Aoki's - finally pau.

I have a lot more pictures from Saturday, but with it being so cold and gray outside I've been coming home feeling like busting out every color in the paint box. Finally finished this Aoki's picture I've been working on for ages tonight! Click on the picture for a bigger version.

In case you missed earlier posts about Aoki's - this was a Haleiwa classic that, along with the Iwa Gallery next door, got torn down last year. The Aoki family opened their shave ice business in this 20's-era shop in the early 80's. Matsumoto's is the super-famous one down the that every tourist wants to go to - I never had the patience for their ridiculous lines when the Aokis were selling perfectly delicious shave ice. No more though - island economics are demanding and demands apparently require that these old Haleiwa fixtures be torn down. HawaiiBusiness.com had a good article about the goings-on in Haleiwa, click here to read that.

I've been playing around with watercolors quite a bit lately and when I saw that Aoki's was gone, I decided to paint it.

Took me a while - posted the ink drawing in mid-January. I do these things in bits and pieces after work, though, and sometimes I just want to come home and veg.

Aoki's was featured in one of my favorite posts - of everything I've scribbled here, the posts I did after my first trip there as a solo traveller, there entirely to soak things in, remain some of my favorites. Despite the fact that I didn't actually HAVE a shave ice at Aoki's that time, I still included them in "Ono"-rable Mentions - scroll down a ways for the shave ice part.

Eating Aoki's, kind of a long time ago - think this was my first time back home after being hauled off to Washington before my junior year in HS - my folks retired back there in the mid-90's and the first trip back? It was like magic, seeing (and eating, when appropriate) all the things I loved there for the first time in so, so long.