On March 6, 2006, five students went with Professor Shaw to Hawaii from Philadelphia. After hours of travel, and a good night's sleep, we traveled the next morning to the northern side of the island to visit the Polynesian Cultural Center. We toured different villages, Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, New Zealand, the Marquesas, and Hawaii, of Polynesian societies and learned about their cultures. We watched villagers perform music, dance, and make food from their respective cultures. At night, we had a Hawaiian luau dinner before watching a night show. The next day, we visited the Iolani Palace in the morning. It was the official residence of the Kingdom of Hawaii before it became a territory and then a state of the United States of America. There, we learned about the last years of the Kingdom of Hawaii, its rulers, and its customs, as well as how the kingdom came to an end. In the afternoon, we were free to enjoy Waikiki Beach. This was the only day that it was sunny, so we took advantage. On our free day, we went to the Pearl Harbor U.S.S Arizona Memorial. It rained so hard that a man took our picture and referred to us as "wet rats". On Friday, we went to the Bishop Museum, where we learned more about Polynesian culture and the islands that we are studying in class. We saw a large collection of art, tools, and fabrics produced by the Polynesian cultures, and a hula performance that is typical of Hawaii. Our final day was spent at the Honolulu Academy of Art, at a special exhibition called “Life in the Pacific of the 1700s: The Cook/Forster Collection of the Georg August University of Göttingen.” The exhibit displayed many works of art, including textiles, jewelry, and weaponry, from the Polynesian islands that we are studying that had been collected on one of Cook’s voyages to Polynesia. Before we left, we traveled stopped in at the Dole Plantation and found out how pineapples were made. They do not grow from trees, like we thought, but grow from little plants in the ground.