Evan wake-up tracker – 5:45 – I think it’s safe to to say i’m adjusted to Hawaiian time now – tracking complete.
We were all worn out from the last few days full of activities, so it was nice to have a a free morning for once to catch back up on the Zzz’s. I slept in fairly late by my standards, and the kids slept in for several hours after that. I started the coffee and Noelle mixed it together (our usual arrangement) and we had coffee in bed.
It was raining a bit that morning and when I looked up, I saw the most vivid rainbow I had ever seen (technically a double rainbow) that definitely deserved a winged unicorn in the sky to accompany it. Hawaii has been living up to it’s title as the rainbow state. I made Victoria run outside to look for the pot of gold and take a picture.
Victoria and Noelle decided to cook up the eggs we were given for breakfast that morning. We only had 4, so Victoria snuck out to see if we could grab a couple more. She said two big chickens were sitting on the only two out there and didn’t want to give them up, so they scrambled what they had – fresh eggs were very tasty.
After breakfast, Victoria spent a little more time out with the chickens, especially her favorite that she named “Toe Biter” since it would nibble her toes a bit looking for something to eat. It must not have any sense of smell.
Once we started to get past mid-morning, we all started getting ready and put on our fancy clothes (by Hawaiian vacation standards) for the main attraction today – the Polynesian Cultural Center. For those that don’t know, it’s is a very popular entertainment / luau dinner thing on the North Shore of Oahu. I bought my tickets for it in early February as it regularly sells out. They have several packages that you can choose from, but we bought the the “aliʻi lūʻau package” that includes a guided group tour through the 6 “islands”, the luau buffet with life entertainment, and their broadway-like show after dinner called “HA: Breath of Life”. Most people recommend it as something you should do, and I read quite a bit about it, but really had no idea what to expect.
We left the house to try to time it so we got right there before their opening at 12:30pm. We parked in a massive parking lot and walked up to the entrance where there was a ton of ruckus – singing / dancing, getting you pumped up for the day. Right at 12:30, they opened the gates and routed us over to the area for our package where we met our guide for the day – George. He was a very nice, kind of goofy guy from the Philippines that had been working there for a month. It seemed like almost all the workers there were attending the Oahu campus of Brigham Young University (BYU). The whole place had a very strong affiliation with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (turns out it was owned by the church). Think they have some kind of deal where if you agree to work at the PCC, then can also receive an education (scholarship?) to BYU, so kind of a win/win for both sides.
Anyway, George was there to lead us around on a tour of the 6 islands. There are 6 Polynesian islands represented in the PCC, each with a few different small activities that you can participate in, and one large show that ran once an hour to teach you some things about the island. I was glad to have a guide, as trying to plan it all out would have been difficult.
The first island he brought us to was Aotearoa, or as you English speaking folks know it – New Zealand. New Zealand had a few activities you could try – we did a stick game that was taught to children to teach them agility where you’d try to throw / catch sticks to each other simultaneously. If you mess up, you can end up taking a stick to the knuckle or forehead. Victoria and Lydia played with each other and picked it up pretty quickly. Lydia ended up with the most bruises between them.
Next, we went inside for the cultural presentation for New Zealand. I was intrigued the entire time. They started it with out a welcome song in the native tongue, described some of the details of the house we were in that had carvings that were used to track the family tree of the village, and went through some fairly impressive dances, displays of skill with little balls as percussion instruments, and did their own version of toss the stick game. The guys dropped the sticks a couple times when they ramped up the difficulty – probably should have gotten Victoria up there to help.
After that, we went over to the “Missionary” area where they had Ukulele lessons given by a nice lady. We were promised at the beginning that we were going to be masters of the ukulele by the end. The ukulele seems like it was a fairly simple instrument to learn the basics on – you change your fingers at the top to different wires, and then you just strum all 4 of the cords at once to create the note you’re shooting for (or at least that was my interpretation of it. There were a couple of the notes where you just needed your finger on one string, and a one where you needed to have 3 fingers on 3 different strings at once that I had a horrible time trying to do in time with the song (My Little Sunshine). For the final song, if you were still struggling (like I was), she gave you the option of just playing the same easy note for everything and sing louder to make up for it. I think you’ll all agree from the video that we left as true masters of the ukulele.
Next up was the island of Samoa, one of the number one recruiting places for the military and supplier of many of the top NFL players. The narrator – Kap – was hilarious as he went through the lesson on the culture of Samoa – think I literally was laughing the whole time. They had several interesting demonstrations, like how to make fire by rubbing a stick into special types of fibers, how to open and peel a coconut with a stick and a rock, and a war dance where they slapped the hell out of their body. Kap said it was also used to eliminate mosquitoes. Noelle was very impressed by the six-pack abs of many of the younger Samoans, as well as the fact that in their culture, the men are the ones who do all the cooking.
After the cultural presentation, we walked outside to see a demonstration of how to climb a palm tree, which six-pack guy did in 5 seconds. I was going to volunteer to try next, but they said they were worried about what that might do to the palm tree.
After that, George took us onto a little canoe where a guide from Japan rowed us around for a quick tour of some the islands and some of the fruit trees that grow there. He told us that we shouldn’t worry about the reliability of the Japanese motor powering the vehicle. You can tell by the fans that it was getting a little warm at that point.
Our next island was the island of Tahiti – aka French Polynesia. For their cultural presentation, they started with a good drum band on ancient wooden drums / logs that they hit, then asked for kid volunteers to show off some examples of arts/carts that the Tahitian people were known to create. Lydia and Victoria modeled purses on the cat walk the crowd and received several ooo’s and aaa’s. As a rewards for their hard work, they received crowns woven from tufts of grass – good job girls – that’s capitalism!
The highlight of the presentation was the next part where they asked the women and men separately to do traditional Tahitian dances. The dance for the girls required quite a bit of vertical hip shaking that must be continued when walking side to side or spinning. I think the Hodgson girls may have dysfunctional hips that don’t easily move in that direction, but they tried to shake it a little anyway.
The men’s version of Tahitian dance is more about the knees than the hits. You have to shake your knees together at rapid speed. I didn’t know this from my history, but in this version they also incorporated the macarena, as well as the funky chicken in their reproduction of this dance. As you can see, I have no problem at all displaying manly elegance and grace as I executed the perfect rendition of the Tahitian love dance.
After that display, I was a bit worried about being pounced on by the many woman I was surrounded by, so we quickly left out of there, watched a quick presentation on how they made coconut bread in an underground oven, and walked over to the tattoo station to get tribal tattoos via ink template wrap. Lydia and I got navigator tattoos and Victoria got a queen tattoo. Noelle didn’t get one because she didn’t want to get ink all over her white dress.
Next stop was the island of Fiji, which sits 180 degrees opposite to the line of the prime meridian, and is also used for the International Date Line. There’s a place there where you can jump back and forth between today and yesterday. The Fiji music presentation used a big piece of bamboo that you would bang onto the ground on beat to create music. I accidentally slammed mine onto my big toe that was exposed and made a different kind of musical noise.
The last island we visited was Tonga. They are known for being loud, with lots of passionate yelling and loud drum beating. Their presentation was kind of a gameshow they did with drums where they brought 3 guys up, dressed them in a colorful dress ,and had them play the drums for a bit. Instead of following the directions for what he was supposed to play, one of the volunteers did “who let the dogs out” rap/drum version instead. – pretty funny, kind of weird.
The only island we didn’t have time to see was Hawaii, which is fine because we’ve got 7 more days to experience it. At this point, I hadn’t had anything to eat besides the eggs this morning and one small sample of coconut bread, so I’m starving – time to eat at the luau! And no luau can begin without being properly lei’d by a native with a six-pack with a professional picture taken – a picture Noelle felt like we needed to pay for to commemorate the event:
They sat us at our table, and immediately brought out some wonderful alcohol free (thanks Mormons…) pina coladas in pineapples. Those definitely hit the spot. There was live music while we waited, and they went through a welcome presentation for us, including pulling out 2 roasted pigs from an underground fire and paraded the pig out in front of the hungry masses. Lydia didn’t like seeing the pig in the pre-chopped fully piggy form. He looked delicious to me – bring Porky over to our table please boys!
Shortly after the presentation of the pig, the feast commenced. We all lined up at the buffet and started filling our plates. I tried for the Guinness record of having one of everything on a single plate. I was close, but had to skip fruits as stuff was falling off the plate by that point. Food was all delicious – especially the meat main course. I went back for seconds, and later deserts and very quickly got to a very uncomfortable state of overly full.
As you’re eating, they did several rounds of hula songs, including a small show about the former ruling queen of Hawaii that was forced to abdicate by businessmen when the U.S. annexed Hawaii in the 1800’s. It was very laid-back, conservative hula dancing – like what I’d expect from a hula show from the 60’s/70’s – church hula you could say. They called all the kids up late in the show and had them do a sit down hula show for all the parents.
I was a little relieved when they ended the announced the end of the luau so I was no longer tempted to see if I could fit a round of 3rds in and we left with about an hour to kill before the show started. We fed some of the monster fish in the waters and watched a quick movie showing some of the natural beauty of Hawaii in the theater, then made our way over to the seating for the Ha: Breath of Life show.
You weren’t allowed to take pictures or record the show as it was going on. It was very good – following the story of a boy born in Hawaii and his journey through life / love going through each of the Polynesian islands. The highlight came up where they had a bunch of impressed majorette people with fire batons that they whirled around with skill. The show went from 7:30 – ~9:30. By the end, the sugar-rush from dinner was wearing off, and you could tell everyone in there was exhausted. The row in front of us had a family that had 6-7 kids in it and I think 5 of those kids was passed out cold during the fire show.
The show ended with thunderous applause, and we all ran out of there as fast we could (which was pretty slow with the amount of people) and made the 30 minute drive home. It was a great day – the whole event felt a bit like disney world in the presentation and beauty of the campus. It was definitely exhausting though – I don’t even remember laying down in bed before I fell asleep, dreaming of dancing the macarena in Tahiti.