Maliu Mai

Maliu Mai has this fun pool that they built right along the shore as if it were a tide pool. The waves here are too rough to swim normally, but the pool provides enough shelter. Kids and adults had fun jumping in from the sides!

ASSA Swim Meet, #2

palm frond fun

As I alluded to in the PHS Arts Festival post, part of the fun of living out in the middle of the South Pacific is that our kids are exposed to things we hadn't even heard of. We came home the other day to find that our Filipino nanny had been weaving palm fronds with them. They made glasses and rice pods for hanging rice (puso).

Sailele

We hadn't been to Sailele in a while (previously blogged about in this post) so we decided to spend our Saturday there. It's a quiet village on the Northeast side of the island. When we go there, I can easily imagine what life would be like in a Samoan village a hundred years ago.

As we drove through, some of the villagers were sitting along the edge of the road pulling weeds and others were raking up leaves and other debris to burn. It's just a very idyllic setting. One of the older women was sitting in the water with some young kids. When we walked by the littlest started yelling, "palagi, palagi" and pointing at us while she tried (unsuccessfully) to get him to stop. The others just waved and smiled.

We had heard that there was good snorkeling near a rock by the beginning of the village. It wasn't a huge spot, but there were lots of different fish. I love longnose filefish - I can't really explain why. It's probably because when I first saw a pair of them it was so surprising. I had never seen a fish that shape before and the colors were so bright that it seemed unreal and cartoony. There were several pairs of them in the little pool in Sailele, along with a few juvenile emperor angelfish, Clif's favorite.

PHS 2008 Pacific Arts Festival

Last year when Clif and I would go to Everett's school programs and performances, we were surprised that they seemed to be essentially the same things that we had done in elementary school. Well, that's all changed since we moved here!

Friday we went to the Pacific Horizons School version of the Pacific Arts Festival. We saw Cook Island dances, Fijian dances, Maori dances, Tahitian dances, Hawaiian dances, and Samoan dances.

Everett and Simon have been busily practicing their dances over the past few weeks. Simon's class is nearly all boys so they did a Fijian warrior dance. He was very excited about it and practiced over and over at home.

Everett's class did a Samoan dance. His lava lava and tshirt have a fale and palm tree that the class printed on them. He wasn't as excited about his dance as Simon was, but the tshirt and laval lava have been a constant topic of conversation for weeks now.

I'm such a speed demon ;)

Clif (backseat driving): You don't have to be reckless and go thirty[mph].

So this probably needs some explanation. The speed limit here is 25 mph and most of the time there's some slowpoke who thinks that 25 is waaaay too fast so they go 15. And there are almost no areas where passing is allowed so you're just stuck. Apparently Clif's a little too used to it.

polynesian dance performance

I'm not necessarily known for my grace or coordination - if anything, I'm probably known more for my lack of grace and coordination. Dancing is not one of my strengths. And I'm not being modest, it's just not. There are things I do well and things I don't. Dancing falls into the latter category. In spite of that, I joined a Polynesian dance group, Tui Moana. It's amazing exercise (you use muscles you never knew you had!) and a lot of fun.

The group performed just a few months after I started dancing with them. I was supposed to perform too, but chickened out because the dance we were supposed to perform still hadn't been made up (errr, choreographed) two weeks before the performance. I was too new on the island to be comfortable with that level of unpreparedness.

Apparently I just needed a few more months on the island... Last Saturday I performed with the group. There were fifteen of us so this picture is just a portion of those who performed (just those who happened to be standing around when Clif was available to take the picture).


I knew I would be performing one of the dances we had learned earlier. We were learning another dance too, but it was never finished. Just a week before the performance the group decided to scrap the new dance and perform a dance that some of them had done before (affectionately known as the "yellow dress dance" because they originally wore a yellow dress when they first performed it). I wasn't sure if I could learn it in time, but managed to pull it off in a week -being conveniently situated in the back and middle of the group during the performance helped! And, just to keep you on your toes, the "yellow dress dance" was done in the green/red dresses and the yellow puletasi was worn during the Samoan number.



We performed at the Tradewinds Hotel at a fundraising event in order to send a different dance group to Hawaii for a dance competition (although as Clif cynically pointed out, if we had just given the group the amount we spent on costumes, they would probably have made more money). There were fifteen different dance numbers and our group did two of them. I love watching the other groups dance.


Everett is fascinated by Polynesian dancing so he was mesmerized all evening. He even volunteered to get up on stage while the emcee was stalling between numbers.


Simon... well, not so much:


In keeping with Samoan tradition, the final dance was a tauluga. The tauluga is a dance performed by a taupou at the end of important events. A taupou is the daughter of the matai (high chief) and usually a virgin. She is important as a symbol representing the purity and beauty of the girls/women of the village. During the tauluga, people throw money at the taupou, but throwing money isn't just reserved for the tauluga. Anyway, here are pictures of the tauluga; the one at this event was performed by Miss American Samoa. The crazy headdress she's wearing is called a tuwinna and it's my favorite part of the traditional clothes the taupous wear.