On my recent photographic expedition out into the Baiyer District of the Highlands I learnt how the women make the "bush rope" from which they weave the fibre bilums. Its an astonishingly time consuming and painstaking process which I will describe fully on the website. Basically it involves collecting the fibrous part of a particular tree branch (the layer just below the bark) teasing it apart into fine strands of fibre and rolling these strands together to form the string and using different plants and roots as natural dye. On close examination the finished string looks as if it came out of a machine its so uniform and neat - all done by hand.
I also learnt that short speeches are regarded as rude and off hand! It is a sign of respect to talk at length and the welcome speeches from the villages senior women could last for twenty minutes. Not everybody listens to every word, the village would chat quietly during the speech but apparently that is okay. Its not the quality but rather the length of the speech that matters. It would be incredibly rude to speak for just a couple of minutes, a sign of great disrepect. My tok pisin does not enable me to sustain that length of speech so I spoke in English and one of my colleagues translated - and, I suspect that in order to save me from any embarrassment, he added an extra 5 minutes on my behalf!
In the UK on entering or leaving a gathering of fourty or so people we would probably make a general acknowledgement/greeting to the whole group. Not here. Individual handshakes and a few words to each person are considered polite and proper. Not short handshakes either! taking your hand away too soon is rude and quite often you will be holding hands for thirty seconds or a minute (try it - its a long time for a handshake). Feels strange to me of course but its really important not to appear stand offish or to disregard local traditions and etiquette - nobody likes a rude guest!
Watch out when I get home! a brief encounter could last a lot longer than you bargained for.
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