Day 11: Shake those hips!

On Friday, we spent the whole day at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Laie (which is run by the LDS church.) Brian scored us some 40% off tickets since he was a BYU-H employee--yes! The place is HUGE with all these little "villages," each representing a Polynesian island (or group of islands, rather.) Each village has a show of some sort (ukelele and hula dancing at the Hawaii village, Tongan drummers at the Tongan village, etc.) and usually some sort of activity you can do or skill you can learn (like throwing spears, weaving little fish out of leaves, etc.) At the Tongan village, they asked for volunteers to come help them play the drums, and my brother-in-law Brian got picked. In the village of Fiji, they taught some dances and asked for people who had had a birthday that month to come up--which was me! So I stood up there and tried to sway my hips around and follow the dancers on the stage (there was a big group, though, so it wasn't too terribly embarrassing.) Kevin and I got "tattoos" at the Fiji village also. One of our favorites was Samoa, where they demonstrated how to start a fire with sticks, peel a coconut, and climb right up and pick the coconut off the tree!

We watched the river show or boat show or canoe show or whatever they called it, where each village had dancers on a big boat dancing around while they floated along the river. That was very cool--we especially liked the Mauri dancers with their mean faces and tongue-sticking-outing. (see my niece's Mauri face impersonation below to get a better idea.)

Then we had the luau, with LOTS of yummy food! Not that we needed another huge feast the day after Thanksgiving...They showed us the kalua pig after they unburied it and before they cut it up for eating. (Luckily, that did not ruin my appetite). The only thing I didn't really like much was the poi. That stuff is just plain weird. It doesn't taste bad exactly--just very bland with a VERY strange goopy texture. (My old roommate Alicia would have despised it, I know, for textural reasons.) Some people ordered smoothies for $7 extra, which came served in coconut shells and looked really impressive. I was too cheap to buy one, but I wished the whole rest of the trip that I could drink something out of a coconut shell, because that is just plain fun. Ah well.

The crowning event was the Horizons show, which is full of lots of singing and dancing from all the different islands again. But this time, they incorporated things like shooting burning spears from way above stage down onto stage and back. It was fantastic to watch. But the most amazing part was probably the way those Tahitian dancers can shake their hips--seriously, wow!