Lana‘i: Pineapple Festival, Part 2 |
One of the delights afforded the visitor to Hawai‘i is the opportunity to see the keikis (children) — they are so incredibly cute. This little girl was in her father's arms at their booth (Mama was selling jewelry). I did get their email address and sent them a copy.
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Dole Park has a playground for the kids — which they seemed to find more interesting than the food, crafts and entertainment.
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This little girl could not quite decide what she wanted to do — but she was so cute doing nothing, I had to take her picture.
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There were a number of booths set up for public service purposes. For example, the Lana`i Culture & Heritage Center was inviting folks to view old photos of Lana‘i, trying to identify people and places. There is keen appreciation for local history of the island.
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I made one major mistake that day. When we arrived on Lana‘i, it was several hours before the festival was scheduled to start — so we went to the Blue Ginger Cafe (a local favorite) for lunch. However, I should have waited for lunch because there were so many food vendors with such a wonderful variety of culinary delights.
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Teriyaki chicken or barbecued hot dogs anyone?
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The food vendors were so friendly and quite happy to allow me to take photographs of them and their food.
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Such a variety — can I have one of each?
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This was new to me — sweet black rice. A bit of research online revealed that "Biko biko" is Filipino sweet sticky rice made with sweet rice (of course), brown sugar, coconut milk and coconut cream. I still kick myself for eating lunch — I missed out on sampling all these delicacies.
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Now these look familiar. Toward the end of the day, they were handling out free samples — oh, so good.
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It took a moment to recognize what this guy was making — crêpes. I was told later that he worked at one of the two Four Seasons hotels on Lana‘i and makes these wonderful delicacies professionally.
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In addition to the food booths, they had a cooking competition — not unlike some of the cooking shows on cable. The MC kept up the banter but I could tell the judges were greatly looking forward to sampling the results — just check the grin on the guy in the gray t-shirt!
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Funny but the kids do not really care about all the fancy food — just give them some cotton candy and they are happy.
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To be continued...
Life is good.