From a City Girl to Being Stuck in Hawaii

I know what you’re all about to say. How can you not scream of excitement about living in Hawaii. Yes, it’s amazing and exciting that I get to live near gorgeous beaches and don’t get me wrong it’s beautiful, the beaches, the hiking, the views. But it all gets old after a while.

Coming from a big city like Chicago, it’s a major change, maybe a good one people may say. I have always been a city girl with big dreams. Chicago is fast paced as ever, not quite like New York, but uhhh you get the point! Moving to Hawaii for my internship and after college was a dream come true. I was mesmerized by the way it looked and the fact that it was an island. Sipping Mojitos by the water, finding a job and relaxing taking lots of pictures and being happy where I had ended up. Not quite.

I moved here May 2017 and let me tell you, being here a year-and-a-half, now it’s not as exciting as it seems. You have the annoying drivers here who don’t know how to use turn signals on the highway while your driving. Locals have a beautiful island but sometimes they just seem like they are bothered by the amount of people here. Everything here is slow paced, vacation pace, meaning I’m the person that’s like, “Excuse me, I’m trying to get to places at sometime today.”

Affordability—now that’s another topic to get at another time. It’s so dang expensive here! And I’m still trying to figure it out. The amount of homeless and job rates!!, I thought Chicago had a problem. And the bugs, Hawaii has ginormous bugs and I mean flying cockroaches and centipedes, gosh it makes living here tough sometimes. And let me tell you that sometimes you can’t plan a nice day to go grill and go to the beach because it will just start pouring on you randomly and then stop out of nowhere, take it as Florida weather, “Gosh, extremely humid and hot here during the summer.” I just can’t sometimes.

Let me tell you that the food, it's literally just Asian or Hawaiian and no diversity at all, and I’m used to diversity because I come from The Midwest, where I can turn around a corner and get some Puerto Rican food if I want to. I know what you are about to say, “Stop complaining, you live in freaking Hawaii.” But if you want my opinion, Hawaii is awesome if you want to come explore and vacation for a few months, not to live... that is if you’re use to it.