Predictably Wrong

Some time ago a friend asked me to describe my perception of Hawaii. I never was able to get around to answering adequately. Below I'll post a mini-essay--as in less than a page--I wrote last year that describes how often I've misjudged what a place will be like before arriving there for the first time. I'd never been in a place where drivers yielded better than Hawaii. And you can't beat the weather. The laid-back atmosphere was nice, as was the diversity. The only really hard to accept thing was it felt like it was rapidly losing it's "Polynesian" spirit and becoming more mercenary. It felt more like Asia to me in some ways.........................

Anyways, here's the essay:

Predictably Wrong
I don’t have a good track record when it comes to predicting what places are going to be like before I go there. It’s gotten to the point where I probably need to be like George in one of the Seinfield episodes and start believing the opposite of what my initial inclinations are. “Thanks to” my high school Japanese teacher’s fixation on inundating us with images of traditional Japan, I was half-expecting to see a fair amount of Japanese people walking around in kimonos and perhaps even an occasional samurai when I arrived in the Nagoya, Japan airport in February of 2000. My delusions prior to arriving in Korea in August of 2005 weren’t quite so anachronistic, but were equally ludicrous. Because it seemed like almost ALL the Korean students I’d met at the university I attended in Utah wore glasses, I was shocked to discover a sizable population of Koreans that wore contacts or who weren’t even “visually impaired.” Several weeks before our family moved to Hawaii this past August a friend my wife and I had met in college, who grew up in Hawaii and is now back living “on the island,” warned us that “Honolulu is pretty ghetto.” I chalked up her statement to her being Japanese descent and hence, based on a stereotype I don’t think most Japanese people would even challenge, paranoid about safety. How could “paradise” be “ghetto?” I thought Hawaii would be just one big, glitzy Waikiki district (thank goodness it’s not by the way!) But then I arrived and beheld Honolulu’s “thriving” homeless population. And visited Honolulu’s China Town. And couldn’t help noticing all the run-down gated apartment complexes and security officers at stores and in libraries. And overheard the hard to dispel rumors that the Hawaii public education system ranks 49th in the U.S., above only, gulp, Mississippi. So I’m now 0-3 and owe our friend in Hawaii an apology for trusting my unreliable preconceptions rather than the perspective she gleaned from growing up here. I have a chance to redeem myself and break the streak this summer when we visit Cambodia for the first time. I wouldn’t recommend betting on it, though.