{"id":2775,"date":"2013-05-08T23:11:08","date_gmt":"2013-05-08T13:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/?p=2775"},"modified":"2013-10-07T22:52:17","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T12:52:17","slug":"hawaii-2012-part-2-waikiki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/?p=2775","title":{"rendered":"Hawaii 2012 part #2 – Waikiki"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Waikiki

Waikiki Beach<\/p><\/div>\n

Having Chilli’s Bar and Grill<\/a> on the ground floor of our hotel was one way to welcome us back to American food culture, tantalisingly delish but instantly regrettable. Luckily there was plenty of walking to be had around our new temporary home to help move along the couple pounds of meat, cheese and grease we had just ingested.<\/p>\n

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Waikiki is pretty much the Oahu equivalent of Surfers Paradise, ie. tourist central, but its not all bad! Street botherers and slow moving path blocking groups aside, between the scores of hotels there is a generous speckling of retail shops and eateries. Kuhio Ave<\/strong> is a good place to start with the Waikiki town center, Kings Village shopping center<\/a>, Royal Hawaiian center<\/a>. Here you\u2019ll find almost any souvenir you can imagine with the usual excessive over redundancy of content and shops in tourist hot spots but it is still worth a look-through as some stores will stock different designs, colours or styles. The fixed shops make way for open air markets and mobile stalls in surrounding lanes and streets, thankfully very few are pushy with their sales.<\/p>\n

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The Royal Hawaiian<\/strong> is where the branded shopping begins with high end names like Fendi, Hermes, Bvlgari<\/strong> and even a Ferrari<\/strong> store but the one we were most interested in was Zumies<\/a> \u2013 the token skate, surf, snow, moto-x store. They actually had quite the range of stock and brands, even a small section of Undefeated<\/a> along with a bunch of sale items, always a good sign (:
\nDownstairs, it wouldn’t hurt your taste buds to pop into the Honolulu Cookie Company<\/a> and try a few samples of their gourmet shortbread cookies.<\/p>\n

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Out on the streets you\u2019ll find a couple 88 tees<\/a> stores \u2013 kind of a designer vintage tee store dressed up like a rubbishy clearance store where shirts are in piles on large tables and in pigeon holes. There were some cool designs but prices were quite expensive for what they were (starting around $20). They did however have some other random items like old Hawaiian and American licence plates which were great for a slightly quirky souvenir (:<\/p>\n

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Alot of the high end stores made use of their massive store fronts for some intriguing art exhibits.<\/p>\n

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Finally, if by some chance you were walking around with your eyes closed, you may not have noticed that there\u2019s quite literally an ABC store<\/a> on every corner (not be mistaken with the Japanese Footlocker equivalent<\/a>). Basically your one stop shop for souvenirs, convenience items and last minute life saving.<\/p>\n

Next up, we take our best shot contracting mall dementia by running the gauntlet of the major shopping centres on the west coast\u2026 all in one day!<\/p>\n

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Hawaii 2012 part #1 \u2013 Arrival<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #2 \u2013 Waikiki<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #3 \u2013 Honolulu shopping \u2013 Part A<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #4 \u2013 The Big Island \u2013 Volcano tour<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #5 \u2013 Shopping Honolulu \u2013 part B<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #6 \u2013 Tattoo Honolulu \/ Boardshorts: A Perfect Fit art exhibits<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #7 \u2013 Pearl City area<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #8 \u2013 Swap meets and Made in Hawaii festival<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #9 \u2013 Cook offs and Car shows<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #10 \u2013 North shore<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #11 \u2013 Windward shore and Sealife Park<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #12 \u2013 Chief\u2019s Luau at Sealife Park<\/a>
\nHawaii 2012 part #13 \u2013 South shore \u2013 Diamondhead crater, Hanauma bay<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having Chilli’s Bar and Grill on the ground floor of our hotel was one way to welcome us back to American food culture, tantalisingly delish but instantly regrettable. Luckily there was plenty of walking to be had around our new temporary home to help move along the couple pounds of meat, cheese and grease we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1883,388],"tags":[1507,1925,1926,1894,1886,400,1924,563,1921,1920,1887,1893,50,525,1922,990,100,488,391,1890,1923],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2775"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2775"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3544,"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2775\/revisions\/3544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soulbridgemedia.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}