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Moving to Oahu for at least a few years
Ketar
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So. I'm sitting on Waikiki beach right now rather glad to have missed the first real snow in Chicago. My wife just got a job offer at a hospital in Honolulu that is very attractive, and we have until Monday afternoon to decide between this and her best offer back home (which won't give her any more time to mull their offer over).
Any thoughts, advice, or things we should be considering while making the decision? We're going out with a realtor tomorrow to get a feel for potential places to live. Relocation is included so logistics aren't an issue. My major concerns are the adjustment coming from living in Chicago my whole life, and child care and whatnot for our son (he'll be 15 months when we'd move here). I know that if we're here once he hits school age that private schools are often the way to go, and expensive.
Is there anything to do here that doesn't involve the ocean or hiking?
I'm a big old nerd, where my nerdy activities at?
Need to go meet someone for dinner, but I'll probably add more later. Thanks.
Any thoughts, advice, or things we should be considering while making the decision? We're going out with a realtor tomorrow to get a feel for potential places to live. Relocation is included so logistics aren't an issue. My major concerns are the adjustment coming from living in Chicago my whole life, and child care and whatnot for our son (he'll be 15 months when we'd move here). I know that if we're here once he hits school age that private schools are often the way to go, and expensive.
Is there anything to do here that doesn't involve the ocean or hiking?
I'm a big old nerd, where my nerdy activities at?Need to go meet someone for dinner, but I'll probably add more later. Thanks.
Posts
Location is a big, big thing. There's public transit but it's nowhere near as nice as Chicago's and it can take a while. Traffic is pretty bad in some areas on weekdays but it's not the worst in the world. Despite that, having to commute a long way can still get irritating. What's normally a 15-20 minute drive from my house to work at the Ala Moana Center on a normal day can easily turn into a 1.5 hour trek with roadwork, festivals, meetings, or just bad traffic in general. The bus would probably be closer to 2.5 on a bad traffic day. Trying to go from the Honolulu area to other parts of the island is pretty much not worth it on The Bus. You'll spend most of the day traveling.
Getting back to the mainland is also pretty pricey and difficult so if you like to do a lot of family visits you might not be able to. I know a lot of people who would put that in the top 3 reasons they want to leave.
The school systems are not really anything to brag about... that's about all I can say from what I've heard. We don't have kids so I don't know much about the childcare options around the island.
Also be prepared for a hurricane or tsunami. They are not super common but it’s definitely a possibility and I can’t even imagine what an actual strong storm would do out here or how long it would take for extra help to come. We’ve had two tsunami misses our two years here. You’ll want to make sure you have a supply of water, batteries, flashlights, non perishable food… Although you might want the flashlights and things for the power outages anyway!
The bright side is that it's much warmer here than Chicago! The weather is pretty temperate and the trade winds keep things nice and cool. If you love the ocean it's a great place to be. Aside from beachy things there's some food scenes downtown, growing art festivals, and shopping. There are a lot of cultural festivals and parades that go on year round and having the access to neighbor islands for things like the volcano park and reefs is pretty epic.
You also have closer access to a lot of countries out east which is great if you can travel! And we get a lot of tourists and exposure to tons of people from around the world and their cultures which is pretty awesome.
What hospital is she looking at and what areas are you checking out? That helps to narrow things down some or I might be able to recommend some. Do you plan on working while here? It's something to consider location wise and budget wise.
I'm pretty sure Quid will cover most of the nerd things. There are nerds out here though!
Edit: Looking back I realize this sounds somewhat negative. I’ve really enjoyed living here and wouldn’t mind staying a bit longer if we have to but I think there are a lot of things people don’t consider or think will be an issue when they want to relocate out here. I think it is an awesome place to spend some time if you can handle it!
It's not bad at all, but it's not anywhere the same as a city on the mainland either. There are amazing places to eat, nice bars to drink at, and usually a show/concert somewhere you can catch. My wife and I have really enjoyed ourselves but part of it takes a lot of effort in finding stuff to do down in Waikiki and finding out of the way stuff to look at/try. Honestly the only thing that really keeps us from deciding to stay here forever is the price.
The biggest set back is probably housing. It's ridiculously expensive for anything that would be considered acceptable on the mainland. Every bit as bad as NYC as far as I can tell. Very few places have central AC if any at all and can have horrible conditions as some of our friends have discovered. Utilities, electricity in particular, will also eat up a huge amount of your money even if you’re very careful. Nobody I know has been happy with the public schools but I can’t honestly tell if that’s just people complaining about public schools or not since we don’t have any kids of our own.
As far as nerd stuff goes there’s actually a decent amount of stuff. In fact, if you’re in Waikiki you’re not very far from The Ward Center which is a shopping area with a Dave and Busters, movie theater, and across the street a comic book/game store called Other Realms. There’s also apparently a board game store that just opened up there but it looked like they were already going out of business when we last looked in there. There are also two or three other game stores I’ve heard about on the island but haven’t been to. I’ve done laser tag a couple times at another shopping area. The internet's decent most of the time outside of the occasional 10 second disconnect.
In my own opinion if you're not looking to put down roots I would say go for it. It's a great experience and lets you live in a relatively different culture while still staying in the U.S. Keep in mind that it is very different, especially from cities like Chicago, and it'll be the one you're living with for the next few years.
My wife would be working at Queens. She's a doctor and they made an offer about 20% higher than anything back home so the cost of living difference is acceptable (although holy shit are milk, eggs and cereal expensive). Housing costs are painful by comparison but we are fortunate enough to have a lot of flexibility in budget for renting. Buying ain't happening anytime soon.
How tough would it be to find rentals that allow cats? We have 2, and a cursory look on Craigslist showed mostly no pets listings.
I'm very open to suggestions on where to live. An old college friend rents in Waikiki, but he suggested Kailua as an area coworkers live in with a reasonable commute. He also mentioned Hawaii Kai but that sounded more expensive? I don't know much of anything about neighborhoods and whatnot here, aside from everyone telling us not to look west of Honolulu.
I would like to find a job here to avoid going stir crazy, but my wife would be making enough that I can stay home and play house husband/Mr. Mom if I can't find a decent job. That's strangely emasculating though, and not really preferred.
As far as rentals that accept cats it shouldn't be a huge issue. I know lots of renters with pets. Do be ready to have a lot of paper work and possible quarantine for the cat though.
I don't know the actual name of the apartment buildings though I'm sure any realtor you talk to does, but there are two very tall high rises just before H-1 hits H-2 that everyone just calls the towers that most people seem to find accommodating. Pearl City and Ewa Beach might also work for your pet situation since there are more housing options there.
Does your wife have any idea of the general hours she'll be working?
Kailua is really nice but it a bit of a drive... and you're really isolated from anything major. And by anything major I mean "most things". There's shopping and all but it's a very small town an really sleepy. I'd say to keep things easy you might want to be in town somewhere. The one thing I've noticed about Kailua is that there's only 3 major roads to get you from one side to the other. There's H3 which is way past downtown and it would lead to H1 which is where 99% of the traffic snarls occur on weekdays. Likelike and Pali are your other options but I know at least one of them tends to close on a fairly regular basis at night. Google maps quotes most of them around 30ish minutes but with H1 traffic it'd be closer to an hour+.
I will say that it is GORGEOUS and if we had the money and I didn't have to go in town for work I would love to live there but I'd probably get very bored. You need to come in town to do almost anything fun.
Hawaii Kai is also beautiful and but one of the most expensive places on the island to live.
If you want to keep the traveling as painless as possible I'd recommend looking somewhere in town. There are a lot of nicer apartments heading up Ward Ave past H-1. (where it hits Prospect St). I've known quite a few people who found soemthing they liked around the Chinatown area as well.
If you don't mind the distance I'd say maybe rent a car an go out towards Kailua and such to get a feel for the distance (make sure you're cool with it) and check out what's there before you leave the island. There's also Ewa Beach/Pearl City which are heading more towards our outskirts of the city. Location wise it's nice because you can easily get into town but not have to deal with living smack in the hectic center.
The downside is that a lot of places on island don't seem to be very pet friendly.
Renting is really the best option. I would never recommend buying a place here unless you wanted to stay. I die a little inside every time we look at houses for make-believe and realize how much that would buy us in big cities back home.
ALSO, if you plan to keep your pets you really need to look into the quarantine rules here. They need shots and paperwork update within a certain amount time before their transport and they need bloowork done and could still face some hold time once they get over here.
My wife would be working 7am to 7pm usually, with a few shifts a month going overnight instead.
I drove through Kailua today, and it seemed nice but a bit quiet and remote. Beach was nice. Pali back to Queens took 25 minutes, which is typical from what I understand. Totally fine with us time wise. Delays making it more like 1.5 hrs would be terribad though.
Sleep now. Will look into Pearl City and Eva Beach tomorrow, thanks.
Finding a rental that allows cats is a whole other story. Almost entirely rules out condos and apartments, but my wife would probably rather rent a house or townhouse anyway.
personally before we had our son, i would have been all over that, especially if its only a ocuple of years.
Here's all the relevant info: http://hawaii.gov/hdoa/ai/aqs/aqsbrochure.pdf
We got everything done for 5 day or less and actually got to take our cat off the plane with us and straight home.
Looks like we'll be relocating in August o.O. We'll fly back out early July to find a place to live. On the ground in Chicago right now and it's 23 degrees. Definitely won't miss that.
I've been to Queens a fair bit, when my mom had surgery there. It's a really nice place to work, so congrats to your wife. Go to Maui and the big island - enjoy the sights while you can. It's super pretty.
I was born on Oahu but have been up in Massachusetts for most of my life. I've been trying to work out a plan to move back out there sometime around August myself, along with a couple of friends, it all comes down to the finances. I've had the pleasure of returning a few times since I was younger and still have some family out there and while there are certainly a number of drawbacks to the move as have been mentioned, there are certainly a lot of positives that can be pulled from the experience.
Best of luck to you and your wife and who knows, maybe we'll meet up out there sometime!