The Maori experience (and some wood chopping...)

Yesterday we went to see some Maori performance by Mitai family. If I got it right, the Mitai family is just a local tribe that owns a piece of land here in Rotorua on a beautiful hill with a natural stream and they give daily performances of the Maori people: dances, songs, rituals and of course there's food... I've seen this before on the TV, but seeing it in person was a bit different, maybe because it was so up close. Anyways, it was really cool and I would definitely recommend this. Most of the crowd were tourists from all over the places, I think there were 18 countries presented or more. Thinking about it now, unfortunately, Uzbekistan was excluded from the count because I didn't raise my hand and didn't say "paki-paki (aplauses in Maori) for Uzbekistan" :). Lots of Europeans, as you would think, and a few locals as well...


Greeting Maori way. You rub your noses twice and open your eyes as wide as possible. It was hard to do for me, rubbing noses part would've been good, but opening my eyes wide could be somewhat problematic, considering my Korean eyes... haha~





This is the food that we ate later. It basically smoked over very hot stones in what is called "hang-i" (not sure about the spelling). What you see is chicken in one corner, lamo in the other, sweet potatoes and just potatoes with some stuffing in those bags. Meat was really tender and juicy with that slight smell of smoke, which only made it better... It was so good~~


The water in this stream is so clear that it's hard to believe that this is natural... And with all that vegetation around makes you speechless...

The warriors (part of performance) came up the stream by canoe. And the next photo is where this stream begins. You can see there a cloud of sand on the floor where the water springs out from the underground. Simply amazing..










The performance itself. The dance of warriors and a couple of girls chatting before it all started.








We all agreed that this guy was the best looking one...









You have to look as scary as you can because it was the war dance. My guessing would be that you would have to scare the enemies or something like that. You're supposed to show your eye-whites, because it's apparently scary... :)













Some of the face expressions...

And... not exactly the Maori experience, but I helped Robin to chop some wood for winter. It's not as easy as you'd think. My back kind of started hurting after about 10 minutes, but you get used to it. Also, looking at the pictures, make me think to work more on my posture when I do this next time ^^. All that ass sticking out doesn't look good, huh? Same for the face expression on the second picture. It actually was kind of fun, since I'm hardly getting any exercise these day, chopping wood is quite good. I kind of enjoy physical labor now.. haha~ And note that piece of wood on the second picture that kind of covering my left foot, that's the piece in air, flying off the big one as I chopped it off. haha~ As you can see I'm immensly proud of it... haha~