Laie

Big day today. Probably the biggest day we'll have on this trip. I have so much I want to talk about, but I'm so tired and we have an early day tomorrow. I'm going to be brief, and if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, or send me an email.

Today we journeyed up the east coast of Hawaii to Laie, home of the Laie Temple, BYU-Hawaii, and the Polynesian Cultural Center. Turns out, it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere. I can't get a map to load, so if you'll refer to a map of Oahu, we went east on H3, then up the coast to Laie on Kamehameha Highway.

It is an absolutely beautiful drive. I'm not going to post pictures of the mountains, except this one:

And I won't post any pictures of the ocean, except this one:

We were really glad we had the convertible today, let me tell you!

Our first stop when we got there, was to visit the temple. We had planned on doing a session this morning, but that was before we heard (from some people we ran into on the beach) that it is closed until next summer for renovations. According to the sister missionary who gave us a tour, they've gutted the entire building. The only thing left standing are the oxen from the baptismal font.

Anyway, we had a nice little tour of the grounds and got to learn some history of the church in Hawaii and Polynesia in general.

After the temple, we hopped over to BYU-Hawaii, my dad's old stomping grounds (back when it was the Church College of Hawaii). This is a picture of the front of the main building. For some reason it was locked and we couldn't get in to see the murals that are inside. I took some pictures of them through the glass, but they didn't turn out very well, so I'm not posting them. The sign on the door said it was closed for the devotional, but we were there about a half hour after the devotional ended and it was still closed. We could see that they had some displays with some historical stuff on the islands, but since we couldn't get in, we couldn't see.

We stopped in the university bookstore to pick up a Hawaiian shirt for John. He just needed to look more touristy. We then headed over to the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC), which is adjacent to the school. As we were leaving the bookstore building, we could hear fun things going on at the center. Here we are on our canoe ride.

We were part of a tour group of four couples. The three other couples were all from the Los Angeles area. Two of them were actually there together, and are also staying across the street from our resort, and we might run into them at the lagoon, since they're planning to do some snorkeling there this week.

The PCC has replicated villages from Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Tonga. We visited each village briefly, and saw the shows in the Tongan village and the Samoan village and the Aotearoa village (that's the Maori culture). In the Tonga village, they had a drum show, and John was picked to be the guest drummer. The Drum Master (seen in the colorful skirt) was just hilarious. John was a super sport and just went along with whatever the guy had him do. He was the most popular out of the three volunteers and through the rest of the day random people came up to him and told him what a good job he did and that they enjoyed watching him.

Our tour group was our "Ohana", or family, for the day. This is Uncle Sam, our tour guide. He's from the beautiful island nation of Nebraska.

After our tour, we went to the luau for dinner. I tried all of the Hawaiian foods they had. They had the roast pork, poi, poi rolls, a chicken and rice noodle dish, raw marinated fish (my first time eating raw fish), a salmon/tomato salad and some Hawaiian beef jerky. It was all pretty tasty. At the luau, they recognized those with November birthdays, so John got to stand while every sang Happy Birthday. And then they invited couples who were celebrating an anniversary to come up to the stage and share a dance. So, we went! We had a couple in our ohana who were celebrating their 53rd anniversary, and the wife's birthday.

This is a not very good picture of the lead in the night show. I don't know his real name, but his character's name was Mana. We really enjoyed the show, especially the fire-knife dancers.

This is Kap, the star of the fire-knife dancers. He's from Samoa and he graduated from BYU-H a few years ago with a degree in art. He sells his art after the show. We bought one of his photographs. He did some kind of soft-focus thing on it and I think it looks like a painting. He signed it and posed for a picture. John gave him our address and invited him to come for dinner. He was so much fun to watch. He also did the coconut demonstration in the Samoan village, which was also a lot of fun.

Anyway, that's the very short version of a very long and very fun day. We had so much fun at the PCC, but didn't see near enough, so we're planning to go back, because with our tickets, they include three extra days readmission so you can go back and see the rest. We didn't get to the hula lessons, ukulele lessons, or any number of other things, including the IMAX show.

Good-night!