Jennifer Turvold's Navy husband grew up in Hawaii, and was
delighted to find this Bar Centrale Gelateria selling Hawaiian coffee.
It's in the little seaside town of Gaeta, between Rome and Naples,
where the whole family resides while Turvold pere
serves on the USS LaSalle.

The search for
signs of Hawaiian life
in the universe

The proof is in the snapshots:
Hawaii's influence abounds

By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

HAWAIIANS -- they're everywhere! That's because Hawaiians aren't just a people. "Hawaiian" is also an idea, an ideal, an affectation and a juicy injection of market sloganeering.

Cook didn't just discover Hawaii. On the same day, Hawaiians discovered the rest of the world. Many lit out and settled elsewhere. There were "kanaka brigades" during the Civil War. A Hawaiian rode with Custer at Little Big Horn. Hawaiian tradesmen built much of old San Francisco. Hawaiian labor leaders sell log cabins.

C. Dean Chu attended Gard Kealoha's alma mater,
Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., waaaaaaay back in the
'70s, and was always mystified by a nearby street named
Waikiki. "I took the picture sometime later, like, in the 1980s,"
reports Chu. Anyone know the etiology?

But when the world discovered Hawaiian music and the seductive sway of the hula-hula, it was good-night nurse. Hawaiian-ness became a fad, part of world pop culture.

And so we set out to discover those little corners of the world where little pieces of Hawaii pop up. It was inspired by a picture of a plastic cow in Maili that ran in a Dutch newspaper (their motto: Plastic Cows Are Cooler Than Windmills Anyday) and we thought, hey, any idiot can do that. WE can do that!

While traveling in Morocco, Carolyn Nakasato of Pearl City
took a snapshot of Dana Nakasato-Nejmi next to a sign
that promises "Camping Hawaii International."

With the Star-Bulletin's online news authority, with worldwide readership in the hundreds of thousands, we asked readers to send us snapshots of Hawaiian-ness that are anywhere but Hawaii. This is the first batch in the "Search for Signs of Hawaiian Life in the Universe."

Stuff came in from all over. We didn't use anything from Aloha, Oregon, because that's a coincidence, coming from an Indian word pronounced "allowa," according to town officials.

Nakasato was also entranced by the Restaurant Waikiki in
Boblingen, near Stuttgart, Germany, taking a picture of diners
Marilyn Endrulat and family. The menu promises
"Polynesische Spezialitaten und Cocktails aus der Sudsee."

Keep sending us the pictures. Snapshots, slides and e-mail attachments are fine. Tell us where the picture's from and what you're doing there.

Address it to WatDat?, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, HI, fax at 523-7863 or e-mail at features@starbulletin.com.