HOTEL WAIKIKI: Gensiro's Stone Pagoda Garden

I'm sure the absence of pics in the previous posts didn't go undetected by your eagle eyes. It's a hold over from the days reading blogs when the Internet was picture-less and abstinence was my way of re-experiencing the nostalgia even though back then I didn't author a blog myself and truth be told I never thought I would be up to the Herculean task. The bandwidth or whatever simply didn't allow picture transmission and at the odd moments that it did, it would take a day and a half and a few crashes to load a single photograph, some pixels missing, some re-arranged.

The nostalgia part is that what made reading all-text blogs so enjoyable was that many of them were written by professional writers during their off hours who articulated their thoughts so shamelessly well and even more amazingly by using the least amount of words. For example, I would post an every which way yard-long question on their comment page and they would obligatorily respond back with an eleven-word answer so coherent and comprehensive that, well, it inspired me to be like them some day, not meaning a clone now, but the realization was that I would save years of my life getting from point A to point B in a straightener line with my thought life. Writing is nothing more than thinking out loud properly, so coherent writing is a free bonus.

Without further ado, now back to our story du jour .... In a land not far from Waikiki town, at the very last lot on Kahala Ave., there is beach front house with a front yard that. Oh forgot, we have pics today. No need for words. What it is though is a works in progress at it's early stage. I pass by there daily and it's always a sight if you happen to see billionaire Gensiro, 70-80 years old, directing the landscaping or standing across the street surveying what Google Maps missed on the last flyby.

Pan right.

Pan left.

This is more how the finish product will eventually look.

As you can see for yourselves, we're back at Gensiro's Museum and Statue Gardens a few hundred yards up Kahala Ave. The neighbors were originally pissed off with the ecentric billionaire's extravagant plan. You simply can't do this next to our mansions even though Gensiro's beach front mansion was more a mansion than theirs. That however was the neighborhood reaction at the very start. Today, they've probably embraced his grand illusion which he's managed to realify undaunted as his style has always been on his visits to Hawaii throughout the years. Simply put, it's 50 or more marble statues on a single plot when Hawaii doesn't have any public marble statues anywhere that I know of. The Statue Garden is far from finished and whether the focus will shift to the Stone Pagodas is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile, the Kahala neighbors should walk softly here because on an earlier day the Kahala land owners stole the land from the original Bishop Estate Land Trust through legal maneuvering. Bishop Estate's beneficiary is the Hawaiian ancestry Kamehameha Schools. The legal premise was that Bishop Estate owned too much land at the detriment of leasees and because these residents were super rich they were able to get the courts to convert their leases to fee simple. Less well off people living on other parts of the island were renting Bishop Estate land but the same concept escaped them preoccuppied as they were scrapping out a living and shopping for cans of Spam on sale at Long's Drugs. If there were the kind of justice in the world how the Kahala millionaires promoted it, these lessor people were more the type of individuals deserving and entitled to a leasehold-to-fee simple conversion rather than their Kahala counterparts who flew in on their private jets to stay a week or two each year at their Kahala mansions. Of course the lot of poor asses weren't included in the same ruling on the weight that the legal landmark was not a class ruling. What distinguished it apart was that Kahala already had class galore and the fruits of the suit was strictly their private reserve and their's alone.