Day 303, Year 1: Fiafia Night at Sadie Thompson’s
Date: Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Weather: Partly Sunny and Calm
Location: Pago Pago Harbor, Tutuila Island, American Samoa
The neatest thing happened today. We were sitting in the cockpit. Mark was on his computer and I was faithfully doing my leg lift exercises when the computer “rang”. Mark had Skype up and running on the computer, so we knew someone was trying to call us. When Mark looked at the screen, he saw it was our friends Ron and Suzie back in Maryland. They have Skype on their computer and saw that we were online and called. I still find this amazing that at no cost you can talk to someone half way around the world and it really sounds just like you are next door. If you don’t have Skype on your computer, you should get it. It costs nothing to download. You do have to have a headset with a microphone. With that you can call computer to computer at absolutely no cost. Normally there is a very nominal cost for calling someone’s normal telephone if they don’t have Skype, but Ron told us that right now there is a special promotion and even that is free. Maybe that explains why we have used less than $3 of the $10 that we paid back in Panama when we first connected. If this keeps working for us, we’ll probably be calling everyone we know in the next couple of weeks. Be forewarned.
I spent my morning vacuuming the floors and walls in the boat. With my leg, this took about an hour and a half. In that time, Mark went to town, rode the bus out to the hospital to inquire about renting a wheel chair (unsuccessful), and returned. I had barely finished vacuuming when he got here. I’ve promised myself to tackle one job each day. It is slow going, but I can get things done.
Tonight we attended a Fiafia (festivity) Night at Sadie Thompson’s Restaurant. The food was fantastic, some American, some traditional Samoan, and the entertainment was very good. This was our first glimpse of singing and dancing here in American Samoa and it was very different from what we have been seeing in French Polynesia and in Rarotonga. Most of the dancing was done by a single young woman dressed in a pulatasi. This literally means “two dresses”. When the missionaries first arrived here, young woman wore only a lava lava (material wrapped as a skirt-no top). The missionaries gave them dresses to wear and they just put these on over the lava lava. Today’s pulatasis continue the tradition but are quite sophisticated-long skirts with a fitted top that comes down to the upper thigh. Anyway, the dancer moves slowly and beautifully in the long dress, telling a story with her hands and with the way she moves her feet. There were also two young women who performed a Tahiti style “hip shaking” dance and a beautiful dance from the Rarotonga.
Then came the fire dancers. Three young brothers, the youngest 13 and the oldest about 17, did some unbelievable maneuvers with batons with fire on each end. It was beautiful and very well done. They just returned from Honolulu where they won first place in the competition there. These are the first fire dancers we have seen and it was very exciting. At the end of the performance, all of the dancers came out and they pulled a young man from the audience to participate with them. The young man was Eddie from the boat New Horizons which is anchored just in front of us. He is from Germany and took a one-year leave of absence to crew on the boat with the captain, Wolfgang. Their boat is out of the US, but Wolfgang is originally from Germany. They met on the internet and now Eddie is nearing the end of his year and will be headed back to Germany to his job as an engineer in January. But tonight he was a star. He did a great job of following the male lead and dancing with the young woman. It was great fun.
Tomorrow is work on the boat day. We have stainless to be polished, oil to be changed, fuel and oil filters to replace, and on and on. Guess I had better get some rest so we can get started bright and early in the morning.
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| 060816 Day 303 American Samoa–Fiafia Night at Sadie Thompson's |
