Hawaii Facts

In Hawaiian culture, wearing a flower behind the right ear traditionally signals that a person is single and available, while wearing it behind the left ear indicates they are taken.

The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters.

Honolulu is the only place in the United States that has a royal palace.

Honolulu is the only place in the United States that has a royal palace!

At age 4, Bruno Mars was nicknamed 'Little Elvis' and became one of the world's youngest Elvis Presley impersonators, performing in his family's show in Honolulu.

Gordon Ramsay finished the 2013 Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. The world's angriest chef swam 2.4 miles in the open ocean, biked 112 miles, then ran a full marathon, all in one day. He crossed the finish line in 14 hours and 4 minutes. And it was no stunt. He had already run 10 London Marathons in a row.

A young humpback whale got tangled in more than 800 feet of coaxial cable off Maui in 2017. It was something rescuers had never seen before. They cut it free, not knowing if it would survive. Seven years later, a stranger's photo of a whale's tail turned up on a tracking website. Researchers matched it to the very same whale. It was alive and fully healed.

The US Army once bombed a volcano to save a town. In 1935, lava from Mauna Loa crept toward Hilo's water supply, and Army biplanes dropped twenty 600-pound bombs on the flow. The eruption ended within a week, though geologists doubt the bombs did it. One squadron on the raid already had a patch of bombs falling on a volcano, approved four years earlier. Its B-52 crews still wear it.