On the 2026 Honors Hawaii Jan term trip, we had the opportunity to visit the Bishop Museum. The Bishop Museum is located in sunny Honolulu and is the official Museum of Natural and Cultural History of Hawaii. Here we had the joy of exploring several fascinating exhibits, including sections devoted to Hawaiian and Polynesian history, natural science, and even dinosaurs!
Over the course of the 2026 Jan term trip to London I had the privilege of attending nine different stage productions, all very different, but all equally valuable to my experience studying abroad. It was an opportunity I had never had before to be able to go somewhere where dozens of shows of West End quality were all playing at the same time. I bought as many tickets as I reasonably could with my budget and aimed to get the maximum value out of each show I saw. Over the course of the trip, I gained a renewed appreciation for the performance arts and their value, not only to British culture, but society in general.
At the Wahiawā Botanical Gardens, the practice of lei making is taught to visitors, both to carry on the tradition and teach the significance of the weave to visitors, but also to aid in the onerous task of weaving approximately 53,000 lei for Memorial Day. The Wahiawā Botanical Gardens contributes 7,000 natural lei every year to the project. In the hour and a half the Whitworth students were there, we made one hundred woven Ti lei. Hundreds of organizations run similar lei making sessions for the five months leading up to Memorial Day, freezing the lei braids to keep them until May.
