more Pacific Arts Festival

As a disclaimer, I know I'm going to go into way too much detail on the Arts Festival for most of you, but it was incredibly cool and something I doubt I'll get to experience again so this is partly for me and partly for family, who actually do care what we did at every moment of the day.

When we showed up to the first official day of the festival, some of the groups from Papau New Guinea were out in full traditional dress - koteka included.

We watched the dancers from Tahiti and Everett got pulled up on stage.

Oh, and Everett is wearing an ie faitaga (ie for short) in this picture. It's basically a formal lava lava, with pockets and a waistband. Clif wears ies to work nearly every day and both the boys have a bunch of them. As part of their school uniform the kids can wear shorts or ies. Everett wears his more often than Simon, probably about once a week.

We watched performances by some of the Papau New Guinea groups. Papau New Guinea is so big with so many different cultural groups that I had a hard time keeping track of names of the different groups.

Ruth and the kids got to hang out a bit longer after I went back to work. I was jealous that they got to see the pan pipers from the Solomon Islands perform again.

And Fiji. Little did I know that we'd end up seeing some groups over and over and others not at all. The Festival's Program wasn't always accurate, but I can't complain. It was an amazing thing to experience.

In the evening, we went to see some performances at the stadium. New Caledonia was incredible. I love the Maori (New Zealand) group. The women were amazing with their poi. It doesn't sound very impressive since it's just a ball on the end of a string that they swung around as they danced, but it was really cool. And, of course, I'll never get tired of seeing the haka!