How to make friends in Hawaii

Making friends in Hawaii?  I can think of no place else where it is easier to make friends!  What it does take is that you are first and outgoing person, as opposed to an introvert.  You have to like people, and you have to like making friends! Second, it requires that you like being here. You have to have a genuine respect for your host culture.

In our 16 years here, we've encountered two kinds of people as regards the ability to make friends.  The first kind, and this is the category most folks fall into, make friends everywhere they go!  They're friend magnets.  We see people who have only lived here for months and they tell us they have more good friends here than they had accumulated their entire lives on the US Mainland.  The second type are the introverts.  These folks don't make eye contact and are very private.  They feel other people's interest in them is an invasion of their privacy.  These are usually the folks who move here for the perfect weather; the warm inviting ocean, maybe even the low cost of living compared to where they came from.  And they're the ones who after being here for a few months start to complain about this, then about that, and next thing you know they're packing their stuff and heading back to their old comfort zone on the Mainland.

Anyway, making friends in Hawaii is easy.  If you are any kind of a people person, it comes naturally. If you truly love people, and I mean people whose culture is different from yours, you're in.  We have never personally experienced any form of prejudice here.  In Hawaii, everybody is a minority, especially on the Big Island where we live.  We love it and when we go visit the Mainland and find ourselves in places that are like 95% Caucasian, it feels very weird.

Feel free to email with questions, or visit my blog at http://affordablehawaiiliving.blogspot.com/ and join in on some great conversation about moving to and living in Hawaii!