Today I washed my hair in tomato soup. It was disgusting, and the entire shower turned out light red. I’m not trying to dye my hair pink or anything, it was a desperate attempt to get the green tint out of my normally blond hair. I googled it (it’s amazing how you can google anything), and I found a lot of people suggesting tomato soup. I went to a pool (and hot tub) party on
Sunday, and when I looked myself in the mirror Sunday night, my ends had turned green from the chlorine. I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never had that happen to me before, so I had no idea what to do, so I googled it. This morning I found myself in the shower with a can of tomato soup and a can opener, and a few minutes later I found myself pouring tomato soup in my hair… And all of a sudden I panicked! My hair had turned pink, and I decided that a few green ends were better than my entire hair turning pink. So I washed the tomato out right away, resulting in… The green ends still there. Well well – this is the kind of problems we’re facing out here. Pool parties lead to green hair. I guess I can live with that.
Yesterday there was another potential problem (or rather disaster??) facing us. Because of the Samoa earthquake a tsunami advisory was issued for Hawaii. It was in effect for a little more than an hour, but was cancelled again, but I still had to promise my mom not to go to the beach… Even with a potential tsunami on its way the beaches were still crowded with tourists enjoying their vacation and most surfers refused to get out of the water. We figured that we’d be fairly safe up here on the eight floor. At least as long as our apartment is still standing…
Sunday morning we had our Graduate Student Organization Welcome Picnic. I think it turned out a success. Since we have had our almost unlimited budget cut to zero, we had to be creative, so for the first time we had a potluck this semester. We had about 30 graduate students showing up, from almost every corner of the world, so the buffet turned out really interesting. There was homemade
sushi, a Slovakian mango cake, BBQ pork, pasta salads, cookies and lots of good stuff.
I got back two weeks ago. Susanne and Hallvard (my new roomies) had all ready found our new place, moved in to the apartment and cleaned the entire place, so all I had to do was unpack. So so nice! It’s such a hassle to spend the first weeks in a hostel trying to find a place, and the best part
is that I absolutely love my new home. It’s very close to our old place, literally just two blocks down the street on the corner of Kuhio and Kaiulani. This also means that the beach is only 100 meters from here and from our lanai and from my bedroom window I can see the ocean in between theHyatt towers, but it really would help if somebody could maybe tear the hotel 
down. To say that we have ocean view – or even partially ocean view – would be an overstatement… But hey - I can see a small fraction of the ocean from my bedroom window – if it’s not exactly what can be categorized as ocean view, it is at least a small view of the ocean. And I’m loving it. 
my tiny TV and the fact that my (master) bedroom is quite big and has hard wood floors. But it doesn’t end here. The building is secured with a security guard guarding us day and night, we have a swimming pool (we figured jumping from our lanai on the eighth floor would be a bad idea, nevertheless very tempting), we have parking (I’mseriously considering buying a car, or rather… I’m seriously tryingto figure out how to afford buying a car), we have a big lanai (Hawaiian for balcony), and we have a washer and a dryer and even better – a dishwasher, a living room with a dining area and a very decent kitchen. I even bought a bread machine on Amazon, so lately I’ve been baking bread on an almost daily basis, and we get to eat real bread with real fibers, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, instead of the soft white stuff 
Americans call bread. Well… I guess my recent obsession with the bread machine deserves an entire post to itself. As you can tell – I love my new home – and I should not forget to mention the most important accessory that came with the place: Susanne and Hallvard!
