Curiosity

So Kasia and I were walking home and saw this guy with his shirt off making something. And we were like gosh a guy with his shirt off we should soo talk to him... haha ya right. We asked him what he was making and his father said that he was teaching him how to weave a basket.

He showed us his basket work, and then we asked him about the huge seeds on the ground, and He said they were cocconuts and then offered us one. He got a ladder (though he said normaly they don't use ladders to get them down)

And then he started cutting it open on this sharp pointy object they had put in the ground!

He is holding a green new coconut and the brown ones are on the ground next to him, Coconuts grow year round and are usable at both stages of there life. Ah'Choo said that in Tonga (were hes from) people used to do this as there only export. They would get paid by how much of the coconut pulp they could gather.

After he got the pit part of the coconut he took a mechetee and started hacking a whole in it so we could try the milk

Ah. Num-numbs (Ah... Sara do you still say that? :)
Gosh when he was climbing the latter and using the machetee I was worried he would cut something off or fall or something and it would be my fault for asking.

But Ah'Choo has been doing this since he was a boy. He opened a older one for us so we could try that milk, it is not as good.

This is Kasia trying to get at the accual meat of the cococnut

And this is the bag he gave us! What a sweet man! He said that if we went to the Polyniesan cultural center they would teach us all this stuff. I'm glad I got to hear it from him though, it made it that much more real.

Oh he also told us the story of how the coconut got its face. Aparently there was a beautiful girl who loved her pet eel. The eel grew very large and the villagers wanted to kill it because it was so big (maybe they were hungry who knows) And the girl was sad, but the eel said that when they killed him to take his head after it had been cut off and burry it in the ground and a plant would come up that would always remind her of him. She did and the coconut tree was born. So the whole that you can open is the eels mouth, so when you take a drink from the whole your starring into the eyes of her eel. Well more like kissing her eel. Honestly were do people come up with this stuff :) It was totally awesome!

And the bag is so fasionable too. So the moral of the story? Curiosity may have killed the cat, but Kasia and I got a basket (that now holds our dirty laundry) and a coconut cut (which now holds my keys and sticky notes) and an new friend.