Culture clash, part 2

Possibly the high point for unintentional comedy in Vanuatu came on our last night. Everyone at the meeting had been invited for dinner at a restaurant right on the ocean about 20 minutes outside of town. When it came time to go back to the hotel, a driver pulled up in a big van--not a suburban minivan, but one of those big vans that everyone had back in the 1970s (you know, with faux wood paneling on the outside, only instead of faux wood paneling, this one had "SHARK" painted on the side). There were over a dozen of us crammed in, representing places like Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, etc. (We blended right in, as you can probably imagine.) As we started the long drive down a bumpy dirt road, the driver turned on a bright blue neon light on the ceiling inside the van to give it a nice disco ambience to go along with the blaring tropical music. All of a sudden the next song came on at full volume and it was about the last thing you would expect to hear on a full-moon night in a neon-lit van full of Pacific Islanders on a dirt road in Vanuatu: "Stand By Your Man" by Tammy Wynette. This was followed in short order by Freddy Fender's "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights". That's the kind of thing I couldn't invent if I tried...

(We have a couple of hours to kill in the Singapore Airport while waiting for our next flight, and they conveniently have free internet access...)