More Orientation BLOG

---

I forgot in the first blog to talk about the Maori Village that we went to. It was such a neat thing that we did. We started in town in Rotorua and got on these buses, our bus driver taught us some Maori words and we started our journey to the Tamaki Village. We stopped at this place in town that gave us a brief history on the Maori people and after we walked through that and saw a couple of days we got back on the bus. While we were on the bus we had to nominate a chief. Now the chief had to be a male, and he would be the one to represent our tribe once we would get to the village. Dave was our chief, and he was a mighty good chief.

Once we got to the village we all stood around while we waited for the first ceremony to start. The three chiefs from the three different "tribes"(buses) haha stood at the front as the Maori warriors came out one at a time. The jumped around and made crazy intense scary faces in attempt to scare off the chiefs. After the three warriors did their thing one of them set down a fern leaf as a peace offering. A chief from some other tribe (not ours) picked it up and we proceeded through to the village. It was really neat they had this mock village set up where they had people at each place that were dressed up in traditional Maori dress. They would explain different aspects of Maori life and such. It was really neat.

After that we proceeded to a different room where we sat down and watched some traditional dances and such. It was fun and interesting. Then we finally moved on to the dinner portion. They cook the food kind of like they would for a luau, in the ground over hot stones and steamed. It was yummy food, we had fish chicken and lamb and lots of other stuff. We had Kumara, which is the Maori sweet potato! Yum, so after dinner 5 of the men at the dinner closed it out with doing the haka?(SP) for us. It is an intense warrior dance used to scare off enemies. The All Blacks rugby team does it before every game I guess.

After all of that fun it was time to head back to good ol' Kiwi Paka and resume the activities of a night spent in the Kiwi Paka. HAHA that place was sure fun and interesting. But anyways I just wanted to add on this little part about orientation that I left out, because it was fun and super important!

---