Oh Whatta Day!

We had a few stops we wanted to make on our way to the Polynesian Cultural Center besides the Dole Plantation and Givanni's. BYU Hawaii was one of them.

We showed the kids around the school a little and headed for the bookstore

The kids were all anxious to purchase some BYU Hawaii gear

Jeff's cousin Kim met up with us over here for a bit.  She actually lives right next to the temple and her son Jaron works at the PCC.  They got us the sweetest deal on our admission and luau tickets.  We couldn't have been more grateful!

PCC is beautiful and such a fun place, but it was really hard trying to explain to the kids what we'd be doing there.

Because of all our little detours we only had time to visit 3 of the villages.

Samoa was our first stop and the guy doing the presentation there was so funny and I was grateful.  Until then they were kind of looking at the whole experience like we were spending the day at school rather than at the beach.  Besides, they were all way to crispy to be spending any time at the beach.

One of the funnier parts of the program was when the tree climbers were teasingly posing for the tree climbers calendar and showing us the poses for each month.  This one was for April.

I loved watching the kids all have so much fun together in between each of the programs.   They were all thoroughly enjoying each other.

 After we went to the village that encompassed New Zealand, Garrett and Drew Skinner made an attempt to learn the poms.

There were a few casualties in the attempt.  Some more painful than others...

We tried to show our warrior faces we had learned from New Zealand.  Mark got the crazy eyes down perfectly!  

 I'm pretty sure the Bohn family failed in this attempt.

Last we went to Tonga.  We learned a few dance moves here and then they took up some volunteers for the drums.

This was one of the funniest things any of us have seen!  

 One of the volunteers was an Asian guy from Arizona.  The chief tried and tried to get him to finish off the pattern that starts off with dum-dum-da-dum-dum, and then should be answered back dum-dum, but the guy just couldn't get it.  The audience was cracking up.  

Then the guy in the orange shirt came up.  He was from Korea.

The chief asked him if he was ready and instead of answering he yelled into the mike are you ready?!

 So then the chief asks him how do you say, "are you ready?" in Korean, but the guy totally didin't understand and just yelled into the mic, "Are you ready in Korea?!" We were laughing so hard, but when the chief asked it three more times trying to emphasize different words to get his question across, the Korean guy just yelled louder with more vigor "Are you ready in Korea?"The entire audience was dying laughing.  Since then when it's time to go anywhere, we have all just asked, "Are you ready in Korea?"  

We were all ready in Korea when it was time to go to the luau.  

 When we were done with dinner and the crowd had thinned out, the kids got up and practiced their hula moves on the stage.  

 We were thrilled to realize we had an hour before the big show started that night so we drove over to the temple to walk around

 Garrett says of all the temples he's seen he thinks this one is the most beautiful.  

 It definitely was a sight to behold on this clear night, and the landscaping around it was awesome!

 We had a sweet sister missionary walk around with our group and tell about the temple and answer the kids questions.

 We got back just in time to enjoy the show.  It was pretty awesome.  As usual, we were all fascinated by the way those women can wiggle their hips like nobody's business and of course the fire dancers.  The speed they had and the skill was more than I had ever seen.  Truly amazing!

We had spent the day doing so many different things that on the way back home Garrett was telling me he couldn't even remember what we had done that morning!  It was a busy fun filled day!