 Good to see you back to another episode of Think The Kauai's Human-Humane Architecture, Broadcasting Life from the Opposite Ends of the World with Yudhisoto from Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hi, DeSoto. Hello. And me near Munich in Germany. So if you drill through the globe, then you know, that's where we are. Kind of, kind of. That's where we then have the coconut wire running through that. So as far as I understand is that you guys, DeSoto, are trying to get back to normal. Tourism is quite up again. And you said, all the discussions we have to say, well, we should have learned something from that. And we did a lot in talk, but not so much walk-to-walk, right? Not any really actions have been taken. Is that correct? That is exactly right. And that's something that people are discussing right now because we had this period of introspection and examination of what do we want from tourism? What do we want in terms of its effect on our lives? Which is, in some cases, overwhelming. And yet now it's coming back and we really haven't done anything about what we were even talking about before COVID got started. Last year in 2020. So we have to say as brutal as it is, we're back to being overly full of ourselves and thinking of us being unique in many ways. And also one of the things we think ourselves being unique is as being a prime wedding destination in the world, right? And for that, we can get the first picture up because you and our co-host, Ron Lindgren, have been announcing already these two people here getting married, right? Yes, we did announce that these two people got married and that's you and your new wife, Suzanne. Exactly, and we already know her as our exotic escapism expert for a long time, consulting us because she has a degree in tourism and business, so she's the expert in that area. And but we are originally and fundamentally Europeans and Europeans have not been let back into the US, including Hawaii, right? So what do we do, right? I mean, what connects us is Hawaii, she has been an au pair there and I've been there a while. So that's our place, but we couldn't. And then also we're one of the biggest proponents of easy breeziness. So what do you do if you wanna get married in COVID and you level why, what do you do and what did we do? Well, you weren't able to come here. That was one of the things because as Europeans, you weren't allowed to travel here and very few people were allowed to travel here. So you just told me that in Germany, there's a rule that you have to be married in an enclosed space, which you did not want to do. You wanted to be married outdoors. And you found a loophole where you were able to get married at some kind of wedding facility, but outdoors in a forest. But it wasn't a jungle, warm jungle. It was a chilly temperate zone jungle where you said the temperature was in the 50s. Plus it was raining and it was chilly, it was cold rain. So you did the best with what you had but you didn't have a tropical jungle wedding. Exactly and this is the first time everyone sees me wearing it, what's close to an aloha shirt too, which is by Jack and Jones, which is a Danish company and they're interpreting the tropical exotic. And that's what we allow that's as far as we can go, right? Because we don't allow any or endorse any imitation but interpretation. And of course, you know, Suzanne being a native of Bavarian had to wear her native attire of the dirndl as you were pronouncing it several times in the last couple of years. So let's go to the next slide here and keep you in the dark for a little longer because here we're basically seeing in the continental US, this was some years ago when I was invited back to my home away from home in the prairie in Lincoln, Nebraska. And you see that anywhere in the continental US our tropical exotic Hawaii has the biggest draw, you know that's like the most tropical exotic destination. And that's why, you know, airlines is advertising that heavily that particular aerial view is actually we can see our homes on there because this is all front yard as close as it gets. But the other kind of puzzling or this is less puzzling but you found a puzzling picture and asked me about it and that's at the top right. And what is that one? Well, that, I still don't know what's going on. That is a Hawaiian Airlines jet that was photographed at the Nuremberg Airport in Germany. Yeah. What was it doing there? We'll never know. Well, not, someone bought the postcards that was on eBay. And so maybe that person is doing more investigations and if he watches or she watches the bill, you know they might able to tell us but that basically made me ask you a question that I had heard the rumor that back then in the glory roaring 70s there were actually direct flights between Frankfurt and Honolulu but you said not so much, right? Yeah. I mean, they couldn't even take as much fuel you said, you know, doing that non-stop. So probably just- No way. No way. With full thinking, right? Yeah. Yeah. No idea where that story got started. Nevermind, nevermind. All right. So then let's go to the next slide here and continue the confusion for a little longer because you see that German airline that you guys know Lufthansa there and then you see something that looks once again just like on the, I think that was Chicago O'Hare on the last slide where I was doing my stopover to Lincoln where you saw Honolulu advertised. So you're thinking, there we go. Once again, Hawaii is advertised there. If you could look really close, there is a very small letter as there's the airport codes on there and FRA is for Frankfurt. And then if I do this here I'm wearing this shirt here today because HNL is for Honolulu but that's not what it says on that one. It's actually FTL. So let's go to the next slide and slowly but surely are lifting the clouds here although one could still think we are in Hawaii but we put that little world map up there, right? And the red dot is supposedly the islands and they're off some coast of some continent but that shape of that continent for the ones who are little sound and safe and geography looks a little different, right? Yeah, it's not the Hawaiian islands despite your T-shirt that says Blue Hawaii. And it also, the coastline does look sort of like parts of the Hawaiian islands but you didn't come here on your honeymoon so you went someplace else in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific Ocean. Okay, but let's still try hard to insist maybe you still was Hawaii. Next slide, which shows us impressions of that. So we have lush green mountains, very Hawaiian, right? And we have very blue water and we have some very dramatic coasts and we have some dry sides, right? On our islands in Hawaii. And so still looks pretty close but yeah, you already, we're right on. We've found a substitute or a European sibling, I guess we should say. Let's go to the next slide for that and see where that might be. So similarities here, you found striking similarities not just in the overall scenery but also here, animal life, you know, some fauna here, there's some old here and there's some sea animals here, as you can see. And then there's birds and there's insects that amazingly, and that's again, I mean, this is off the geographically off the African continent but politically it belongs to Portugal. And this is the island of Madeira that we're talking about, that we went to. So if you're going to the next slide here, we're starting to analyze again and in the middle at the top is our very familiar map of Oahu which we know is comprised of two mountain ranges. And down there is the island of Madeira and it basically has one mountain, so to speak and that mountain goes all the way down to the coastline. And to give you an idea about scale, we found this interesting website at the top right that compares and you see the kind of, the reddish is basically Madeira and the blueish, the big blueish or the purpleish is basically Oahu. And so that means Oahu is twice as big as Madeira or Madeira is half the size of Oahu. That's pretty much a similar, a big difference. Now, let me ask a question which I should have looked up myself, but I forgot to do. What's the latitude of Madeira compared to the Hawaiian islands because we are at 20 degrees north of the equator. Is Madeira about the same? Well, if we could read this map down there, this is obviously a map that has longitudes and latitudes here, but I think this is homework we have to pass on to ourselves or the audience to do as one thing to learn from the show. I think we're more south, but that's sort of more a guess than I think so too. So let's go to the next slide. Something, again, they share as both basically got discovered by ships, by boats. Back then the Polynesians, obviously the Hawaiian islands and then kept and cook way later and the Portuguese very early in the 1400s, basically Madeira. Christopher Columbus was actually also staying on Madeira before he then became supposedly one of the discoverers of America. And so in both cases, you see this sort of nostalgic. I always, when I'm on my midnight at the Waikiki Grand, I see this first pirate ship floating by and this is a similar one here. And when I looked it up, it basically says it's a remake or remodel of actually Columbus's sort of ship. But that was then and now is now and now how we get to Madeira is actually the same way how did we get to the Hawaiian islands and particularly Oahu and that's the next slide. But relative to the different sort of manifestation of mountainousness on the islands, there's a challenge here that we in Oahu aren't as challenged with as we are. And you were actually wishing me luck when I let you know where I'm going and I send you this information. You wanna share that with everyone? Well, the airport that you had to use and which is used by tourists coming and going from Madeira, because there's so little flat land, they had to actually build an extension of the plane runway that's on concrete pillars. So it's like building a flat surface for the planes to be able to land on that is supported by concrete pillars not unlike the way, for example, freeways are constructed in the USA. We all are aware of freeways with that are held up that way. Even with this extension of the runway to make it longer, it's still a very tricky landing because there's not a lot of open space. So you fortunately made it there and back successfully. So we know it worked, but it's consideration when you're coming and going out of Madeira to land that airplane. Yeah, and it led to this sort of, and there's one I wanted to put in, but you guys imagine when you get off the plane and Honolulu in the great Ossipoff, easy breezy airport, but then when you get shuttled to the city, you go basically under a nimitz at times, right? And that's kind of a similar feel, this sort of gigantic monstrous concrete thing that again is not quite what you expect when you go to exotic islands, right? It's very manmade and it's very brutalist, maybe not big fans of tropical brutalism, but they don't come across as very tropical, right? They come across as very brutal brutalism. That's right. And that's a really good point that be both situations. And I think a lot of people here don't think about that, but for 99% of the people who arrive here, their first view of the island of Oahu is either above on top of or below this immense airport viaduct of the H1 Treeway, which again is neither tropical nor exotic nor Polynesian. Yeah, exactly. Very Western and it has to do with tourism because it's how do you bring all these people there, right? And we got a little indication about how many people up there, there's the statistics in 2017, 1.4 million tourists per year came to Madeira, and that's about five times its population. And obviously we know this is way more extreme on the Hawaiian islands, right? So there's way more stress on the island with all the things we keep talking about. And let's go to the next slide. Once again, looking at similarities and differences. So this again could look like somewhere on the Hawaiian islands, somewhere on Oahu, but similar to our front yard beach or a little bit beyond that, because this is basically the heart of Waikiki up there, picture you took when we were under lockdown or you were under lockdown because I was here at that time where basically it was all vacated and no one was vacationing. And so that beach up there, as we know, is not natural. That's artificial. That sand has been shipped in from somewhere else because you catered to the tourists to expect basically sort of a Jamaican Caribbean, very sort of whitish kind of sand that the ones on Queens Beach and further are natural beaches though, but they're way more grainy, right? And less sort of powdery, so to speak. So this actually beach down there, this shares it with that one because this is an invasive beach that hasn't been there and it's basically been shipped in from somewhere else. And this is the only beach like that on the entire island of Madeira. And we go to the next slide, which shows us there are neighboring islands as well, another similarity to the Hawaiian islands there. This is actually Porto Santo and you can already, even if you don't speak Portuguese, which I don't, but luckily my wife, our exotic escapism expert Zana speaks fluently Portuguese from her three years she lived there from starting as a sweet 16 and for the following three years. And so Porto Santo was actually the island that basically the Portuguese basically discovered first and then they saw Madeira in the background as the sort of big giant dark kind of monster they thought and then they ventured out to discover that one here. And here you can see one side of Porto Santos has a sandy beach and that's basically why, many people then decide to move on and travel on but there's a difference because what got shut down in Hawaii so many years ago, ferries basically are still basically being the connection between the two islands. And we also threw in the image at the top right because we have a sand island just off the coast of our city, which is our main hub, everything we kind of ship in and we get to that aspect to the later. Get to the next slide. How far apart are these two islands, Martin? And how long is the ferry trip between the two? I think the ferry trip is about like, I think half an hour or so or not 45 minutes or so. We almost did it. We had an invitation by the guy who built the hotel that we will share and show at the very end but due to the COVID situation you had to have them basically get tested twice and they were only supporting once. And so here you had to get tested into island travel and test all the issues we know from Hawaii as well. We are in place here too. So let's go to the next slide. And these is actually, you see the same setting but this is the next beach over and this is the typical beaches. And this clearly shows you another, one of the most fundamental similarities between the two is its geology of both are volcanic nature, the Madera and the Hawaiian islands are volcanic islands. Here you see these pebble beaches and black pebble beaches which is the reason to share with you already why Madera has been saved more from mass tourism than our islands because they're not so attractive for the typical idyllic beach vacation because it's a little tougher to basically lounge and chill on a pebble beach. And so- If not impossible to do that. But you know, of course, we do have very rocky, there are some rocky beaches like that here in the Hawaiian islands as well. But yes, as you said, people don't go lounge around on the rocks like that. It's just not comfortable. Exactly. So now we go to another difference on the next slide, but you tell me maybe I haven't paid sufficient attention and now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I have seen some of these, but not to this extent. Very typical is actually that they use the pebbles for the pavement of the walkways and sometimes the streets. And that's one of the kind of the scenic things that are typical for the Madera Island is kind of pebble pavement, so to speak. Do we have any of them at all? We do not have anything like that. And unless you sometimes have, we can see rocks set into concrete purely for decoration not to walk on. So sometimes around decorative pools, the Cocoa Palms Hotel on Kauai did have a setting like this around its swimming pool, but I've seen that in pictures, but I thought I've always thought it must have been uncomfortable to walk in and out of that pool. Yeah, and they get so hot as well, right? Because they're dark. Yes, yes, yes, ouch. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Let's go to the next slide. What we do have, we dedicated a couple of shows to that is about volcanic veneer and volcanic volume we call two shows. I don't recall the such sort of a crazy avant-garde, sort of creation of piling up volcanic pebbles, almost looks like Gaudiesque, what you see on the right side. And it also gives you a little clue that the geological nature is a little bit more puffy, a little bit more grainy. And so that's, we're not geologists, we don't try to go there, but there's certainly differences in the nature of lava, that they're more marginal than really fundamental. But the next slide... Let me just say, Barton, if you go to Hawaii Island and Maui, you will see this kind of lava and you'll see at least what's called dry stack stone walls made of lava the same way. That's right. And what you also see, and I get this to the next slide, and we've been talking about that in our volcanic veneer show is that today, we're slicing basalt to the sort of wallpaper thin panels and basically gluing them on to other structures beneath and then they don't do such a good job and they fall off as you can see here as well. We have been taking a break but we'll continue our automobiles and architecture show. So our rental car was a Renault that we've been talking about the Twingo before and we will have other Renaults showing up. This is a Renault Megane that they gave us. And once again, so the volcanic nature shows up not just in the natural environment but also in the built environment. But the next slide, this is interesting. This is a grocery store, a chain that's called Continenti here. And we have been doing a show about my critical practice experience in that area. And basalt is not that much seen in modern architecture anymore in the Hawaiian islands. And here they're even using it for the stairs here, for the steps that go up into the grocery store. And the display in the background there, we wanna go to the next slide and share that with you as well. Because this is another similarity here difference because there were two industries that were really, really prominent on both islands and they're not anymore on the Hawaiian islands and they're a little bit in Madera and what is that? Yeah, that's sugarcane and we're gonna get into that sugarcane connection also then led to people from Portugal and Madera coming here to the Hawaiian islands to work in our sugar industry as well, which is why there are a number of Portuguese people here or people with some level of Portuguese ancestry. And just like you can see that also there's some display of some of the old sugar machinery that's here in this building that you took pictures of just like here we had sugar mills and we had these huge boilers and really like a factory type of setup which is all entirely gone now. Yeah, and as you said, we will go to in the next show because we're almost done with our 28 minutes again while there was sort of a lot going on in the direction from Madera to Hawaii related to sugarcane but this here we found on that little display there is historic display. One of these pumps basically came from the United States it's an American machine. So there was exchange going on sort of both ways. The picture on the top right is in the grocery store and they basically here map you where there's still a sugarcane production going on and we know that the last one basically on Maui right just shut down production about actually I flew over that when it was the last day of the chimney still steaming and it just happened in a plane at that day. So that was legendary. And here you can see also they're doing a little bit more with their sugarcane here because there's a lot of rum there and there's also well to the other sort of beverage we get to later with one minute left maybe we do the last slide here next slide as our last slide to basically phase out. Yeah, that is that one. That's something they always want to do in Hawaii by really doesn't really and our friend Larry Strecker basically who has built one of the best architectures on the island together with Ron Lindgren and Edward Killingsworth basically retired in California and has a vineyard there. And so Madeira's geology is so different that wine is actually able to grow there quite well and the bottles you see there in a row is actually some of the famous Madeira wine which is a very sweet wine and you either drink it before your meal or after that. And now at the end of the show we can't say what you see on the very left is basically a disease of fungus that happened about 150 years ago. And that fungus is actually the orange for a very, very dramatic and surprising connection between the two islands at the opposite end of the world and I think we leave it with that just so you tune in next week again and hear the continuation of that story once again to us basically now have learned something from the pandemic and wanting to look more beyond our horizon and look at other places and we've been doing this a lot all this year with me in Germany but then you can say Germany is still significantly different than Hawaii but Madeira as we keep discovering is not so there's probably a lot to learn from. So true, true. Thank you and look forward to see you for that next week.