Polynesian Cultural Center

One of Janae's favorite parts of our trip to Hawaii was visiting the Polynesian Cultural Center. She liked it so much, we ended up going twice. We missed a few villages on our first visit, and Janae was more than happy to go back and re-live some of the "memories" from the first day.

We enjoyed learning some of the history of the Polynesian islands and seeing some of the great displays/demonstrations that they have there. This double-hulled canoe is similar to those that the earliest Polynesians may have used, and some students and BYU-Hawaii learn how to sail it as part of a class. Not bad homework . . . The cultural demonstrations for each of the different islands were very interesting. It was fun to try our hand at a few things. Janae got adventurous with a Fijian tatoo . . .

And Josh got roped into some adventurous Tahitian dancing . . .
The word "volunteer" only loosely describes his decision to dance, but he didn't do too bad . . .

After a full day of exploring the villages, we headed over to the luau for more dancing and some delicious food. Janae has a post about the luau here, and more about the other great food we ate in Hawaii here. After dinner we watched another show with more dancing. We thought we had seen it all by this point, but this show definitely took things up a notch with more dancers and some pretty amazing fire dances.

The Cultural Center was definitely more relaxed than some of our other activities in Hawaii, but we thought it was great.