japanese flag and sent him to rest with honorable burial in the ocean the next day. It was so wild, because nobody did that for opposing soldiers, but that captain (or maybe he was a general) believed it was what was right. It's crazy, because that piolet was really no different from any of the American soldiers on board, fighting for what he believed to be the right thing and honorably dying for his country. 

It was popular for the soldiers to take pieces of the plane and rubble and turn it into art. Someone made a mini plane out of the metal, another guy filed a bolt into a ring. 

Down in the kamikaze exhibit below deck, they also had displayed the piolet's letters that he'd written to his family before flying off. At the end of the letter, he'd drawn a picture of his plane proudly. That made my stomach twist a little in morbid sadness. Like, he knew he was just going out there to die, nothing else. He wasn't coming back, and all he was leaving behind was a sweet letter to his parents and excitedly drawing his plane on it. Wow. They also had on display one of his buttons that an American soldier had taken and kept before it was donated to the museum on the USS Missouri. 

Continuing on, we also saw the USS Arizona memorial. During the attack, every ship sank except the USS Pennsylvania, and all were able to be recovered except for the Arizona (which is still there), the USS Oklahoma (which later sunk at sea as it was being transported for scrap) and I think maybe one more? The rest were later put back into commission. The Arizona memorial is also super eerie, but in a beautiful way. It's all open with cutouts, and even a cutout in part of the floor, so that you can see over the water down looking at the sunken ship. The memorial was built over the ship but made sure that it wasn't touching any part of it. There's only one survivor still alive from the Arizona, and he actually was in the parade! He's over 100 I believe. There was a little plaque talking about how they send the ashes of the survivors back into the ship if they wish to be put down there once they die with their fallen crewmates, and the diver who was quoted on it said, "when I let go of the box, I can feel the ship pulling it as if it's reclaiming one of it's own". That gave me chills. Honestly, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

Fun fact, another portion of Pearl Harbor is also a national park. There's all these mini museums set up around there which I went through. The exhibit that stuck most with me, though, was when it was talking about music. Each of the ships had their own bands, which were made up of soldiers who had recently graduated from the Naval Academy school of music. Each year, they had a battle of the bands which took place in Hawaii. There were two preliminary competitions. I forget the date of the first one and who won it, but the second one is the more important one. The second competition and the more important one took place December 6, just a night before the attack. The USS Pennsylvania's band won that battle, and took the trophy with them. The final event was set to be held December 20, but that day would never come. Nobody could have even fathomed what would happen the next day. A night of joy and laughter soon turned into a day of complete and utter devastation that would change the course of history forever. On December 7, every member of the USS Arizona's band would be killed on board their ship in the attack. The USS Pennsylvania's band then decided to hand their trophy off to them, naming the Arizona's band as the winner of the Battle of the Bands. I don't know. I've been thinking about that a lot. Maybe it's because I'm a musician, and I know what music means to me, and never did they think that December 6 would be their final day making music, preforming, doing what they loved. They would have never guessed that the next day they'd be dead, just like that. It's a tragedy, and it just gets me thinking. 

I'm sorry if that was a boring entry. I was trying to put my entire trip into one blog, but there was so much information in this one and I don't want to drag it out and make it too TOO long.  So, if anyone wants to hear the rest of my Hawaiian adventures I'd be happy to share them in another entry! Everyone might find the rest of what happened to be more interesting. I dunno.

Anyway. see ya :)