Coming of Age In Samoa

Moving that Line

2011-12-29T15:31:00.005-11:00

So it seems that there is no tomorrow in The Independent State of Samoa.™

Also, I guess that this means that every world map/globe is inaccurate once again.

UPDATE: Got this from our good friend, 93KHJ reporter Monica Miller, who was on the scene at the time of Samoa's experiment in time travel:

"Just returned from Apia town clock and still feeling euphoric. What with the sirens wailing, cars honking and people shouting in elation when the clock chimed at midnight. This lasted for a good half hour. There was noone around when we arrived at 11:30 pm then at 11:45 a small crowd started gathering. Within minutes there was a cue of cars flowing through the town clock roundabout. And then at midnight, there was non stop noise. So glad I was a front row spectator at this historic event."

Grand Samoan Adventure Grand Finale Part 4: The Edge of the Earth

2011-12-12T15:59:00.003-11:00

So after I got back on the ground, got over the edge to kiss it repeatedly with gratitude to be alive, and climbed into the cab, I decided to stop by Moso's footprint.

I can sum up everything about the footprint pretty darned quickly:

1. It's a formation in the lava rock vaguely in the shape of a right footprint.
2. The legend is that the giant Moso put his right foot down here, straddled several hundred miles of ocean, and then put his other foot down in Fiji, where there is a rock formation shaped like a left footprint.
3. This legend is the only redeeming thing about it.
4. The woman who happens to have the footprint in her front yard charges five Tala just to look at it. This is the worst deal in the South Pacific.
5. She needs to stop letting her kids run around the yard naked. Seriously.

So off we continued to the end of the world. I hopped back in the cab and we came up to the awesomely creepy remains of a church that had been blown apart by a hurricane many years earlier.

The driver asked if I wanted to stop and take a look at it, and I said something like "Sure, there's still plenty of time before we get to the sunset at the end of the world." And he said "Sunset? Okay!" and kept driving right past it toward the area where you can see the Last Sunset. His English wasn't that great, and I was too tired to explain, and plus it was raining and...yeah.

We arrived at Falealupo Beach Fales. After I determined that there was in fact someone actually here to set me up with a fale, I and I thanked, paid, and tipped the taxi driver and arranged for him to pick me up tomorrow morning. And he was off. Then I remembered that I wasn't quite at the very end of the world. I was more like a mile from it, not even quite at the end of the road. I tried not to let that bother me.

For anyone wondering what a fale is, it's one of these:

A traditional Samoan hut with no walls (though rolled up woven mats were hanging from every side). This particular one had a nice little mattress pad laying on a hardwood floor and even a tiny little bit of electricity (one bare lightbulb and I think one plug). It's all cooled by the sea breeze, since it's on the beach. The fale I was on was only about 30 feet from the water and had a nice view.

Hey, quit HOGGING the beach! Geddit? HAHAHAHA!

The main reason that I had picked this particular beach fale place was that it was at the End of the World. For those of you who can't remember details from the beginning of a blog story that I started almost a year ago, it's called that because this is the last settled place before the International Date Line. Thus it's claim to being the last place where the sun sets every day.

As I stared out over the water, it was bizarre to think that this was the edge of the world. That's it. No more, except water. The end. Fin. Well, unless you count that last mile or so that I could have gotten the taxi driver to take me to. But I had been too out of it from exhaustion at the time

Entirely due to my being a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book series, I packed a towel with me on this particular trip, almost as a joke. And now I had something to lie on top of in the sand. I put on my new lava-lava (that I had bought from someone selling them at the passenger waiting area for the ferry) and did just that, since it had stopped raining. Life was good. And dinner was to be included.

And then the sun came out. Life got even better.

I walked around, including a little ways into the water, and took some pictures. I've always been a really obsessive picture taker. As in taking dozens of pictures in a situation where anyone else would take just one or two. And I had a revelation, here at the End of the World. Why was I always taking so many pictures? Because I wanted to hold onto some of my favorite moments. To try and preserve them as fully as possible so I could go back to them whenever I wanted. But what I was really trying to do was to hold onto the past, to try and fight against the inevitable passage of time. And no one can ever do that. And maybe it's the same obsessive desire to get the absolute most out of life while I can that was bugging me about not seeing the very edge of the island.

Oddly, I've gone down to an almost-normal amount of picture-taking since then.

The Last Sunset came, and it was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that a couple showed up just to see it and left as soon as it was done. I took a billion pictures of that sunset. Dinner was served, and I took a picture of it, too.

Mostly to fuel discussion of what it was. Other than good. And why they served me coffee just before bed.

The Last Sunset went, and it was still beautiful. And darkness came, and that was okay. While brushing my teeth, I noticed that the pump for the water had stopped whrrrrr-ing and that the water pressure was really low. A quick chat with the owners revealed that the power was out for the whole village, that this was totally normal around here, and that it should be back on in about two hours. Eh, maybe I'll just go to bed.

The moon was beautiful, and bathed the whole beach in moonlight. The beachfale owners were having Sā, which was nice. Someone had gone around and distributed candles and matches to each fale, since the lights in them weren't working. I lit mine for as long as I needed it, pulled down my mosquito net, put out the candle, and fell asleep pretty quickly.

Can't see any fire hazard here, nopenopenope.

What a day I'd had. I'd seen black sand beaches, posed in front of the giant Taga Blowholes, traveled through the pouring rain, slipped across the rainforest canopy walkway, wasted money on Moso's Footprint, and seen the Last Sunset from this amazing Beachfale.

I slept well.

I'm back!

2011-09-28T11:03:00.003-11:00

So I'm back from working at the Summer Camp That I'm Not Allowed to Name. It was very exhausting but very rewarding. I also have a part-time film-related job coming down the pipe soon.

Until then, enjoy this 1930s travel reel by someone who really hated Fiji but really seemed to love Samoa.

Oh, and you could always click the button to view it in fullscreen if you don't like to watch your videos with the rightmost quarter-inch cut off. Or you could always just click here.

ADD-Infinitum

2011-06-11T11:37:00.002-11:00

Since I've been home, I've been doing a lot of things, mostly looking for work. But another big thing is learning about my own ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder.¹

I've known that I've had it since I was in 11th grade, but this past New Year's Day I happened to catch a documentary on it on PBS. It was fairly bizarre how closely it described me. I bought one of the books that they recommended, and it's been like my personal instruction manual. I don't think most people have it this easy when it comes to self-discovery.

But anyhow, one of the questions that has bugged me since just after I came home was: What will my next adventure be? Something in Hawaii? New York or LA? Juneau, Alaska which I'd presumably get through the family friend that works in the industry up there? Maybe even another overseas adventure. Will I ever have another adventure, or will I just settle into a nice job with a small production company in Charlotte or Greensboro and never look back?

Welp, now I have my answer. After more than six months at home, I'm about to start my next adventure: Teaching Video Arts to kids with ADD and other disorders at a summer camp in another state. Everyone who has been their loves it.

In some weird ways, it already sounds like the Rock. It has a very international staff, so once again I'm going to be surrounded by people from the United States, Australia, the UK, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada & Ireland. It's also out in (a very different definition of) the middle of nowhere.

As such, I'm doing a lot of the same things to prepare for this that I did just before I left for the island (or returned there, in the case of my trip home a year ago). I went to the dentist and the doctor while I had the chance. I'm renewing my car's registration while I'm here to do it. I'm getting new clothes, because it's easier to do that here than there.

Unfortunately, my time at camp won't really be bloggable. I'll be awfully busy and won't be around computers very often, and my own laptop will probably be in storage with the video equipment, away from where I'll be sleeping.

I was hoping to finish up writing about my time in Samoa (where I left off I was about four days from when I left), but it looks like I'll have to take a break for now. I hope to stick in some kind of random updates over the summer when I get the chance. There's at least one more commercial that I made that needs to be posted here, and there's a few more Samoa-related links that I'd like to post. I should be back in September. Think of this as a show in between seasons.

Except that this show has never taken a break for much more than about a month, and this one will take a way bigger one and then suddenly end. So maybe something more like LOST.

What I'll do after camp, I still don't know. I'd really like to go to Hollywood and work with several of my friends in the heart of my industry. And in just the last few days I've been talking with someone from a major cruise line. We'll know in the future. Until then, stay tuned!

¹What, you though all of these footnotes (and excessive parentheticals) were normal?

Grand Samoan Adventure Grand Finale Part 3: New Heights

2011-06-10T14:34:00.001-11:00

Welp, the taxi driver got his rainwater, put it in the engine, filled up his bottle again and we continued onward. Next stop was Falealupo Rainforest Preserve, a...get this...rainforest preserve (!) in the northeast corner of the island, rather close to the edge of the settled world.

From the 2003 version of the map that I had with me. Click if you need to see the vast majority of it for some reason.

The highlight of the preserve is a rainforest canopy walkway. It's a swinging metal bridge 40 meters (131 feet and some change, for those of you with good taste in measurements) above the ground. And it was still very wet and slippery that day. So of course, I had to try it.

The taxi driver elected to stay behind in the parking lot. I paid my $20T and followed the guide, who was about my age and spoke about 40% English, to ~~my doom~~ the metal tower that with the stairs that lead up to the bridge.

"Hey, uh, how high is this bridge?" I asked.

"Oh, very high." The guide responded casually.

"Um, has anyone ever fallen off of it?"

"Oh, yes." He replied casually.

"Really?! Did they die?"

"Yes." I couldn't tell if he understood me or was just answering everything in the affirmative because he didn't know what I was saying. But we were there now. I tried to tell myself that it was too late to chicken out now, and tried not think about how this would be a terrible place to die, and how far away the nearest hospital must be.

"We go up, then across then up, then up." said the guide, motioning an awful lot. I didn't understand. Were there two bridges? Was one much higher than the other? I pretended I understood, figuring that I wouldn't know what he just said if even he said it another dozen times.

I began my ascent. The metal tower at the beginning, constructed only about a year ago to replace a rotten banyan tree that previously held the steps leading up, was slippery but climbable. I held onto its one railing for dear life and tried not to look down.

Whoops.

We had reached to top, and now I was face-to-face with the bridge. It looked...incredibly safe. Giant nets on either side. No way you could fall off of that thing. I felt a lot safer.

The guide obviously felt very safe.

We posed for a bunch of pictures, then when we started walking across, I realized what kind of bridge I was walking on. The guide made me go first, which was totally not nervewracking or anything.

Ah yes, the classic "boards lying on top of ladders, suspended by cables."

It was wobbily but cool, as long as you watched your step and didn't have a foot go through one of those foot-sized gaps. I got to the other side without a problem, and the guide soon followed. It had actually been a lot of fun. We continued upward, this time up a long series of very steep wooden steps that wrapped around an enormous tree. We arrived at the top, and I do mean the top, to a view above the rainforest canopy.

It was a magnificent view, despite the cloudy weather. You could see miles of canopy in one direction, and the ocean in the other. And if you looked straight down, you could see how the canopy was so thick that the ground was barely even visible. I was glad to see that there wasn't a second bridge after all.

Check out how far above the bridge this platform was. If the bridge was 131.23 feet, and the platform was this much higher, then you should do the math if you just have to have an exact figure, because I don't.

In scientific circles, this is referred to as "really high up."

After a whole lot of pictures and laughing and carrying on, we headed back down. This time, we followed the steps around the tree all the way to the ground. And they were as steep and slippery as ever.

I was glad to be back on the ground. Very glad.

Grand Samoan Adventure Grand Finale Part 2: Water

2011-05-31T10:25:00.001-11:00

I woke up the next day, Sunday, feeling better. Today I was going to journey to the end of the world!

But first, I had to figure out how I was going to get there.

The woman that was running the hotel and her sister were nice enough to give me breakfast in their kitchen. We talked a lot about where I would go and how I would get there. I eventually decided to round the island in a clockwise direction, so that I could go to all the cool touristy things in the village of Fagamalo while they were open on Monday, seeing as everything Samoan is closed on Sunday. They were very helpful and came up with a plan for me to see most of the island.

And it was terrifying.

I don't remember a lot of it, but it involved, among other things, about 6 different bus transfers. Including one at about 5 AM Monday morning on the opposite end of the island and another that involved riding a bus for more than a full circuit for some reason. And they were totally serious. I guess if you've spent your entire life on the island you don't understand what its like to not know where anything is,¹ or how wandering around in a strange place in the dark hoping to find a bus stop before you miss the one bus of the day might seem like a bad idea.

Welp, somehow they convinced me to try this, and assured me that God would be with me. They had a point with that one. I'm fairly sure that my surviving two years on the Rock, and even getting the job there in the first place² are divine miracles of some sort. Revving up my adventurous spirit, I decided to give it a try. They generously gave me some mangoes and New Zealand-style biscuits and sent me on my way.

A few minutes in, I convinced the taxi driver, a relative of theirs who was taking me to the bus stop, to just escort me around the rest of the day for 100 Tala. We forged on, under a threatening sky, to the end of the world!

A really threatening sky.

First stop on my free tourist map was the Nuu Black Sand Beach. Believe it or not, the sand there is...black! I asked the taxi driver about it, assuming he'd know exactly where it was, and he drove past it without a clue as to where it was. We asked someone at the next house we found a couple of miles up the road where it was, and then drove back and found it.

Guess what color the sand was?

Answer: A mix between black and regular sand color. Lots of volcanic sand.

Welp, next up were the Alofaaga Blowholes, one of the top tourist attractions in the country. The driver knew exactly where these were- In the village of Taga, waaayyyy off the beaten path. He drove to the turnoff of the main road, then about a mile down a bumpy unpaved and ungraveled road with no one in sight. Then, in the middle of nowhere, there was a small fale where a man collected entry fees to see the blowholes. We paid him and kept going. It was about another mile down the path until we actually got there.

We arrived at the blowholes, which are a series of natural tunnels in lava rock next to the ocean. When waves crash through them, the water shoots out like a geyser. And it's awesome. The taxi driver filled up the water jug for his car's radiator while I looked around for things like coconuts to throw into the blowhole and watch shoot out.

And here's the big one in action:

Or maybe more like just barely in action, then not in action, and then totally in action.

And then while leaving, we realized that I had crossed a white line that no tourist was supposed to cross, for fear of them getting knocked over by the blowhole waves and maybe even washed out to sea. And the line was about as far back as I was when I took the above video. I seem to have crossed it while standing right next to the blowhole. Oh well.

Once back on the road, the driver insisted we stop at this one okay-looking overlook, which was really just an excuse to put more water in his car's sketchy radiator, which was close to overheating.

Eh, the east side of American Samoa has better.

We made it about another 20 miles before steam started rising up from under the hood. We pulled off and went to a house. The taxi driver, plenty dedicated to his work, grabbed his water jug, ran out into the pouring tropical rain, and asked the homeowner if he could have some water that was gushing from his overflowing rain catcher.

Pictured: Exactly what I just described.

I went back to wondering what I was doing.

(To be continued).

¹An Island Trope I never got into an entry- Directionless- If everyone you know has spent their entire life on a single island, they never need directions. Thus, you won't really know how to give directions when you meet someone from a different place.
²A pretty interesting story that I'm surprised I never blogged about.

Grand Samoan Adventure Grand Finale Part 1: Arrival

2011-05-05T14:11:00.002-11:00

There are currently two airlines that fly from PPG airport to The Independent State of Samoa™, Polynesian Airlines and Inter-Island Air. Polynesian lands at the recently-restored old airport near Apia, right in the middle of the island of Upolu. The ferry wharf to Savai'i would be a 30-minute taxi ride away. Inter-Island lands way down at the much nicer airport that's right next to where the ferry to Savai'i leaves from. Not a hard decision who I should be flying with.

Or at least, it shouldn't have been.

Inter-Island doesn't have online booking. Fair enough, I called the phone number on their website and was told that the Saturday that I wanted to fly was fine, but that I'd have to come in to their office in person and bring my passport to actually book the flight. Fine, I'm used to this sort of thing by now. So I tell my boss I'm going to be in late the next morning, drive over to their office at the airport, wait in line for a good 30 minutes to learn-

They're not flying on Saturdays. That's the day they do maintenance.

I walk over to Polynesian's office, do a lot of panicked running around that I can't recall the reason for, and then book my flight with them. A few hours later I realize that I've booked a less-than-ideal itinerary and have them change it (they did this for free, which is good enough customer service that it almost makes up for the last time that I flew with them). Miraculously, I was still able to get another flight, despite all of the people headed to Apia for the Jazz and Blues Festival.

A few days later, its time to leave. I'm all packed and ready for this trip, and mostly packed for the final trip home that will be only two days after I return. I've left a good old-fashioned "Let's go exploring!' as my Facebook status, setting the tone. I have my good friend John Raynar drop me off at the airport, where I see:

It says "Inter-Island Air" on it, if you're like me and usually too lazy to click these images to see the big versions.

That's right, the airline that I had been told I couldn't fly with that day had a plane all ready to leave when I got there. The guy at the check-in counter didn't have a clue, but the people in the Inter-Island office said that due to the demand caused by the Jazz & Blues Fest, they decided to skip out on maintenance and schedule a flight at the last minute for Saturday anyhow. That's what I get for trying to plan out a flight a whole week in advance on the Rock. I don't think I want to fly with anyone who's been skipping out on maintenance anyhow.

Anyway, I weighed myself with my luggage by stepping on that giant scale one last time, checked in (but knew better than to check a bag with Polynesian), and got ready to go. My Polynesian flight to The Airport that I Don't Want to Use went off without a hitch. I got some great pictures, because they don't care enough to make you turn off electronic devices:

Taking off. You can see Maliu Mai Resort by the sand.

Leone from above. I honestly can't tell what's a real building and what's a foundation left bare from the tsunami.

Approaching Upolu

Aggie Grey's Hotel in Apia from above. This is where I stayed with my parents when they visited in Summer 2009.

Click to see a usably big version.

I had a rough outline of my trip planned out: Land at Fagali'i Airport near Apia, take a taxi to the wharf, take a ferry to the village of Salelologa in Savai'i, spend the night at this awesome-sounding inn specially designated for backpackers like myself in that village, spend Sunday traveling to the very back of the island and seeing everything that I could, watch the "last sunset" from the western tip of the island (called this because its about as close as you can get to the International Date Line and still be on land), spend the night in a beach fale back there in the village of Falealupo, spend Monday seeing everything on the way back to Salelologa, spend Monday night at the backpacker's inn again, and then take the ferry back first thing in the morning in order to get back to Fagali'i in plenty of time for my 4:30 PM flight back to AmSam.

I grabbed a taxi right after we landed and agreed on a fare to the wharf ahead of time, like the travel guides recommend (he still managed to rip me off). Had him stop at an ATM to pick up some Samoan Tala (One Tala was worth about 44 cents American at the time), and at a store to grab some sunscreen and bug repellant in a ~~spray bottle~~ roll-on dispenser, both in odd New Zealand packages. Apparently, I could have brought both of those things on the plane with me, because flights out of a US territory aren't subject to much security, or something like that.

We arrived at the wharf and there was a boat sitting there already. There was a lot of confusion, because the taxi driver spoke about 60% English. But going by my watch, there was still plenty of time until the ferry that leaves at 2 PM was supposed to get there. I had plenty of time to grab lunch and relax by the pool and beach at the nearby Aggie Grey's Resort (not to be confused with the hotel in Apia, though its the same company). I grabbed a free tourist map and some more Tala from the ATM, too. (Cash is very important to have in a society where almost no one has a credit card reader) Life was good.

I rode in the same taxi back to the wharf, paid the driver entirely too much, waited around for the ferry that seemed incredibly late, and got on. This was on the brand-new MV Lady Samoa III, a rather large ship that has nice, almost airplane-like seating, a "business class" section for people willing to pay more for a tiny bit more comfort on a 90-minute ferry ride, and a TV that entertains the passengers with American Idol reruns.

Seriously.

Sitting there, I looked at my watch. It was almost 3! Could this ferry that was supposed to leave at two really be a whole hour behind schedule? The next ferry, assuming it was on schedule, might get here before this one ever leaves. Even for Samoa, that was pretty bad.

Then it hit me: My watch was an hour off. The ferry was right on schedule.

Western Samoa had switched to Daylight Savings Time since I had last visited, and American Samoa never did. My watch had been an hour off the entire time. And since BlueSky only covered American Samoa, my cell phone still had Am Samoa time on it as well.

I may or may not have been able to cram in one extra activity with the two hours I would have saved, but maybe not. The important thing was that I was riding on the ferry and would still get to Savai'i my first day, as planned. If fixed my watch, enjoyed the (most likely pirated) onboard videos, watched the view from the deck, and relaxed some more.

It's practically a national holiday when the big ferry arrives in Savai'i.

I arrived and grabbed a taxi, asking him to take me to the Salafai Backpacker's Inn. He'd never heard of it. Not knowing what else to do, I guessed he could take me to an Internet cafe where I could look up the ad where I spotted it and figure out where it was located. But first, and ATM stop, because I would have to pay for my room in cash. Then I spotted the "Salafai Inn" along the road and made him turn around to get me to it.

We pulled up and there was no one at the front desk. No one anywhere. The whole place seemed deserted, but open. Not exactly the happenin' youth hostel that I was expecting. Finally, someone who worked there turned up and confirmed that yes, this was also the Salafai Backpacker's Inn. I thanked them, paid the taxi driver, learned from the clerk that I paid the driver too much ($5T instead of $3T, a difference of about 88 cents American), and had her take me to my room. The ad for the inn had said that there was air conditioning, a refrigerator and a TV for just $50T a night. As it turned out, the TV was only in the lobby, and if you wanted the "Backpacker rate" of $50T, the mini-fridge and A/C would stay unplugged. Also not what I was expecting.

Oh well. With the ability to finally, finally keep my backpack full of stuff safely behind a locked door finally mine, I left it out of my sight for the first time that day and ventured out of the hotel into the village of Salelologa.

Whoo.

All the stores and restaurants are closed because it's a uh...Saturday.

Also not what I expected. I had always been told that Savai'i was a naturally beautiful place, full of adventures to be had and was completely unspoiled. But Salelologa was just like the worst parts of American Samoa- just developed enough to completely lose its "unspoiled" status, but not developed enough to have any real man-made enjoyments or comforts. I walked around and saw that the restaurant that they had recommended to me at the hotel was closed on account of it being not open. I got dinner from a roadside stand selling barbecued chicken, hit the ATM again because this village was the last one I would see for a while with an ATM, and headed back to my room. The whole hotel was still creepy, creaky, old, and almost deserted. The room across the hall was taken, and I'm pretty sure that was it for the entire two-story hotel.

Everything about Savai'i so far was so...not what I had expected. The Backpacker's Inn was nearly deserted, the Backpacker's rate wasn't that great of a deal, the village was a dump, I had forgotten how almost no one spoke adequate English in the entire country, and worst of all, I was alone. Not just alone, but "a whole day's journey from anyone I knew or even anything familiar" kind of alone. What was I doing here? And why was I doing this so close to my trip home?

I fell into a troubled sleep, hoping the next day would be better.

Scratch that, I had no A/C, so I ended up messing with the window to the extent that only I could, stacking the thin mattress from the extra bed on top of the one I was using to double my padding, considering turning on the A/C even though I hadn't paid for it, and finally knocking myself out with one of the sleeping pills that I had brought. Then I went into a troubled sleep, hoping the next day would be better.

You can see a more complete photo album of the day here.

This Island Earth

2011-04-20T08:41:00.001-11:00

It was strange when I first returned home. So many things I had to get used to. First and foremost, the cold. It was mid-November. It wasn't just cold compared to Samoa, we were hitting record cold temperatures for that time of year. And then we went up to Maryland to visit relatives for Thanksgiving, where it was even colder. There were times where I was convinced that the heat was turned off. But who cares? I was OFF the island! I was FREE! And I was spending Thanksgiving with my family for the first time since 2007!

Yes, I was happy. But life was still strange. I kept opening up the fridge whenever I got thirsty, because I expected to find a filter-pitcher of water inside, not remembering that the water from the tap was fine to drink as-is. And then I kept leaving my dishes in the sink, because I hadn't lived in a house with a dishwasher in years. When I had my first interview, I left the house wearing an outfit called a "suit and tie" and found that my windshield was covered in something called "frost," and that to get rid of this stuff, I needed to find something called an "ice scraper." And then I cleared my windshield with it and drove down a highway with almost no potholes, a 55 MPH speed limit and ways to get around cars that were driving too slowly. And then came this stuff called "snow." Bizarre. I gave out a few lava-lavas for Christmas presents and I had to explain what they were.

Then there's the odd reminders of the life that I left. A plastic, light-up coconut tree in the backyard, which looks really weird covered in snow. The salu (Samoan broom) that I got my mother for Christmas one year that sits behind the TV when not in use. Eating corned beef for St. Patrick's Day dinner. A refrigerator magnet for an All-Star Game that says "ASG." Coconuts selling at the local Food Lion for $3 each. Then there were the imagined ones. A worker on the tarmac at Charlotte-Douglas Airport is carrying a salu? Oh, a giant cone. A sign in Maryland is advertising Aiga clothes? Oh, Angie's clothes. Yeah.

Anyway...

*LOST-Style Flashback that starts with the next entry*

Adam's Story Part 3: The Aftermath

2011-03-26T16:08:00.000-11:00

With the story of the Japanese tsunami in the news, I keep mentally going back to the tsunami that I witnessed on the island in September of 2009. I've made a couple of entries on this topic before. But I've never gotten the chance to tell what I did in the days following. As longtime readers of this blog may remember, there was a very little posting by me in the month or so after the tsunami. I had been a bit busy, to say the least.

My interview the following morning with Channel 7 didn't happen. The person they talked to in Western took up all of their time and the Skype connection was pretty terrible that day anyhow. I think if I had gotten to do the interview, it mostly would have been me yelling "WHAT?" over the Internet static.

I didn't go to work for several days after the tsunami. Oh I worked, but I didn't go to work. Joey had somehow made a connection with someone in the Archive department of the UK branch of the Associated Press. I never quite found out why it was going there. But anyway, I spent the next several days driving around the island and filming the destruction. That's where all of the pictures in this album came from.

It was a weird, sad, but exciting experience. Instead of my usual job where I sat in front of a computer all day and went out to stores to film ads about once a week, I was venturing all over the island, meeting people and collecting their stories. A pastor's wife had just barely escaped up the mountain before the wave crushed the inside of the church. A matai (village chief) had risked his life by driving up and down the main road of his seaside village with a bullhorn warning everyone about the coming wave before finally getting to safety himself. Maliu Mai Resort had been hit, but was in good enough shape to reopen after about a week. At the remote village of Fagamalo, at the tail end of the island's main road, I saw the military come in and drop off supplies and tents for everyone to live in, and the village matai divvy them up amongst the affected families. Things everywhere were, smashed, broken, and dirty. Some places only had foundations left, something I saw when I did a mission trip to places hit by Hurricane Katrina.

Then there was Poloa. The village of Poloa, located on the very western tip of the island, had been hit worst of all. So badly, in fact, that they had shut it off from outsiders and you had to get special permission to visit. I met the matai, who was an elderly man who spoke through a tulafale or "talking chief" (spokesperson) who sat beside him the entire time. In exchange for me interviewing him and getting his story out, he would allow me to film the village. He, like the rest of his village, had relocated to the village at the top of the mountain for the foreseeable future. Most of the villagers were now living in a Red Cross station. I kept in mind all that I had learned about Samoan customs and higher ranking people, the rules about sitting and all that, and the interview went very well. I was granted access to the village.

Poloa was, as someone had forewarned me, a ghost town. As if a symbol of the entire village, even the welcome sign at the front had been washed off of its post and was laying on the ground. Almost nothing was spared. Most of the village was in splinters. The destruction was so bad that I really couldn't tell you how many houses had been there before. Everything was just rubble. A cinderblock shower laid on its side in the middle of everything. The only real building still fully standing was the church (interpret that however you like). Even then, the inside was a mess. All of the pews were thrown together in a giant heap. The pulpit was upside-down and most of the windows were broken. Bingo cards were scattered around and bingo chips were spilled everywhere.

A few people were still walking around. The one that I really remember was a guy sitting in the driver's seat of a ruined car, as if he was going to start it and drive away. He waved to me like nothing was wrong. Maybe he was traumatized. Maybe he lived there now. I'll never really know.

After that came the school. Like the church, everything was piled up into one or two heaps. Unlike the church, the walls were gone and there was a good bit of roof/ceiling missing. Books, computers, chairs, younameit, were everywhere. A lone cat sat up meowing desperately at the top of a bank on the mountainside, as if it were just as traumatized as the guy in the car.

It's comforting to know that all of the kids from that school got out of the village OK. In fact, there was only one casualty for all of Poloa. I think one of my few regrets about my time on the island was that never visited Poloa again to see how it had progressed. I wouldn't blame anyone if they never moved back.

I was on what BlueSky called a "residential" internet speed back then, before the island was hooked up to the fiber optic cable, so it was incredibly slow. Something like 100 Kb/s, so I really had a very small pipe to get all of the footage that I had through to the AP. I knew that this would take a LOT of time, so I felt like any time when it wasn't uploading was time wasted. Every day right after I woke up, I'd start uploading footage and pictures to the AP server. I'd make sure a decent-sized file had started uploading before I left, and I'd start a new one as soon as I got back. And of course, another one needed to be uploading when I went to bed.

At one point, I needed to call into the AP office that I was sending these to. Unable to get to them directly, or even the AP HQ, I finally called their Honolulu bureau and explained my situation. The person I talked to there was very helpful and very sympathetic to the situation on the island, and he was able to connect me to the New York bureau, who connected me to the DC bureau, who connected me to the London bureau, where I left a message to the guy that I was supposed to talk to, because he wasn't there. He got back to me later.

As I mentioned in the first entry about the tsunami, the radio stations were knocked off the air and one was brought back on in a very limited capacity (mostly the harbor area) on a small generator for less than half a day at a time. Both of the TV channels that I was in charge of were out for more than a week as well. I spent a bit too much time wondering if I would have a job for much longer.

At about the end of the second day, we managed to get the WVUV-FM broadcasting in my part of the island again from its secondary transmitter on top of the mountain near Pava'ia'i. It was a strange, bare-bones kind of broadcasting, with almost nothing but our on-air talent giving out much-needed emergency information, but it was a big back toward normalcy. It sounded like "the voice of the resistance."

There was a lot of PTSD going around. I had at least one friend who was terrified to go anywhere near the water for months, which was pretty rough, considering that she had to drive along it for more than a mile during her daily commute. Another family picked up everything and climbed up the mountain on the one-month anniversary of the wave, because the expected it to come back that day. We ran ads urging people to seek counseling for more than a year.

Finally, the healing began. People who had lost their homes were given FEMA tents and supplies. They began the slow, slow process of applying for FEMA aid, which was still causing headaches when I left. The Hawaii National Guard was sent to the islands to help. Military helicopters dotted the skies occasionally. One of the world's largest planes made a landing at Pago Pago Airport and dropped off giant generators and much more. They and the ones that came later restored power to places that had lost it due to one of the island's two power plants getting the brunt of the wave. Ruined homes were demolished, and some were replaced. The island's many churches pitched in, including my own. I spent a single afternoon helping to demolish what was left of a home. I would have done more, but thankfully, I still had a full-time job. The wrecked bridge in Leone was replaced with a quick fix, and later a real bridge. The Pago Pago post office added hundreds of new P.O. boxes to replace those that were lost at the Leone location. Both radio stations came back on the air full-time. They started playing music again, then commercials, starting with stores announcing that they were open again. Pago Plaza, the building where I worked that lost its entire bottom floor, was completely reconstructed and had several new and old clients moved in before I left.

I did just a few more interviews. One with the LA Times where everything I contributed was cut in favor of quotes from someone that I had introduced the author to who had seen the actual wave. Another was with my college's newscast that I had once been a part of. I was glad to see that the remembered the interview when I visited the school just last month.

After about a week, we moved both of my TV channels' main computers down to the cable headend (the main control building for the cable system) in Tafuna and hooked them into the system directly, as the cables running to the station had been broken in several places. I updated it daily by carrying down a hard drive with the next day's schedule and any new programming or commercials on it and dumping it all into the machines. It stayed that way for months. Back in the station, everything, and I mean everything was powered by a massive series of extension cords hooked up to a single generator. A lot of tripping, stuck doors, unplugged equipment, and sweatiness (due to there being no A/C) occurred , but after seeing the destruction on so much of the island, I really couldn't complain. Eventually, the regular power was restored and the cable system fixed.

And yet not everything has really healed. When I left the island, most of Leone was still just flat land with only a few houses. Lots of families were still living in FEMA tents, to the best of my knowledge. Both the replacement power plant and post office were still in the early planning stages. While the tsunami alert system had a solid date set for completion, it still didn't exist yet. Plenty of buildings remained untouched and would probably stay that way for some time. One of the most glaring examples is the Pago Pago Community Center, which still had a boat and a shipping container still sitting inside it.

It was a weird experience. I'm glad I got to write about it.

IMPORTANT UPDATE!

2011-03-11T08:01:00.002-11:00

From the NWS Advisory Page for American Samoa:

"A TSUNAMI IS A SERIES OF LONG OCEAN WAVES...WHICH ARE NOT SURFABLE."

Glad you could clear that up, National Weather Service. Just a couple of small waves have been reported so far. Still no all-clear for the island.

UPDATE: No damage occurred on the island. There were waves 3-4' tall that hit at low tide, so everything was fine. Thanks for asking.

Wow...

2011-03-11T01:37:00.002-11:00

Notice how this tsunami alert includes the WHOLE PACIFIC! Stay safe, everyone.

My thoughts, prayers, and eventually, some money go out to Japan. I don't need to tell you that I already know how bad tsunamis can be.

000
WEPA40 PHEB 110730
TSUPAC
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 003
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 0730Z 11 MAR 2011
THIS BULLETIN APPLIES TO AREAS WITHIN AND BORDERING THE PACIFIC
OCEAN AND ADJACENT SEAS...EXCEPT ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...
WASHINGTON...OREGON AND CALIFORNIA.
... A WIDESPREAD TSUNAMI WARNING IS IN EFFECT ...
A TSUNAMI WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR
JAPAN / RUSSIA / MARCUS IS. / N. MARIANAS / GUAM / WAKE IS. /
TAIWAN / YAP / PHILIPPINES / MARSHALL IS. / BELAU / MIDWAY IS. /
POHNPEI / CHUUK / KOSRAE / INDONESIA / PAPUA NEW GUINEA /
NAURU / JOHNSTON IS. / SOLOMON IS. / KIRIBATI / HOWLAND-BAKER /
HAWAII / TUVALU / PALMYRA IS. / VANUATU / TOKELAU / JARVIS IS. /
WALLIS-FUTUNA / SAMOA / AMERICAN SAMOA / COOK ISLANDS / NIUE /
AUSTRALIA / FIJI / NEW CALEDONIA / TONGA / MEXICO /
KERMADEC IS / FR. POLYNESIA / NEW ZEALAND / PITCAIRN /
GUATEMALA / EL SALVADOR / COSTA RICA / NICARAGUA / ANTARCTICA /
PANAMA / HONDURAS / CHILE / ECUADOR / COLOMBIA / PERU
THIS BULLETIN IS ISSUED AS ADVICE TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.  ONLY
NATIONAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE
DECISIONS REGARDING THE OFFICIAL STATE OF ALERT IN THEIR AREA AND
ANY ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN IN RESPONSE.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME -  0546Z 11 MAR 2011
COORDINATES -  38.2 NORTH  142.5 EAST
DEPTH       -   10 KM
LOCATION    -  NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU  JAPAN
MAGNITUDE   -  8.8
MEASUREMENTS OR REPORTS OF TSUNAMI WAVE ACTIVITY
GAUGE LOCATION        LAT   LON    TIME        AMPL         PER
DART 21413           30.5N 152.1E  0659Z   0.76M /  2.5FT  32MIN
HANASAKI HOKKAIDO J  43.3N 145.6E  0657Z   2.79M /  9.2FT  76MIN
DART 21401           42.6N 152.6E  0643Z   0.67M /  2.2FT  40MIN
DART 21418           38.7N 148.7E  0619Z   1.08M /  3.5FT  06MIN
LAT  - LATITUDE (N-NORTH, S-SOUTH)
LON  - LONGITUDE (E-EAST, W-WEST)
TIME - TIME OF THE MEASUREMENT (Z IS UTC IS GREENWICH TIME)
AMPL - TSUNAMI AMPLITUDE MEASURED RELATIVE TO NORMAL SEA LEVEL.
       IT IS ...NOT... CREST-TO-TROUGH WAVE HEIGHT.
       VALUES ARE GIVEN IN BOTH METERS(M) AND FEET(FT).
PER  - PERIOD OF TIME IN MINUTES(MIN) FROM ONE WAVE TO THE NEXT.
NOTE - DART MEASUREMENTS ARE FROM THE DEEP OCEAN AND THEY
       ARE GENERALLY MUCH SMALLER THAN WOULD BE COASTAL
        MEASUREMENTS AT SIMILAR LOCATIONS.
EVALUATION
SEA LEVEL READINGS CONFIRM THAT A TSUNAMI HAS BEEN GENERATED
WHICH COULD CAUSE WIDESPREAD DAMAGE. AUTHORITIES SHOULD TAKE
APPROPRIATE ACTION IN RESPONSE TO THIS THREAT. THIS CENTER WILL
CONTINUE TO MONITOR SEA LEVEL DATA TO DETERMINE THE EXTENT AND
SEVERITY OF THE THREAT.
A TSUNAMI IS A SERIES OF WAVES AND THE FIRST WAVE MAY NOT BE THE
LARGEST. TSUNAMI WAVE HEIGHTS CANNOT BE PREDICTED AND CAN VARY
SIGNIFICANTLY ALONG A COAST DUE TO LOCAL EFFECTS. THE TIME FROM
ONE TSUNAMI WAVE TO THE NEXT CAN BE FIVE MINUTES TO AN HOUR, AND
THE THREAT CAN CONTINUE FOR MANY HOURS AS MULTIPLE WAVES ARRIVE.
FOR ALL AREAS - WHEN NO MAJOR WAVES ARE OBSERVED FOR TWO HOURS
AFTER THE ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL OR DAMAGING WAVES HAVE NOT
OCCURRED FOR AT LEAST TWO HOURS THEN LOCAL AUTHORITIES CAN ASSUME
THE THREAT IS PASSED. DANGER TO BOATS AND COASTAL STRUCTURES CAN
CONTINUE FOR SEVERAL HOURS DUE TO RAPID CURRENTS. AS LOCAL
CONDITIONS CAN CAUSE A WIDE VARIATION IN TSUNAMI WAVE ACTION THE
ALL CLEAR DETERMINATION MUST BE MADE BY LOCAL AUTHORITIES.
ESTIMATED INITIAL TSUNAMI WAVE ARRIVAL TIMES AT FORECAST POINTS
WITHIN THE WARNING AND WATCH AREAS ARE GIVEN BELOW. ACTUAL
ARRIVAL TIMES MAY DIFFER AND THE INITIAL WAVE MAY NOT BE THE
LARGEST. A TSUNAMI IS A SERIES OF WAVES AND THE TIME BETWEEN
SUCCESSIVE WAVES CAN BE FIVE MINUTES TO ONE HOUR.
LOCATION         FORECAST POINT     COORDINATES     ARRIVAL TIME
JAPAN            KATSUURA           35.1N 140.3E    0635Z 11 MAR
                 KUSHIRO            42.9N 144.3E    0642Z 11 MAR
                 HACHINOHE          40.5N 141.5E    0700Z 11 MAR
                 SHIMIZU            32.8N 133.0E    0756Z 11 MAR
                 OKINAWA            26.2N 127.8E    0912Z 11 MAR
RUSSIA           URUP_IS            46.1N 150.5E    0714Z 11 MAR
                 SEVERO_KURILSK     50.8N 156.1E    0834Z 11 MAR
                 PETROPAVLOVSK_K    53.2N 159.6E    0836Z 11 MAR
                 UST_KAMCHATSK      56.1N 162.6E    0840Z 11 MAR
                 MEDNNY_IS          54.7N 167.4E    0903Z 11 MAR
MARCUS IS.       MARCUS_IS.         24.3N 154.0E    0757Z 11 MAR
N. MARIANAS      SAIPAN             15.3N 145.8E    0853Z 11 MAR
GUAM             GUAM               13.4N 144.7E    0909Z 11 MAR
WAKE IS.         WAKE_IS.           19.3N 166.6E    0925Z 11 MAR
TAIWAN           HUALIEN            24.0N 121.7E    0932Z 11 MAR
                 HUALIEN            24.0N 121.6E    0933Z 11 MAR
                 TAITUNG            22.7N 121.2E    0936Z 11 MAR
                 CHILUNG            25.2N 121.8E    1004Z 11 MAR
YAP              YAP_IS.             9.5N 138.1E    0944Z 11 MAR
PHILIPPINES      PALANAN            17.1N 122.6E    0955Z 11 MAR
                 LEGASPI            13.2N 123.8E    1026Z 11 MAR
                 DAVAO               6.8N 125.7E    1053Z 11 MAR
MARSHALL IS.     ENIWETOK           11.4N 162.3E    1013Z 11 MAR
                 KWAJALEIN           8.7N 167.7E    1044Z 11 MAR
                 MAJURO              7.1N 171.4E    1124Z 11 MAR
BELAU            MALAKAL             7.3N 134.5E    1025Z 11 MAR
MIDWAY IS.       MIDWAY_IS.         28.2N 182.6E    1026Z 11 MAR
POHNPEI          POHNPEI_IS.         7.0N 158.2E    1027Z 11 MAR
CHUUK            CHUUK_IS.           7.4N 151.8E    1034Z 11 MAR
KOSRAE           KOSRAE_IS.          5.5N 163.0E    1043Z 11 MAR
INDONESIA        GEME                4.6N 126.8E    1049Z 11 MAR
                 BEREBERE            2.5N 128.7E    1058Z 11 MAR
                 WARSA               0.6S 135.8E    1110Z 11 MAR
                 MANOKWARI           0.8S 134.2E    1118Z 11 MAR
                 PATANI              0.4N 128.8E    1124Z 11 MAR
                 JAYAPURA            2.4S 140.8E    1135Z 11 MAR
                 SORONG              0.8S 131.1E    1135Z 11 MAR
PAPUA NEW GUINE  MANUS_IS.           2.0S 147.5E    1124Z 11 MAR
                 KAVIENG             2.5S 150.7E    1124Z 11 MAR
                 VANIMO              2.6S 141.3E    1134Z 11 MAR
                 WEWAK               3.5S 143.6E    1146Z 11 MAR
                 RABAUL              4.2S 152.3E    1154Z 11 MAR
                 KIETA               6.1S 155.6E    1205Z 11 MAR
                 AMUN                6.0S 154.7E    1211Z 11 MAR
                 MADANG              5.2S 145.8E    1215Z 11 MAR
                 LAE                 6.8S 147.0E    1254Z 11 MAR
                 PORT_MORESBY        9.3S 146.9E    1429Z 11 MAR
NAURU            NAURU               0.5S 166.9E    1149Z 11 MAR
JOHNSTON IS.     JOHNSTON_IS.       16.7N 190.5E    1202Z 11 MAR
SOLOMON IS.      PANGGOE             6.9S 157.2E    1221Z 11 MAR
                 FALAMAE             7.4S 155.6E    1222Z 11 MAR
                 MUNDA               8.4S 157.2E    1239Z 11 MAR
                 GHATERE             7.8S 159.2E    1248Z 11 MAR
                 AUKI                8.8S 160.6E    1309Z 11 MAR
                 HONIARA             9.3S 160.0E    1314Z 11 MAR
                 KIRAKIRA           10.4S 161.9E    1318Z 11 MAR
KIRIBATI         TARAWA_IS.          1.5N 173.0E    1228Z 11 MAR
                 KANTON_IS.          2.8S 188.3E    1329Z 11 MAR
                 CHRISTMAS_IS.       2.0N 202.5E    1443Z 11 MAR
                 MALDEN_IS.          3.9S 205.1E    1518Z 11 MAR
                 FLINT_IS.          11.4S 208.2E    1613Z 11 MAR
HOWLAND-BAKER    HOWLAND_IS.         0.6N 183.4E    1243Z 11 MAR
HAWAII           NAWILIWILI         22.0N 200.6E    1259Z 11 MAR
                 HONOLULU           21.3N 202.1E    1313Z 11 MAR
                 KAHULUI            20.9N 203.5E    1320Z 11 MAR
                 HILO               19.7N 204.9E    1339Z 11 MAR
TUVALU           FUNAFUTI_IS.        7.9S 178.5E    1330Z 11 MAR
PALMYRA IS.      PALMYRA_IS.         6.3N 197.6E    1346Z 11 MAR
VANUATU          ESPERITU_SANTO     15.1S 167.3E    1407Z 11 MAR
                 ANATOM_IS.         20.2S 169.9E    1502Z 11 MAR
TOKELAU          NUKUNONU_IS.        9.2S 188.2E    1409Z 11 MAR
JARVIS IS.       JARVIS_IS.          0.4S 199.9E    1427Z 11 MAR
WALLIS-FUTUNA    WALLIS_IS.         13.3S 183.8E    1427Z 11 MAR
                 FUTUNA_I.          14.3S 181.8E    1440Z 11 MAR
SAMOA            APIA               13.8S 188.2E    1445Z 11 MAR
AMERICAN SAMOA   PAGO_PAGO          14.3S 189.3E    1452Z 11 MAR
COOK ISLANDS     PUKAPUKA_IS.       10.8S 194.1E    1452Z 11 MAR
                 PENRYN_IS.          8.9S 202.2E    1525Z 11 MAR
                 RAROTONGA          21.2S 200.2E    1626Z 11 MAR
NIUE             NIUE_IS.           19.0S 190.0E    1526Z 11 MAR
AUSTRALIA        CAIRNS             16.7S 145.8E    1528Z 11 MAR
                 BRISBANE           27.2S 153.3E    1620Z 11 MAR
                 SYDNEY             33.9S 151.4E    1651Z 11 MAR
                 GLADSTONE          23.8S 151.4E    1730Z 11 MAR
                 MACKAY             21.1S 149.3E    1811Z 11 MAR
                 HOBART             43.3S 147.6E    1826Z 11 MAR
FIJI             SUVA               18.1S 178.4E    1528Z 11 MAR
NEW CALEDONIA    NOUMEA             22.3S 166.5E    1531Z 11 MAR
TONGA            NUKUALOFA          21.0S 184.8E    1557Z 11 MAR
MEXICO           ENSENADA           31.8N 243.2E    1644Z 11 MAR
                 PUNTA_ABREOJOS     26.7N 246.4E    1732Z 11 MAR
                 CABO_SAN_LUCAS     22.8N 250.0E    1809Z 11 MAR
                 SOCORRO            18.8N 249.0E    1819Z 11 MAR
                 MAZATLAN           23.2N 253.6E    1858Z 11 MAR
                 MANZANILLO         19.1N 255.7E    1924Z 11 MAR
                 ACAPULCO           16.9N 260.1E    1959Z 11 MAR
                 PUERTO_MADERO      14.8N 267.5E    2134Z 11 MAR
KERMADEC IS      RAOUL_IS.          29.2S 182.1E    1648Z 11 MAR
FR. POLYNESIA    PAPEETE            17.5S 210.4E    1706Z 11 MAR
                 HIVA_OA            10.0S 221.0E    1744Z 11 MAR
                 RIKITEA            23.1S 225.0E    1913Z 11 MAR
NEW ZEALAND      NORTH_CAPE         34.4S 173.3E    1714Z 11 MAR
                 EAST_CAPE          37.7S 178.5E    1814Z 11 MAR
                 AUCKLAND(W)        37.1S 174.2E    1814Z 11 MAR
                 GISBORNE           38.7S 178.0E    1821Z 11 MAR
                 MILFORD_SOUND      44.6S 167.9E    1839Z 11 MAR
                 WELLINGTON         41.3S 174.8E    1845Z 11 MAR
                 AUCKLAND(E)        36.7S 175.0E    1856Z 11 MAR
                 NEW_PLYMOUTH       39.1S 174.1E    1900Z 11 MAR
                 NAPIER             39.5S 176.9E    1908Z 11 MAR
                 WESTPORT           41.8S 171.6E    1929Z 11 MAR
                 DUNEDIN            45.9S 170.5E    2021Z 11 MAR
                 LYTTELTON          43.6S 172.7E    2055Z 11 MAR
                 BLUFF              46.6S 168.3E    2113Z 11 MAR
                 NELSON             41.3S 173.3E    2206Z 11 MAR
PITCAIRN         PITCAIRN_IS.       25.1S 229.9E    2000Z 11 MAR
GUATEMALA        SIPICATE           13.9N 268.8E    2150Z 11 MAR
EL SALVADOR      ACAJUTLA           13.6N 270.2E    2156Z 11 MAR
COSTA RICA       CABO_SAN_ELENA     10.9N 274.0E    2209Z 11 MAR
                 PUERTO_QUEPOS       9.4N 275.8E    2235Z 11 MAR
                 CABO_MATAPALO       8.4N 276.7E    2237Z 11 MAR
NICARAGUA        CORINTO            12.5N 272.8E    2217Z 11 MAR
                 PUERTO_SANDINO     12.2N 273.2E    2223Z 11 MAR
                 SAN_JUAN_DL_SUR    11.2N 274.1E    2233Z 11 MAR
ANTARCTICA       CAPE_ADARE         71.0S 170.0E    2222Z 11 MAR
                 THURSTON_IS.       72.0S 260.0E    0121Z 12 MAR
PANAMA           PUNTA_BURICA        8.0N 277.1E    2248Z 11 MAR
                 PUNTA_MALA          7.5N 280.0E    2334Z 11 MAR
                 PUERTO_PINA         7.4N 282.0E    2344Z 11 MAR
                 BALBOA_HTS.         9.0N 280.4E    0155Z 12 MAR
HONDURAS         AMAPALA            13.2N 272.4E    2253Z 11 MAR
CHILE            EASTER_IS.         27.1S 250.6E    2255Z 11 MAR
                 ARICA              18.5S 289.7E    0244Z 12 MAR
                 IQUIQUE            20.2S 289.9E    0249Z 12 MAR
                 ANTOFAGASTA        23.3S 289.6E    0254Z 12 MAR
                 CALDERA            27.1S 289.2E    0314Z 12 MAR
                 GOLFO_DE_PENAS     47.1S 285.1E    0315Z 12 MAR
                 COQUIMBO           29.9S 288.6E    0323Z 12 MAR
                 VALPARAISO         33.0S 288.4E    0338Z 12 MAR
                 CORRAL             39.8S 286.5E    0352Z 12 MAR
                 TALCAHUANO         36.7S 286.9E    0359Z 12 MAR
                 PUERTO_MONTT       41.5S 287.0E    0552Z 12 MAR
                 PUERTO_WILLIAMS    54.8S 291.8E    0855Z 12 MAR
                 PUNTA_ARENAS       53.2S 289.1E    1700Z 12 MAR
ECUADOR          BALTRA_IS.          0.5S 269.7E    2331Z 11 MAR
                 ESMERELDAS          1.2N 280.2E    0003Z 12 MAR
                 LA_LIBERTAD         2.2S 278.8E    0024Z 12 MAR
COLOMBIA         BAHIA_SOLANO        6.3N 282.6E    2347Z 11 MAR
                 TUMACO              1.8N 281.1E    0012Z 12 MAR
                 BUENAVENTURA        3.8N 282.8E    0030Z 12 MAR
PERU             TALARA              4.6S 278.5E    0033Z 12 MAR
                 PIMENTAL            6.9S 280.0E    0138Z 12 MAR
                 LA_PUNTA           12.1S 282.8E    0139Z 12 MAR
                 CHIMBOTE            9.0S 281.2E    0144Z 12 MAR
                 SAN_JUAN           15.3S 284.8E    0153Z 12 MAR
                 MOLLENDO           17.1S 288.0E    0226Z 12 MAR
BULLETINS WILL BE ISSUED HOURLY OR SOONER IF CONDITIONS WARRANT.
THE TSUNAMI WARNING WILL REMAIN IN EFFECT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
THE JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY MAY ALSO ISSUE TSUNAMI MESSAGES
FOR THIS EVENT TO COUNTRIES IN THE NORTHWEST PACIFIC AND SOUTH
CHINA SEA REGION.  IN CASE OF CONFLICTING INFORMATION... THE
MORE CONSERVATIVE INFORMATION SHOULD BE USED FOR SAFETY.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE PRODUCTS
FOR ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...WASHINGTON...OREGON...CALIFORNIA.

Grand Samoan Adventure Grand Finale: Prologue

2011-02-19T16:05:00.002-11:00

The job search is going OK, I guess. I've had three interviews and two of them are still possibilities, and I can I honestly say that I'd like to work for either one. And not just because they might be reading this. On the other hand, I've been looking since December and I'm still not employed. Today I went to a job fair at Carowinds (the same amusement park from this entry on my trip home). I stood in line forever¹, mostly standing between a teenager with multiple lip piercings and a group that was very, very concerned that the drug test might be today.

So anyway, back to last November...

*LOST-style flashback*

I decided somewhere in the last two weeks, since that this was my last, and possibly best chance to visit an island in the region that I had never been to, that I should, you know, go. Fiji and New Zealand were out of my budget and schedule, so it had to be either Ofu, a beautiful little island that's a part of the Territory over in the Manu'a group with a nice little beach resort, or the big island of Savai'i in Independent Samoa. Since this trip was to be so abrupt and everyone else was going to be working, I'd be going on this adventure by myself.

The problem with Savai'i was that it was relatively far. I had to fly to Samoa, take a taxi to the ferry wharf, then take a 90 minute ferry to the island. And that's just to get there.

The problem with Ofu was ASG. There used to be direct flights to Ofu, but then, at probably the worst time imaginable, ASG ruled that the airstrip in Ofu was too small to be safely used, but didn't give them any funds to expand it.² So then the only way to get there was to fly to the island of Ta'u, also in the Manu'a group, and then overpay for a small ferry to Ofu. And then get back that same way. One of my friends told me that while riding that ferry, it started to sink and they all had to bail the water out.

So, it seemed like either way I'd be flying to one island and then taking a ferry to the island that I actually wanted to go to. For a while I also considered just flying to Ta'u and staying there, although there's not much to do there besides hike by yourself and there isn't much to see other than Saua, the spot where Polynesian people are said to have originated from. Also, there's no place to stay there. Though it would have been fitting to wrap up this blog with a visit to the island where the book that this blog got its title from took place.

Finally someone explained to me that Ofu was good for relaxing and navel-gazing, but that Savai'i was the place to go for an adventure. I made my decision.

I'd like to see Ofu someday...

¹ Just like any other trip to an amusement park, amirite?
² By "worst time possible," I mean that the supply boat was dry-docked for longterm repairs that were made longer by ASG's attempts to destroy the company fixing them, and that was done when there were still months left before they would be finished. For a while there Ofu was being resupplied by airdrops.

Rockin' Like A Hurricane

2011-01-22T14:46:00.002-11:00

You know, occasionally, especially when my search for a new job is getting me down, I wonder if I should have ever left Samoa.

And then right now I see that there's a Category 2 Hurricane about to hit the island dead-on. There's a lot more info on JZ's blog on the list to the right.

By contrast, here in the States, I'm going to be going to a Carolina Hurricanes game on Monday.

Yeah, I think I made the right decision.

Real update soon-ish. It should be the cool kind with pictures.

In the meantime, please enjoy another cool animation of an ancient Samoan lege nd that seems to stray from the traditional version. Everyone in the comments says it was usually different.
Also, is that some kind of Samoan flute that I've never heard of playing in the background or was the animation made by some genius who decided that a Native North American instrument would be appropriate for a Samoan story?

Also, just because.

Ending Tropes

2011-01-02T08:10:00.004-11:00

So, I sorta forgot to mention: I've moved away from American Samoa and am now back home in the States for good. Yeah. Just thought I'd bring that up.

I really wanted to be a little more clever about it. Write a two-page entry about how half a bag of baby carrots sent me to the hospital with a 104 degree temperature¹ and end it with and out-of-the-blue twist ending of "Good thing I'm leaving soon."

But as you may have guessed, preparing to move 7,000 to a different hemisphere, moving 7,000 miles to a different hemisphere, and then putting my life back on track after moving 7,000 to a different hemisphere has really taken up a lot of writing time. I'm starting to feel like if I don't get something in quick, I'll never get back to this blog at all. This blog is facing a cosmic deadline known as "before I forget completely."

So I present to you my account of what it was like in the last few weeks, as my time on the Rock drew to a close. In another weird, listlike form of "tropes" of course. Writing it out conventionally wouldn't really work, since it's not a coherent story.

Ending Fatigue- Starting at about six months left, you start to keep in mind that you're "about to leave." But six months left feels almost exactly the same as it did when you had no real plans to leave. Probably because almost nothing has changed, and that you don't want your bosses to know too soon that you plan on skipping out, so you don't tell anyone. And if you're like me, you've always had a "Bucket List" of things that you wanted to do before you leave, and you've already done most of them.

And then five months left feels the same as six months left.
Four months...same.
Three months left...feel the same.
Two months left...feel the same. Actually have to think about whether or not you'll be able to use it all up when buying stuff in bulk from Cost-U-Lots. Nothing else is different.
One month left...feel the same.
Three weeks left...feel the same, except for about 15 minutes after you book your tickets home.

And then...
Seriously About to End- I'm hiking through the jungle on one trail that I've always wanted to try and so deep in the woods that I later find some kind of tree worm dangling from the brim of my hat, when I realize that there won't be enough daylight to finish this trail today. Maybe I should come back next weekend. No, I have plans then. Maybe the weekend after. Then it hits me.

There. won't. be. a. weekend. after.

I guess I don't reach this phase until I get to the point where I actually start to run out of time, and the fact that I'm leaving starts to seriously affect my life.

The Reveal- After almost five moths of keeping it a secret, it was time to tell my boss that I was leaving. Then everyone else, via a Facebook posting. Reaction was mixed, mostly depending on if you were a friend from home or a friend from the Rock. Finally, I didn't have to lie about why I wasn't shopping at Cost-U-Lots anymore.

How Could You Ever Leave Samoa- "But Samoa is the best place in the universe! It's absolutely perfect in every way! There's no poverty, rampant bacteria, collapsing economy, language that you'll never be able to learn, widespread corruption, power-mad politicians that try to close any business they personally don't like, super-high cost of everything, or people overreacting to things you write on your blog. Why would you ever want to leave? The island is BEAUTIFUL!"

It's Just Not Home- As much as those things bother me, they're not really in A-list of reasons why I left (except maybe the bacteria one, which is how I ended up in the hospital). But I have a story that tells it pretty well.

About a month before I left, I was hanging out at Tisa's for what ended up being the last time. A Samoan man told me about how he lived on the American west coast for years and absolutely loved it, but he couldn't stay there forever because it just wasn't his home, and he didn't want it to be.

How true. How true.

For The Last Time- "Wow, I'm leaving my workplace for the last time." "Wow, I'm going to my island church for the last time." "Wow, I'm going to my favorite restaurant for the last time." "Wow, I'm getting gas on the island for the last time." "Wow, I just chased off a pack of snarling stray dogs for the last time." "Wow, I'm leaving my workplace for the last time, for real this time." "Wow, I'm using the bathroom next to my workplace for the last time...I think."

The Long Goodbye- The same sort of thing, but with people. Saying goodbye to the people I worked with for two years. Saying goodbye to my friends from the Dissociates and church. Saying goodbye to the security guard at the building where I worked. Saying goodbye to that random neighbor who never introduced himself but we'd say "hi" to each other when we passed. The whole process involved a lot of awkward "Well, if I don't see you between now and when I leave a week from now, uh...have a nice life!" I think I ended up saying goodbye to a few people three or four times.

The Auction- A tradition among palangis on the island that probably began when Phineas Taft became the first American contractor that I made up to get fed up with the island in 1901 is the "Leaving the Island Sale." Unlike every other time most people move somewhere in their lives, it's waaay too expensive to take most of that stuff with you.² So you have to sell it, give it away, or throw it away. Although sometimes done as a traditional yard sale, the cultural-rich experience of the Leaving Sale now usually done via the famous Dissociates Email List (i.e. we email each other using the all-purpose email list, tack on the address of a few Samoan friends that might be interested, and ask "who wants to buy this stuff?") Then about a year ago, someone discovered that you can make online auctions with a Google spreadsheet, and those of use feeling that it was worth a lot more hassle to make about $35 more started doing it as a very drawn out online auction. This process was more fun than a barrel full of turkey tail.

Moving Out Nihilism- ASPA raising power rates again? "I'm leaving soon anyway." Good friend moved away a whole month before you? "I'm leaving soon anyway." Island economy in danger of collapsing now that the tsunami-related FEMA money that supplanted the closed cannery has stopped coming in? "Good thing I'm leaving soon anyway." Furry Vengeance playing at the only theater instead of the smash-hit move you were pumped to see? "I'm leaving soon anyway." Roads flooded? "I'm leaving soon anyway." Stub your toe while walking through your apartment? "I'm leaving soon anyway." Cable company switched from amazing CNN International to inferior US version of CNN? "OH COME ON!"

Final Food Problem- Sure, not shopping at Cost-U-Lots as much for the last month or so is no big deal, but you really get into problems when you get down to the last two weeks or so. You're afraid to buy almost anything, as you're supposed to be cleaning out your pantry at this point, not adding to it. And for the same reason, you end up eating a lot of really random meals. For the last week or so, I ate an awful lot of frozen chicken nuggets with Oreo cookies and long-expired Kraft Mac & Cheese. I paid good money for that food, and it's not like I can take it home with me.

But then at the same time, sometimes you clean out your pantry a little too well, and you have almost nothing left to eat, and thus have to go to the store anyway to buy overpriced basics that you'll get to use about half of. I still ended up having to throw away quite a bit of stuff. Especially expired mac and cheese.

Book Ends- So many random things from my last days on the island mirrored my first days there:
-No car
-No furniture that didn't come with the apartment
-Not a lot of food in my pantry/fridge, for the reasons discussed above
-3/4 of the stuff I own is in a USPS warehouse somewhere, and will be for months because I got the cheapest rate on shipping
-It's November, which meant everything from the holidays approaching to breadfruit hanging from every other tree
-Random Samoans I just met are asking me if it's my first time on the island
-I was to fly through Honolulu and Las Vegas, just like the first time

What Sort of Ending- How would I end my time in Samoa? Maybe a Dance Party Ending. And having a Bittersweet Ending is kind of inevitable, seeing as I'm leaving almost every friend I've met over the last two years for good. Maybe I'd just sorta ride my plane into the sunset. And what could be more appropriate for Samoa than an Everybody Laughs Ending? Or maybe using all these TV Tropes entries is something only fans of the site will appreciate, and I should stop doing it.

Well, as it turned out, I got a Grand Finale to my Grand Samoan Adventure.

More on that soonish.

¹ This actually happened.
² Despite this, everyone still takes a lot of stuff back with them. I mailed myself about 20 boxes of every size, and I've known people who rented out space in shipping containers, or even rented the whole thing for themselves.

This may have worked better as a Carnac the Magnificent joke

2010-12-28T15:30:00.003-11:00

A few things I never thought I'd see in the same news article:

-Swains Island, a fairly remote part of American Samoa that I've never been to.
-Wikileaks
-Good, coherent journalism
-Something by the Samoa News

And yet, you can find it all here.

Real entry coming soon. It's time I started wrapping this blog up.

Electile Dysfunction

2010-11-20T19:12:00.002-11:00

Note: This post was originally written on the night of November 2nd, 2010

It's almost 11 PM local time, and I'm still at work. Such is the life of media employees on election night. And no, we don't have an 11 o'clock newscast, or even a 10 o'clock one, or even a 6 PM one. Heck, as far as TV is concerned, we don't even have a newscast at all.

But I digress. I'm here to give continuing coverage on our "slideshow channel," Island Info Channel 13. A few individual polling stations have yet to submit their results, and for all I know they've already gone to bed and plan on counting the ballots tomorrow afternoon. But now I've been told that I can go home as soon as the channel is back to normal, so now I mostly just have to wait for most of the night for the computer that runs it to finish loading.

Anyway, the voters of the Rock have roundly rejected a number of "revisions" to the territorial constitution. Revisions, not amendments. Amendments would require approval by the United States Congress. And I don't think they'd approve of all of them, particularly one that basically says that the Governor and a 2/3rds majority of the Fono can nullify any Federal law they feel like. Come on AS, we in the Carolinas tried this once before, and it could've gotten really ugly.

Though instead of a serious standoff, it probably would have been more like the following conversation where I imagine the Federal government talking to ASG via text message for some reason, probably because they know the Feds can't be bothered to actually call down here:

ASG: No $7.25/hr. minimum wage for us, LOL!
FEDUSA: LOLWUT?
ASG: Yeah, we dnt want it. So it dsn't count.
FEDUSA: LOLWUT?
ASG: We said we cld nullify laws that we don't like in our cnstitutinal revisns!@
FEDUSA: LOLWUT?
ASG: We revisd our constitution.
FEDUSA: U hav a constitution? & U can amend it without us?
ASG: Hey, we only need ur permission to amend it, not 2 revise it.
FEDUSA: ...LOLWUT?
ASG: Come on, its totly diffrnt!
FEDUSA: LOLNO.
ASG: Plz?
FEDUSA: LOLNO. LOL.

(Cue random commenter telling me that I spelled "different" wrong)

So yeah, good on ya, voters of AmSam.

The other big race was for the territory's nonvoting Representative to Congress, which I can't help but notice that none of the major American news networks have covered in their website maps that supposedly cover the whole country. What's up with that? Anyhow, the seat appears to have been retained by 398-term delegate Eni Faleomavaega, who I actually quite like, especially since he was cool enough to do an interview with Steven Colbert that I posted way back when I first started this blog. And later come on our show and talk about how terrible an idea some of those Constitutional "revisions" were.

But the only really funny thing about that race, besides Tuika Tuika in general (who is really not the "ha ha" kind of funny), is that early on, a candidate who should probably remain nameless ran on the campaign slogan "Manifest Our Destiny," apparently not knowing any of the horrible Indian-killing history behind Manifest Destiny. But I never got to tell her, because she probably would have pulled all of those ads that she ran with us using that slogan.

Yeah. Now you know what my sense of humor looks like when I'm really tired.

Something I meant to post ages ago!

2010-10-15T22:39:00.003-11:00

No time to write about the days after the tsunami now, but I'm really due for another entry while I work on one about something else entirely.

Here's some epic ukulele playing here on-island from a few months back. It's by Taimane, who is basically the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele. She's so awesome that she would play duets with Don Ho, even though she's currently only 21, meaning that she would have been about 18 at the time.

You may want to view these videos in a separate window by double-clicking them, unless you just don't care for the right side of videos.

Adam's Story Part 2: Pictures

2010-10-04T22:37:00.002-11:00

In the days and weeks after the tsunami last year, my TV channel wasn't running and wouldn't be for at least a few days. But as you might remember from my entry about the actual day, we did have some pretty strong contacts with the international media. So in lieu of regular work, I was to travel around the island and film/photograph the devastation on the island and send it to the Associated Press via an FTP server.

For the anniversary of the tsunami, I had planned on posting an album of photos that I had taken all over the island in the days and weeks after the event, but I was slowed down for a very good reason¹.

But anyway, it's finished now and is available for viewing here on Facebook.

I've actually lost a lot of my 2009 photo archive, so, lucky for you, it's a normal-sized album instead of the enormous monstrosities that I tend to create.

I had wanted to also write about some specifics of what I did, but I figured that this entry is late enough already. Hopefully, I'll get to do that next time.

¹I'm just now getting into the show Lost, which is a program that I can really relate to.

Under Pressure

2010-09-14T18:19:00.003-11:00

As I write this, it's raining outside. Hard. I mean like really hard, maybe even for here. Plus it's really consistent and the tradewinds are still blowing, so it's just generally very nasty outside. There's some kind of low pressure system, maybe a trough, that's been hanging over the island for at least a week now. I'm so used to constant rain here that I think I've completely lost track. I don't know that much about it, partly because both local news outlets that I follow¹ covered it for about one story last Friday and then went on to other things.

In fact there was a lot of flooding on the roads both yest-*BZZZZZZZT* *BZZZZZZZZT* *BZZZZZZZZZT*

*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP*

FLASH FLOOD WARNING
ASZ001-002-150800-

BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
FLASH FLOOD WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PAGO PAGO AS
600 PM SST TUE SEP 14 2010

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN PAGO PAGO HAS ISSUED A

* FLASH FLOOD WARNING FOR
TUTUILA AUNUU AND MANUA...

* UNTIL 900 PM SST

* AT 550 PM SST...AN UPPER-LEVEL TROUGH HAS GENERATED
HEAVY RAINFALL OVER TUTUILA AUNUU AND MANU`A. THE
WEATHER SERVICE OFFICE IN TAFUNA RECEIVED OVER 1 INCH
OF RAINFALL DURING THE LAST HOUR. HEAVY RAINFALL
OF 2 TO 4 INCHES WILL CAUSE FLASH FLOODING OF SMALL
STREAMS IN LOW LYING AREA AND ROADS. LAND AND MUD SLIDES
WILL OCCUR DUE TO HEAVY RAIN AND RUNOFFS.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
A FLASH FLOOD WARNING MEANS FLASH FLOODING IS IMMINENT
OR OCCURRING IN STREAMS...ROADS AND LOW LYING AREAS. MOVE
TO HIGHER GROUND IMMEDIATELY IF YOUR HOME IS IN A FLOOD
PRONE AREA.

DO NOT CROSS FAST FLOWING OR RISING WATER IN YOUR
VEHICLE OR ON FOOT. REPORT SEVERE WEATHER TO THE LOCAL
POLICE OFFICIALS OR THE EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER (EOC)
...THEY WILL RELAY YOUR REPORT TO THE NATIONAL WEATHER
SERVICE OFFICE.

&&

$$

LAPATAIGA MO LOLOGA MA TAFEGA TETELE
OFISA O LE TAU
600 AFIAFI ASO LUA SETEMA 14 2010

...UA I AI NEI LAPATAIGA MO LOLOGA MA TAFEGA TETELE MO TUTUILA AUNUU MA
MANU`A E OO ATU I LE 9 I LE PO NANEI...

O TIMUGA MAMAFA MA FAITITILI UA MAFUA MAI I TULAGA LOULOUA O LE TAU O LE
A MAFUA AI LOLOGA MA TAFEGA MO NOFOAGA MAUALALALO...FAAPEA FO`I SOLOGA
MAI MAUGA MA NOFOAGA MAUALULUGA.

E LAPATA`I ATU LE MAMALU LAUTELE INA IA AUA NE`I FAAFOEINA TAAVALE
I NOFOAGA MA ALATELE UA MATUA LOLO VAIA. IA TAGA`I ANE FO`I I NOFOAGA
TU LATA I MAUGA MO NI SOLOGA.

FAAMOLEMOLE VALAAU VAVE LE OFISA O SAOGALEMU LAUTELE MA LE EOC...E RIPOTI
ANE AI NI LOLOGA MA TAFEGA.

IA FAAUTAGIA MAI LENEI LAPATAIGA MA PUIPUIA LOA LOU SOIFUA MA AU MEA
TOTINO.

$$

BAQUI

(That seriously was issued while I was writing this. And our radio stations really did an EAS bulletin for it. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog entry already in progress)

-and that's how they got rid of all the dead dogs they had lying all over the place. With a mail sack.²

But yeah, it's kinda weird how so many people just keep going about their normal everyday lives as if it wasn't flooding outside. From what I've seen, this kind of thing happens once or twice a year here, and I guess if you've been living on the Rock your entire life, you really don't think that much of it. Maybe that's why the news isn't covering it very much.

Anyhow, the big way that it affects me, other than basically not being able to do anything outside, including things like take out the trash, is driving. On the NWS website, underneath the bulletin that I posted above, there was a second one that said to avoid driving until the flood alert has been lifted. I discovered this right after driving home.

As I and just about any other person who's driven on this island will tell you, driving on this island is a) more difficult and b) more dangerous. There's a lot of different "rules." Not real rules, mind you, but just a totally different driving style. People merge onto the road from driveways by cutting everyone off. People stop in the middle of the highway with 10 cars following them to let a single car merge onto the road, thinking that they're being courteous. People will go into the lane made for oncoming traffic to dodge a pothole in their lane, a rough spot that looks like it may become a pothole sometime soon, or even a metal plate covering up a pothole. Or sometimes just because it gets them around a curve faster. Somewhere around a third of drivers don't turn on their headlights until it's 100% pitch black.³ People drive 10 miles under the speed limit. (OK, I know that that last one happens in the States all the time, but here the speed limit is 25 MPH and there's almost no passing zones.) And aiga bus drivers are the worst about all of these. But eventually you learn to expect all of these things and adapt to them as best you can.

But it gets much worse when there's a trough overhead. The roads flood in seemingly random places, occasionally deeply enough to stall a car, as I know all too well. There's at least one spot on my daily commute where I can hear the water sloshing against the underside of my car. People veer into oncoming traffic to drive through the shallow end. The potholes all become hidden. That same third of drivers still leave their lights off, even if it's 30 minutes to sundown and severe thunderstorms are cutting visibility to next to nothing. And of course, everyone is driving slower than usual.

So, uh, I hope it clears up soon. Especially because I have outdoor plans for this weekend.

And this song seems appropriate. Partly because of it's lyrics, and partly because it will not leave my head until it clears up outside.

¹It's best that I don't get started on the other two news outlets, one of which is known to mostly just copy our radio newscast word-for-word without giving our newsteam any credit whatsoever. Plus, neither one has an active news website anyhow.

²This is from a true story, but it's totally, totally unbloggable. Ask Jason Thomas if you know him. If I'm very, very lucky and everything goes according to plan, I'll get to record him telling it and make it into a Flash cartoon. But first I have to get Flash, learn how to use it, and record Jason's story.

³When I first started driving here, people were flashing their lights at me to let me know that I left mine on accidentally, because surely no one would be using theirs just because it's overcast out.

Mini-Adventures on the Docks

2010-09-01T20:13:00.002-11:00

I end up going on a lot of mini-adventures here on the Rock. I might go for a quick hike and discover an amazing view that I've never seen before. I might take a wrong turn and end up at the beautiful Turtle and Shark Site at sunset. I might stop on the way home from work to take a picture of a departing cruise ship and find myself running all over the docks.

Sorry I didn't give any hints to which one this was in the title.

Better check it out while it's still viewable to the general public, as I'm going to set it to be only visible to Facebook friends in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and if your attention span is as short as mine is-

Sorry, I got distracted. What was I saying? Oh yeah. If your attention span is as short as mine is and you get bored easily, the first thirteen pictures are the more interesting ones.

We Can't Stop Here...

2010-08-25T21:46:00.008-11:00

...this is BAT COUNTRY!

American Samoa is a batty place. Bats are everywhere. One of my favorite ways to relax at the end of the day is to sit out on my balcony at dusk and watch the bats, or flying foxes, glide overhead by the dozens. It's a pretty cool thing to see. I'm not sure when it happened, but I got used to them a while ago and can even handle domesticated ones just fine. I think this started about a year ago when my friend Pirate Chris took one to a party with it hanging on his back the entire time and let me hold it for a while.

This is how vampires are made.

But what I'm getting to is that lately I've been working on a super-mega-special project. It's a mini-documentary about...BATS! And I even uploaded it to YouTube to share with you!¹

It's pretty good, considering how quickly we rushed it out before Hideyo, the host, had to leave the island for an awesome work-related trip to Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, and several other places that I can't even remember. Lucky.

But here it is. You might have to double-click it and watch it in YouTube, unless you just don't care for the right half of videos:

I have a little confession to make: The bat in that video is not a real wild one, but a very docile pet bat owned by our friend Alden. He let us borrow her for the video. Her name is Luna, and she's too young to fly away on us.

Luna is about the cutest widdle Pteropus samoensis you've ever seen. She's like a puppy. A dark, winged, half-hairless puppy that would make a lot of people scream. But I'm pretty used to her, so I can see her more like a sweet little animal. She also likes to nibble on fingers like a puppy.

Here's some stills from clips I didn't use:

Luna hangs with Hideyo during a break in filming.

She was hanging off the back of the driver's headrest during all the driving bits. Sometimes she wanted to sit up front, though.

Luna hangs on my stomach and gives it a quick lick during my turn to hold her. She was really into licking the salty sweat off of our hands.

Luna takes interest in the video camera. She's actually hanging off of the lens hood in this one. 'Sokay, it's not my camera.

Hideyo shows off Luna's wingspan a bit. Fruit bats grow to be the largest bats in the world, up to a meter in length.

¹Well, it's technically a compressed version of the video. Uploading the full-sized video file at my connection speed would have taken 11 hours. Which I tried to do anyway, but it got an error somewhere around the 8th hour. Really.

Down With the Sickness

2010-08-14T13:48:00.007-11:00

It's the dead of winter here right now. The tradewinds sweep the island, and the thermometer reads a chilly 75°F. A few people walk around wearing sweaters and blankets.

I started getting a sore throat last Tuesday, which was a bad sign, since I had just been sick about two weeks before. I chose to ignore it, convincing myself that I just had allergies to the huge amount of dust that had been kicked up by changing one of the carpets in the studio or maybe my old leaf mold allergy has come back, since it is the dead of winter here and therefore the closest thing we have to fall. Hey, if you're sick and therefore feverish and delusional, it makes sense. So anyhow, I figured that I must be feeling good enough to go on that hike along the island's southern coast.

Wrong. Totally worn out by the end of that day and a full-blown bad cold the next.

There's something going around the island. My boss says he's sick, Larry, the company president is apparently sick, and at least one kid from my church is sick with the same thing. I guess having a lot of people crowded into and mostly unable to leave this one little area makes for a breeding ground for germs. Especially in the dead of winter.

I took Monday off and stayed in bed. Still sick. By Thursday I had had enough and bit the bullet and went into LBJ.

The thing about LBJ Tropical Medical Center is that it sucks. This really isn't a controversial thing to say, because even the people that work there know it's terrible for a hospital. It's ridiculously underfunded, understaffed, and undersomethingelsedthatIcan'tthinkofthewordfor. Politicians know it has problems, to the point that they consistently campaign on getting it properly funded. It's bad enough that even travel guides tell you that if you get sick, just stick it out until you can get to the better hospitals in Apia. The first time I went to LBJ there I sat around for four hours waiting to get a prescription to get some meds refilled, watching the Disney Channel in the waiting room the entire time, and was told to come back on Monday to try again.

This time I was going to avoid that sort of mess. I was going on a weekday. I asked one of my coworkers the day before if I needed to make an appointment first. Nope, just walk in. I got there and found out I should have made an appointment. After about 30 minutes of waiting, I think one of the receptionists started to worry about my cough and sent me to the ER, which actually had fewer people waiting in it. After only 15 minutes of Disney Channel later did I get to see a doctor, who prescribed me some cough syurp and antibiotics and a note to take the rest of the week off.

Next up was a visit to the hospital pharmacy. I drew #34 from the "take a number" dohicky. The LED sign said that they were now serving #11. Wasn't this a scene at the end of the movie Beetlejuice? Anyhow, this is better than the old system, where they would yell out the numbers in Samoan. 23 numbers and one discovery that there were no water fountains left in this part of the building later, I got my antibiotics, my Robitussin, and...a syringe with no needle? I didn't notice that one until later, but I have no idea what it's for. This is still a lot less weird than the time they gave my friend Jeremy magic mouth wash¹:

Well, it's now Saturday evening an I've made progress, but I'm still not totally better. But I've learned a few things:

- Don't go hiking if you're sick, even if it's just a little cold and it's warm outside

- You actually do need to make appointments to see the General Practice doctors at LBJ.

- A needleless syringe is a great way to measure out the correct amount of cough syrup.

- Cough syrup is a lot easier to take if you drink something syurpy immediately before and after. The syrupy stuff coats your tongue a little and forms a barrier from the cough medicine.

- Tissues are $1.75 a box here. Dang.

- Hawaiian Punch, which is loaded with vitamin C,² fills the "something syurpy" requirement, and apparently about the same price per gallon at Cost-U-Lots than it does at a mainland Wal-Mart, about $5 and some change. It's not, however, really made in Hawaii, which is kind of disappointing.

- Don't wanna carry several trashcans full of tissues down three flights of steps, especially when you're sick? Most apartments have a built-in chute for taking care of that sort of thing.

- Being bedridden with illness is a great time to write blog entries you wouldn't have written otherwise.

Also, just because. (NSFW language)

¹ It's come to my attention that magic mouth wash is apparently a real thing, but I can't seem to find the blog entry that it originated from to see if that's what he actually had been given.

² Buying this for colds made a lot more sense before I knew vitamin C doesn't really do anything for them.

Here is the News

2010-08-09T16:41:00.002-11:00

Man, sometimes working in the media is hard.

Like how a few weeks ago, a couple of tiny and seemingly insignificant screws slowly worked their way out of our video camera.¹ Problem is, those were load-bearing screws (or something like that) and without them, the camera fell off of the tripod and...let's just say that "viewfinder" is a terrible name, because I still haven't been able to view or find all of that camera's viewfinder ever since. And more importantly, it still won't attach to a tripod.

So on the afternoon of July 22nd, I had sealed it up for shipping it to the closest place I could find that would repair a video camera mailed to them (Burbank, CA) when I learned that it needed more packing materials. I sliced its box back open and added some.

And then I heard about the shooting. A police officer had been shot in front of the High Court in downtown Fagatogo, just about a mile from the office.

On an island that doesn't allow handguns, not even for cops, this is a totally shocking thing. It's been years since the last shooting in the territory. This was apparently a revenge shooting; it later turned out that the victim had arrested the mother of the shooter on an outstanding warrant when she returned to the island to attend the trial that the officer in question (Lt.
Brown) was protecting at the time of the shooting.

Monica, our news director, breaks into our regulatory scheduled radio programs with a report about the shooting. There's a clip of La, her assistant, breaking into tears as she describes the shooting that she just witnessed firsthand while she was interviewing one of the lawyers for the case.

But oddly enough, since I'm not really in news production, I go back to what I was doing and tape the box for the camera closed for a second time. Then a few minutes later I realize that maybe I should go down to the scene of the shooting and take some footage. I clear it with the boss, get Kolio to drive me down there (my car still isn't fixed), cut open the camera box for the second time, find a stick mic, and ride down to the scene of the crime.

We arrive, and it's has mostly emptied out, but the entire parking lot in front of the courthouse is still roped off with ~~police tape~~ "CAUTION! OPEN DITCH" tape. There's still a few police vehicles and a firetruck (?) on the scene. I grab some halfway-decent tripodless shots of police and eyewitnesses mulling around from the front porch of the Sadie Thompson Inn across the street. I meet some people who are able to point me to an eyewitness. She's still shaken; afraid to say her name or let us show her face for fear of retribution from the shooter's family. I let her just speak into the microphone and I point the camera at the ground. Monica and La would still be able to use the audio for their radio news program. The eyewitness has seen some pretty terrifying things. The shooter is a very big guy, and it took several cops to finally wrestle him to the ground and take the gun away from him. A second officer was shot in the hand before it was all over.

After the interview, Kolio finds something else. There's a big bloodstain on the ground from where the shooting was. Jeez. I film what I need of it, and also a forensics guy taking pictures of it.

Then we rush back to the station and Joey leads me in slicing the 10 minutes or so of footage that I have into an approximately 30-second clip that we will upload to the FTP server of a guy in Hawaii who will send it on to any major media outlets that may want it. As far as I know, none of them ever used it. But the story was carried on a number of major news outlets, including NPR Australian ABC, and the Associated Press.

I went back to the station and sat down at my computer. In front of me was an open audio file of some sort. It turned out that La had been recording an interview at the time of the shooting, and actually captured the audio of the entire incident. It was the most disturbing thing I've ever heard. Were the full version of it to have really gotten out, I think it might have gotten up there with the Budd Dwyer suicide or the tape of Timothy Treadwell's death. A heavily edited version of La's clip was aired during the afternoon newscast, which can be found as part of the story on the station's news website here. I wouldn't recommend listening to it if you don't have that much of a connection to the island, but I will say that it's not half as scarring as the unedited version.

The following day, the Samoa News carried about a dozen photos of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, including the shooter kicking Detective Brown's body and the arrest. I know that I'm in the minority on this here, but they were right to carry these photos. There is a human tendency to ignore information that we don't like, and the fact that something this horrible can happen here is one of those bits of information. This shooting was very much drug-related, and there have been many reports of a serious drug problem here on the island, including serious things like crystal meth, but what do we do when we hear them? Seriously demand more action from our elected leaders? Volunteer for or donate to anti-drug programs? Nope, most people will say "Oh, how terrible" then immediately stick their heads in the sand and mentally pretend that it never happened. It's the natural, easy thing to do. We all want to believe that we live anywhere in a perfectly safe, secure island paradise and that problems like drugs and revenge killings are limited to other parts of the world, but not here.

When my aunt died a terrible death of lung cancer a few years ago, we all wished that more people could have seen her in that state. That image of her lying their in terrible pain, wasting away in a time where she should have had at least 20 good years left, was the strongest deterrent to smoking that will ever encounter. Just like how most people here want to pretend that the island is a drug-free paradise, most smokers are in denial that they're setting themselves up for a slow, painful death.

Similarly, running those photos and airing that audio punches you in the face with cold, hard reality and tells you "THIS IS WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING!" At the same time, if I were the one who decides what would be in the paper, I would have put one of the less graphic but still important photos on the front page and put the others on the inside somewhere. You only need to punch faces so hard to keep people from being in denial about the world around them. I feel like it would make more sense to put the majority of the more graphic photos on the inside, so that at least kids wouldn't have to see them. I also now understand why the Charlotte Observer ran those photos of the American contractors whose charred bodies had been hung over the bridge in Fallujah, Iraq. It feels like in some way, you're reading/hearing a totally different story if all of the graphic elements are censored.

A lot of people have also said that the images shouldn't be published out of respect for Detective Brown's family, but is that family actually going to go out and buy the paper knowing what's going to be in it? I doubt that. We really just don't want anyone to "rock the boat" of our pleasant-enough view of the world. Also, I've only heard one person complain about the airing of our audio clip, which is pretty good, considering the dozens that complained about the paper's photos.

La was very shaken by what she witnessed for the next day or so, but she seems fine now.

There was at least one other interesting impact that the release of La's recording made. The AP version of the story was posted to a news website that I frequent with a somewhat inflamatory gun-control headline. Due to some very good timing, I was able to be one of the first commentators and post a link to the recording along with a reminder that this tragedy was a REAL horror with REAL pain for real people and NOT a political football for people to "prove" that their preexisting beliefs on the gun issue. Surprisingly, this was actually effective, and the responses were a lot more respectful and muted than what that site is known for.

What's up next for this story? The first pretrial hearings for the alleged shooter have begun, and apparently there is the possibility for the island to have its first execution since 1939. The article says that that execution was by hanging, and that there was an attempt to officially switch the method of execution to lethal injections in 2003, which failed. Does this mean that there could be a 21st-century hanging on the island? Heck if I know, but my instincts say they'll try to avoid that somehow.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Lt. Brown's family.

Also, I'll put this here just because.

¹Yes, we really only have one, except some older ones that are permanently part of the set of The 411.

Barky and the Eel

2010-07-29T20:21:00.003-11:00

So I really need to write a lengthy, detailed account of what it was like covering last week's terrible shooting, but I'm too tired, thanks to one of the neighbors having a new dog that likes to bark whenever it sees a bird, hears another dog, sees a leaf fall from a tree, hears something that might possibly be a ghost, when the sun is out, when it's raining, or whenever its nighttime. Especially whenever it's nighttime. And of course, whenever one dog starts barking, all the others in the neighborhood feel jealous and have to bark along.

I don't think I've ever seen him, but I've nicknamed the new dog Barky. So blame Barky on this entry-like substitute product. And other things that aren't worth writing about.

But anyway, I have to put something in here, so why not ready the highly cultural Samoan tale of Sina and the Eel? It's probably best that you read it before continuing with this entry.

What? You want it in English? Fine then, be that way. Miss out on half the experience. Read it in English.

Well, if you're really lazy, you can even watch an animated version of it here, although I noticed that about 90% of the story is different from the written version, which I'm inclined to believe is more like the original.

And here's another link you'll probably appreciate if your name happens to be Anna Leonard. But there's another cool story at the bottom that I think anyone can enjoy.

Island Tropes

2010-07-16T20:19:00.002-11:00

So it seems that I promised ~~a while back~~ sometime last year to make a glossary of the various nicknames that I've given to things and phenomena on the island. Some of them are long-standing, but most of them I came up with on my own. I actually started on this back in January, but my article on crazy things that happen here was cut short by a village-wide power outage with no apparent cause.

Also, I'm a big fan of a site called TVTropes, which is basically a wiki of story devices where the users give names to all the recurring phenomena that they notice. That's sort of what I'm doing here with a lot of these entries.

The Rock/The Island/The Village/AmSam/AmSamoa/The Unorganized Territory- Uh, I think you can figure this one out. No one I've asked is really certain if the part-Samoan wrestler/actor had the "Rock" nickname first, but I'm guessing he got it from the island and not the other way around.

Samoa/Western Samoa/Western/Indie Samoa/The Independent State of Samoa™- The island nation next to this one.

Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom (TMMT)- A great book by Gary Trudeau, author of the Doonesbury comic strip. The strip had a series in the mid-seventies where the Uncle Duke character was Governor of the territory for a while. Somehow, that lead to Trudeau and a few friends coming down here to stay for two weeks not long after. The book is the story of their experience, interspersed with the comics of the Uncle Duke governorship. I like to reference it a lot. The title comes from anthropologist Margaret Mead's famously wrong book Coming of Age in Samoa, from which the name of this blog is derived.

ASG/GAS- The American Samoa Government. The government of the territory. About 1/3rd of the local population works for them in some branch or other. The GAS nickname was created by Trudeau in TMMT.

LBJ- Lyndon Baines Johnston Tropical Medical Center. The only hospital or even decent-sized doctor's office on the island. It's run by ASG. Try to avoid going there if you can.

Everything's an Import- Probably somewhere around 90% of everything you buy on the island was imported from someplace thousands of miles away. Cars are imported. Lumber is imported. TVs are imported. Furniture is mostly imported. Much of the food is imported (especially the food I eat). Soap is imported. It's weird to buy jelly at the store and think about how it sailed thousands of miles in a container filled with hundreds of other jelly jars just to end up in a sandwich with too much peanut butter.

The Price of Paradise- A phrase, common in Hawaii, meaning that everything is expensive when Everything's an Import. But it's the price you pay for living here. Also, there's a price tag on nearly everything you buy, so that you'll be reminded that you paid $4 for a jar of jelly until the day you use it up and pay $4 for another one.

FOB/Fobling- A person who's Fresh Off the Boat, AKA just got here and blissfully naive of everything. AKA a noob of teh island. I've heard this one used around here all the time, and also saw it in a video from New Zealand. "Fobling" can also refer to the child of a FOB or the kind of English or Samoan that they speak.

Diverse but Not- According to the 2000 census, the island is about 91% Pacific Islanders. But That 9% is one of the most wildly diverse groups of people you'll ever see. There are plenty of Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, and white people form all over. And I have friends from places as far away as the Azores Islands and Madagascar. And of course, not all of those Pacific Islanders are Samoans. Going by the languages on that same link, about 3% are Tongans. Then again the island is still overwhelmingly one group of people. So it's diverse, but not.

Foreign But Not- I've mentioned this before, but this territory is treated both as a part of the States as well as a foreign country all the time. On one hand, it uses the Dollar, the US military recruits from here, we have most American TV channels, we have McDonald's and KFC, US Mail comes here at the same cost as any other part of the country, and landline phone calls to the mainland count as domestic. On the other hand, UPS and FedEx definitely charge international rates, the culture is very different, we have CNN International instead of CNN US, most websites automatically detect that users here are "Outside the United States" and restrict what video clips we can see accordingly, and the McDonald's restaurants here are definetly the "international" (or "clean") kind.

Not In Africa- I told a lot of people that I was going to American Samoa, and a lot of them said "Isn't that in Africa!?" People tend to confuse Samoa with Somalia. But the majority of people I talked to before I left just knew that it was out in the Pacific somewhere. Similarly, most people here know that North Carolina is a state on the mainland somewhere. Although there was one person who confused it with New Caledonia. I'd feel a lot better if that person hadn't been involved with doing my taxes.

Reverse Door Logic- Plenty of doors to shops and such open the opposite way that you'd expect them to. If you're outside a store and it has a horizontal bar for pushing, then it probably opens outward by pulling. If a door here has a vertical handle made for grasping and pulling, then it probably opens by pushing. And sometimes, no handle at all means you need to cram your fingers in between the door and its frame and wedge it open. And then to complicate things, not every building uses Reverse Door Logic, so you'll never totally get used to one door type or the other. My theory is that a lot of people just hung their doors on backwards and didn't care.

Cashfull Society- Aside from bars and restaurants, I'd say that only about 10% of stores here take credit cards. It's complicated to set them up or something. I only know of one gas station that takes them. And there are plenty of people here who can't be trusted with checks, most of whom have their pictures posted at the front of the stores they ripped off, along with a scan of their bad check for all to see. So around here, cash is tupu, or king. Everyone tries to avoid the banks on government payday, because they lines will be stuffed with people turning their paychecks into cash.

The Washing Machine Effect- All that cash that everyone's using gets circulated a lot, but its not really going anywhere. It's not very likely to leave the island, except maybe in the pockets of someone flying or sailing out. So, just like cash that gets left in the washing machine, it goes around and around and gets worn out. The same thing happens with coins, which seem to stay in circulation here forever. I think I'd seen about five bicentennial quarters in my life before I moved here. Now I see them all the time. I know this whole phenomenon has been going on since at least the time that TMMT was written.

Island Shipping Time- I don't care what the little computer at the post office told you, shipping packages down here takes quite some time. Two weeks if you use Priority Mail, about six if you go with standard mail. Sending something via UPS or FedEx will involve it taking even longer to bounce all over the Pacific Rim (Seriously, it will do something like LA-Honolulu-Hong Kong-Singapore-Apia-Pago Pago) and cost around $100 for even a small package. Go with USPS.

Phantom Television- A phenomenon I blogged about when I first got here, which is about how the majority of cable TV channels are on a two-week tape delay. That's how long it takes for the drives that the shows were recorded on to get here. It's based on the really cool sci-fi idea that TV signals continue traveling forever into the outer reaches of space once they've been broadcast, and how we're looking into past "dead" shows just by turning on our TVs. I've been told that it's one a one-week delay in the CNMI and three weeks in Palau. Since the installation of the fiber-optic cable last summer, they've been switching channels to a live feed from Hawaii one by one.

Outer Rim Territories- My Star Wars-based nickname for all of the US territories and possessions. There are more than you might think.

Island Internet- It's slow. I pay $75 a month for 125 Kb/s. That's standard for homes here. And even that bit of speed tends to vary a lot, mostly on who else is using it. You get used to it.

Awkward International Moment- When a text message of a friend wakes you up at 3 AM because they forgot how time zones work. When you order something from the mainland and they think you're going to be upset because they won't be able to ship it until the next morning. When you're downloading something large with Island Internet from a public storage site and it asks you if you want to pay $29.95 a month to download it faster, because they limit free downloads to just 500 Kb/s. When someone from off-island suggests you pick up a bus schedule, buy something from Wal-Mart, or get up-to-date information from the website of an office of ASG. Basically, anything that makes you have to stop and explain to someone a thing or two about life here.

Always Dark Early- Because we're so close to the Equator, the sun usually sets around 6:30 every day. That doesn't leave a whole lot of daylight for those of us who work 9-5 (pretty much just the company I work for). There's only a small variation in the length of days between summer and "winter."

Two Seasons- I like to say that we have two seasons here: "Rainy" (Nov-April) and "Less Rainy" (the rest of the year).

Unbloggable- When something is best left not blogged about. Usually involves sponsors, something a little too offensive, something that would terrify my mother, or something that's best left unsaid. The Car Saga is a big unbloggable thing that's been going on in my life lately, and a lot of the reason why so many recent entries have been about life here in general and not about what I'm doing.

The Car Saga- Suffice to say that my car's been broken since mid-April and it's been quite a task trying to get it fixed. And because of the Price of Paradise, getting a new one is out of the question. Oh, and a lot of people on online car repair forums think that all islands are small enough that everyplace on them is in walking distance.

The Falcon- My car. Named after the Millennium Falcon, because "She might not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid." That is, she actually runs. Or she did when I named it.

The Nest- My apartment. Named that because 1) It's the parking place of the Falcon 2) It's messy, like a rat's nest, and 3) It's the name of Elon's basketball arena.

The highway- American Samoa 001, the main highway on the island. Don't go thinking it's an Interstate; it's really just a one-lane-in-each-direction deal; basically the equivalent of a state highway. It has more curves than Christina Hendricks.

Aiga Bus- The buses on the island. They're made out of heavily modified pickup trucks, and riding them is quite the experience. Right now they're my transportation to work. I've blogged about them before.

Aiga Bus Uncertainty Principle- I don't think you can ever be totally sure where an aiga bus is headed until it's almost there, but I'm now up to the point where I can predict with 80% certanty where most of them are headed. I think this one may deserve an entry of its own.

Future tropes will be added in separate entries.

Like a rerun that I worked really hard on!

2010-07-05T22:12:00.003-11:00

So I'm sure that many of you have thought "Man, that entry on Adam's trip home was amazing! If only there was some way he'd make another entry out of it, with much less conventional blogging and around 110 more photos."

Well, today is your lucky day! I've made a supersized photo album of my trip home with captions for every photo, even the ones that would have been better off without them!

And it will even be open to those of you who aren't my Facebook friends, for a few weeks anyhow.

Someone Noticed We Exist!

2010-06-28T20:57:00.004-11:00

No, not this blog itself. But a major media outlet, namely the New York Times, did notice that American Samoa is having a Constitutional Convention, or Con-Con.¹

I can't think of the last story about the territory from a off-island source that wasn't about corruption, a natural disaster, or a near natural disaster.

Oh wait, yes I can. Just a few weeks ago we were listening to one of the other radio stations on the island, and a Radio New Zealand news break had a newscast covering the South Pacific with more than one story about the territory. One was about a man who was smashing everything in someone's house with a hammer, including the police who showed up to stop his hammertime. This led to a follow-up story that maaaayyybe we should give the local police weapons of some sort. Maybe.

Those of you who are actually interested in the Con-Con can follow it at Talanei.com, our radio station's new news site. At least 50% more coherent than other local news websites, guaranteed!²

¹ Every time I hear those words, I get excited for a second, thinking that there is going to be a Comic Con of some sort. Then I realize what I actually just heard, and get disappointed.

² Offer not guaranteed.

Cheesy Story, Bro!

2010-06-17T21:28:00.006-11:00

So I was back in Cost-U-Lots the other day, and I was looking to get some cheddar cheese for making lasagna, and I come across a big package in the big fridge thingie. Having spent enough time on the Rock to know all the important things, I checked the expiration date.

It had gone bad almost a week earlier.

But more importantly, I can't find the big bottles of Coke made in Fiji with real sugar that I like. So I find someone to help me and ask where the Cokes have been moved to (she doesn't know) and that oh yeah, there's dairy products in the fridge that's about to start coming with some free penicillin, if you get my drift.

She doesn't know what to do, so she gets her manger. They have a lengthy conversation in Samoan. We all go over and look at the cheese together. Yep, it's still expired. Finally, he tells me "The lady will come by and lower the price tomorrow morning."

Yeah.

Wait, Google tells me that it's safe to eat until it starts to get moldy, but I don't really think anyone should be selling it.

Annnd now another site is telling me that it's safe to eat cheddar for at least 3 months after its expiration date. Nevermind. Sorry everyone, I'm just not much of a cheese-eater. Too late at night to erase this now-pointless entry and write a new one. No one in this story did anything dumb but me. At least I got my big bottle of Coke.

Visiting Home

2010-06-09T20:50:00.012-11:00

Sooo, what I have here is an entry that I started while I was at home, but couldn't finish, because that's just how much stuff I was doing. Enjoy anyhow.
________________________________________________________

I've been back in the states for about three weeks now, and I'm still unable to answer one fundamental question, one that all visitors to the Rock contemplate at one time or another, one so common that at least one blog that I know of takes its title from it:

Was any of that real?

Seriously. It just blows my mind how everything here is so different. Or maybe I should say that it is not not different. Everything on the Rock is different, and here it's the same that it's always been. Understand? Good, explain it to me.

And those differences makes for some good stories. The buildings there are different. The food is different. The driving style is different. The ATMs are different. And if you plug your clock into the wall, time moves differently.

But suddenly I'm back home and everything is the way it's always been: predictable. The buildings are made with tile roofs. The food is classic American. You can use most ATMs without getting out of your car. Time moves at about the same speed no matter what kind of clock you're using. It's like I spent the last 18 months in a dream and have suddenly woken up. OR HAVE I?

I'm not going to spend 15 entries detailing everything that I've done while here, but instead I'll just offer up some moments that really struck me:

Mispronouncing the name of a certain bus stop in LA twice, and not getting laughed at. This is the moment where I knew I was no longer on the Rock.

Riding a bus from the airport seated next to a person who, due to some sort of cosmic coincidence, is on his way to Guam for the first time.

Eating lunch with my college friend and host Ben in an LA restaurant, and people behind me are actually discussing a TV show for more than thirty seconds. And in English!

HOLY CRAP FREEWAY!

Yes, I was amazed enough to take a picture. Riding on this was, and I quote, "Just like NASCAR!"

Being in front row of the audience of the Tonight Show with Scarlett Johansson as the guest. She's apparently been in some movies or something, but in my world, she is most famous for this photo:

Eating Krispy Kreme. Yessss.

Hanging out with, and more importantly, getting Chipotle with, Ben and our friend Catherine, the latter of whom was awesome enough to get us those Tonight Show tickets.

Discovering that Venice Beach has somehow gotten wilder since I last visited LA in 2006. I didn't think that was possible.

Spotting the Carolina Panthers' team plane parked at Charlotte/Douglas Airport

Seeing my parents for the first time in nearly a year.

And my dog, too. Was she ever surprised to see me!

And my sister. I saw her as well. Since it was her college graduation that I came home for and all.

Staying in a mountain cabin for a week with a view like this:

It looks even better if you mentally remove all the blue discoloration caused by my cameraphone.

Actually feeling truly cold weather for the first time since November 2008.

Getting my hair cut by my sister, who used a beard trimmer for most of it. Nothing like a haircut that involves getting as much hair yanked out as trimmed.

Watching my sister graduate college, complete with an awesome speaker who kept quoting Green Day. "This is the dawning of the rest of our lives."

Attending a huge party at the cabin that approximately 1 metric crapload of people showed up to, including a former Dean of the University.

Going hiking with my family

Going kayaking with my family

Going tubing with my family

Going fly fishing with my dad on an awesome guided tour where we didn't even have to untangle our lines.

Getting my car unfrozen from the cryogenic storage pod next to Walt Disney's head, which took about $80.

Slowly but surely learning how to drive over 30 MPH again.

Eating Chick-Fil-A. Yessss.

Going to Greensboro to see the epic play Avenue Q with my friends Stephanie and Tom and discovering that it's basically the perfect time in life for all of us to be seeing that show.

Giving my good friend and reader of this blog Anthony a lava lava, which he almost immediately started wearing as a cape, 'cause that's how he rolls.

Watching a music video that I directed in high school and then going out and eating dinner with the same friends that were in it. We ate at, of all places, a Filipino restaurant that's opened up since I've been away. I like it better than the one near my workplace.

Seeing Iron Man 2 and being blown away by the picture quality.

Attending a Charlotte Knights ballgame, which ended in a tie-breaking home run- wait scratch that, a really impressive foul ball. THAT WAS FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER HOME RUN BY THE SAME GUY!

Such a great turnout.

Going to the brand-new NASCAR Hall of Fame, which is the single most awesome museum ever.

While there, getting to be in the background of an ESPN2 show that was taping there. Yes, I called home and had it DVR'd.

Road tripping with my sister up to DC, then Delaware and the Baltimore area to see our grandmother and three other relatives. Of course, we also did plenty of the touristy stuff in DC.
Going to the beach in Delaware, which I just now realized means that I hit beaches on both coasts during this trip.

Going to Carowinds with family friend Mitchell, and, after going on nearly every ride, including the thrilling new Intimidator (that includes 10 rollercoasters, BTW) went for a swing on the Xtreme Skyflyer.

See that tiny speck by the top of the tower on the left in the back? That's where they drop you from

Okay, I've gotta break format to tell about this one; this picture just doesn't say enough. You have to pay extra for this, but it's worth it if you're completely insane. After being strapped into a harness, they tow you and up to three friends 153 feet up in the air. Someone with a bullhorn gives you a countdown, and you pull the release cord on yourself and swing, pendulum-style, toward the ground. It's been there since 1995 and I was always too scared or poor to go on it, but not this time.

One thing that's really unnerving about getting towed up is how you're hanging horizontally, with your face facing the ground, so that you both can't look anywhere but down and you don't know how high you are until you get to the top. I kept expecting to be there, but I just kept getting farther and farther away from the ground. Finally, we reached it, the guy below gave a countdown, and I gave the handle a yank.

Nothing.

I tried again. And again. Uh-oh.

"PULL THE YELLOW CORD!" yelled the bullhorn-guy below. I twisted around (a bit scary in itself) and saw that, genius that I am, I was pulling on one of the metal loops on my harness that didn't do anything. Behind it was the yellow handle. Despite ever instinct in my body, I gave it a yank and began plummeting from the top. I let out a Samoan war cry as I swung toward the earth at breakneck speed.

It's actually pretty fun once you get past the terror of that first drop. I have to credit my time on the Rock, a relatively dangerous place where your typical year involves an earthquake, a cyclone, and at least two flash floods, for eliminating my fears of silly amusement park rides that 100% of the thousands of people who have been on them have survived. Anyway...

Getting a new camera, so that you won't have to be subjected to all of these camera phone pictures.
Saying goodbyes and then flying from Charlotte to Dallas to LA (with a one night layover there) to Honolulu, only to see this unlikely mindscrew in HNL airport:

When you see it, you'll poop bricks.

Flying from there back to the Rock, on an unbelievably empty flight. We're talking about two dozen people total. Although I met some UH students who were headed down there for the first time and got to tell them all about what they were in for.

Fully realizing that I was back on the Rock when I called my cell phone's voicemail and was told that the caller is not responding at this time.

Of course, there were lots of other great moments that I will never forget, and good times had with family and friends, and lots more funny little culture-shock bits that deserve mention, but I'm tired. Too bad for them.

A Supersized Miniseries

2010-05-12T13:49:00.006-11:00

Sooo, I've been busy not being on the Rock lately, but have also been busy fixing connectivity problems with my laptop and doing other non-blogging things like watching my sister graduate from college and lying in the nice hot tub in the cabin that we've rented up here in the mountains of NC. Seeing as it will probably be a few days before I get to write about my time in the States thus far, starting with a few awesome days with friends in LA, here's a link that I've been holding out on sharing.

It's a supersized blog miniseries of a couple sailing across the ocean. Specifically the section about their travels through the Samoan islands. Actually, I'm not sure that you can really call it a blog, as it appears to have been written sometime in the 70's and eventually copied onto the Web. But the story is never dull. The woman is named Freddy and it only gets stranger from there. I'd personally skip everything on that first page that goes on about the universe being hourglass-shaped and similar to a kaleidoscope, but that's just me. Also, if you've enjoyed my friend Jeremy's blog, you'll probably like this guy's outlook on life.

Remember that the links to the next few pages of the story are at the bottom, under the section titled "Log Book Three." Or you could just click here for the next part, then here for the next then, here for the next, here for the next, then here, then here. I really just wish they'd have made that site a little more easy to navigate, but it took me at least ten minutes to figure that site out. But I also like linking things.

A couple of things:

1. I haven't really read most of what's in that, but I liked what I've read so far and intend to read it all at some point. Except for some overly detailed descriptions of their cat's medical problems at one point, I have yet to find anything offensive.
2. In case you're getting confused, they're going through all of the major Samoan islands in an west-east direction, starting with the most natural and probably most interesting one, Savai'i. Of course, this is the one that I have yet to be able to afford to go to.
3. Most of their adventures in the Samoas appear to take place in AmSam.
4. If you really enjoy reading it, you can always go back and start at the beginning, which starts off with their harrowing escape from Chinese pirates.

Oh yeah...

2010-05-02T17:37:00.002-11:00

Thought I'd mention that I'm about to embark on a monthlong trip home, which will mark my first visit to the mainland since getting here in November 2008. It's going to involve a few days with friends in LA, my sister's graduation form college, and numerous other mini adventures. I had a bigger entry planned out, but I didn't have time to write it.

Just thought it was worth making a note of.

A Tale of Lua Samoas, Part Six

2010-04-30T20:55:00.009-11:00

Wow. I expected to tell everything about my trip to Indie Samoa back in February in two or three entries. Anyhow, this entry should be enough to wrap it up.

Fagali'i Airport from the runway. All of it.

If you haven't figured it out¹ by now, the titles of this blog miniseries means "A Tale of Two Samoas." The two groups of islands share a common culture, landscape, and a lot of other things that it's too late at night to get into, but on another level they're very different.

I actually had something really long written out about exactly how they were different, but it basically came down to "Independent Samoa is way nicer because they have to earn their own money (as opposed to getting a ton of grants from the U.S.) and have to keep everything clean and at least halfway functioning in order to keep the tourists and business partners coming back. I have the long version of that saved where I really stretch out an old comparison of American Samoa to a career college student about as far as it will go and might get around to posting it some day.

I also realized how many Samoans living in AmSam are really from Independent Samoa, aren't all that crazy about The Rock, and just there to work. Kinda like me. Except for that part about being from Samoa.

Reefs off Upolu

I don't really have much more to say for this entry. Just enjoy the pictures of the flight back.

RainbOWNED!

Approaching Cape Taputapu, the westernmost corner of Tutuila.

Getting closer...

Wait a second, am I going back to..?

NOOOOOOOO!!

¹Googled it

Blackout

2010-04-22T20:36:00.003-11:00

Living in a quasi-third world territory with significant leftover tsunami damage, infrastructure here isn't all that great. There are power outages once every two months or so, and it's gotten worse since our friend Mike let his contract as CEO of the territorial power authority expire. In fact, there was a power outage just tonight. Allow me to break down how it went:

7:30 PM- Power went out abruptly.
7:35- Air conditioning is gone. Fear, denial begin to set in. Animal instincts start taking over.
7:40- Where did light go? Forage to find light. Find ancient flashlight so bright it once banned from Boy Scout campouts. Cave bright again!
7:45- Forage for food. Find hot food on stove, almost as if it had been there before power outage. Can't remember that far back, too long ago. Food good!
7:50- Airport officials take flashlight. Say they need to borrow it so 767 can land on runway safely.
7:55- Try to make own electricity by rubbing two stray cats together. Only a few sparks.
8:00- Try again, but add some car batteries and wire. Accidentally discover fire instead. Fire hot! Fire awesome! Find candle with picture of man named San Jose.* Wonder why man named after city in California. Fire burn candle!
8:10- Candle burns itself out. Adam laugh at absurdity of it all (and at bad pun about San Jose). Adam only pawn in game of life.
8:15- Realize I never made bed. Fashion crude stone tools, skin leopard to make a bed.
8:20- Can't let food in fridge go to waste. Mix animal blood with taco sauce from fridge to make paint. Begin work on elaborate cave painting.
8:30- Power came back on. Decided to finish cave painting.

*Readers with good memories will get it

Oof.

2010-04-15T21:22:00.000-11:00

At least it happened in Hawaii and not here:

A Tale of Lua Samoas, Part Five

2010-04-10T16:59:00.010-11:00

So after brunch, we went out to see Apia during the day.

The original Mr. LavaLava's, named after Samoa's first pimp daddy.

A Coke bottled in the Vailima plant.

750 ml. That's, what? 10 gallons?

So then we went out for a drive to find a nice beach to swim at. Problem was, it was Sunday, and most people here don't allow swimming on a Sunday, because...they don't know, actually. And I've asked. It's just an unquestioned tradition. So we drove around for a while looking for beaches where we could swim.

Canada? What are you doing way out here?

Useless fact: In my nearly 18 months of living in the Samoas, I have met people from as far away as Italy and Madagascar, but never any Canadians.

We went to another nice beach where we weren't allowed to swim.

As far as we could tell, this is what Canada is building there, very close to that same beach. They're climate change-proof fales or something.

So we went down a different road.
And passed some horses, the first ones I've seen since I left home. It was such an unexpected sight to see one by the road, it might as well have been a llama.
So then we arrived at the waterfall.

It has a nice overlook at the top of the steps.

This is actually one of two of Kolio's neighbors who went with us that I haven't mentioned yet.

And we finally got to go swimming here. But I don't have any pictures of that, because I was, you know, swimming.

It's actually a lot bigger than it looks in this pictures. And a lot less overexposed.

That's better.

It made for some really great swimming. It was deep enough that I couldn't even sense where the bottom was, which meant that you could jump in from some fairly high places. The current right below the waterfall is also pretty strong (pushing you away from the waterfall, not anything dangerous).

Then I had to get ready to go back to the Rock. But I still have one more entry to write about my trip back and some general reflections that finally explain the title that I've been using for this series of posts.

A Tale of Lua Samoas, Part 4

2010-04-05T21:12:00.005-11:00

So the next day, back at Kolio's, we start the day with a nice breakfast that I don't have any pictures of. But for lunch, everything is cooked on an umu. Umus are made as follows. A lot of these pictures are pretty blurry, but I'll try to remember what I can.

1. Start a small fire and let it burn a bit. Either that or put tinfoil over a bunch of reddish logs.

2. Dump the hot coals off of the sheet of metal onto a pile of rocks. Put out any remaining fire by stabbing it with a pointed stick.

3. Put a couple of foods, such as uh...yellow-looking things right up next to the coals.

4. Yeah, this one really does involve tin foil. Wrap up whatever it is you're cooking and get it ready. And make sure you have plenty of leaves.

5. Tinfoil things
___________
Leaves
___________
Hot Coals

Yeah, sometimes I'm too lazy to use sentences.

6. Put more leaves on top of the whole shebang. That should make it all oven-like.

This dog is eating breadfruit. Your argument is invalid.

7. Take pictures of dogs behind you while you wait for it to cook.

8. If you want to split open coconuts, sit on the wooden part of this thing and spike them on the pointy metal part. But you really should have done that before we started cooking. What's wrong with you? Haven't you done this before? Sheeish!*

8. When it's done, it should look something like this. Especially if you put a leaf-basket on top.

*No, they didn't do that part out of order, I just took that picture out of order. That's the joke. They know what they're doing.

A Tale of Lua Samoas, Part Three

2010-03-25T20:21:00.016-11:00

Where was I? Oh yes, it was a month ago, and we were in Samoa, on our way to Sene's wedding. Kolio and I met up with Lupe and Joey. We were headed straight for the wedding!

But first we decided to stop and look at the Baha'i temple. If I've got this blog set up right, you can click it to see a bigger image.

I think it was actually bigger than that.

From there we went directly to the resort where the wedding would be held. It had been hit really hard by the tsunami, and was in the middle of being rebuilt.

But it was still a very nice place.

Looks like a goo place for a wedding.

It is.Did I mention that Joey performed the ceremony? Yep, apparently my boss is a preacher in the Universal Life Church, AKA That Preacher Thing With the Ads In Rolling Stone. I didn't know this until the ceremony began. You learn something every day, I suppose.

A lot of family members are there. All the pictures during and after the ceremony, by the way, are transferred from the video that I took and will edit into their wedding video.

There is cake.
And dancing.

And a beautiful sunset, none of which tranfered to stills that well.

There is also a great seafood buffet, about a dozen more guests, Lupe singing "The Rose," and a belly dancer. None of which I have good stills of anyway.

Congratulations to Sene and Angie! I'll have your video done sooner or later!

....

...what?

Yes, there was REALLY a belly dancer after the reception!

...

...Yes, she was kind of hot. But, like nearly every other woman I've met since moving down here, she was soon telling me about her husband and kids. But her story was interesting, as she's an American citizen who just went to on vacation to Samoa a few years back and decided to stay. And by stay, I mean move back several years later when she got the chance.

...I wouldn't.

Anyhow, it was a great wedding. But I had a whole 'nother half-day on the island, which there will be a whole 'nother entry for, along with a lot of general observations that I made.

A Tale of Lua Samoas, Part Two

2010-03-16T21:17:00.007-11:00

Before I get back to talking about the wedding, I have more exciting Internet-related news!

I came home from work about two weeks ago to discover that my Internet wasn't working again, even though it had been a few days since I had had any problems. I called up my ISP and found out that it was intentionally turned off. According to them, I had called a few days ago and told them to turn off my Internet connection because I was leaving the island permanently.

Yeah. I wasn't.

So they switched it back on within a few minutes, and everything was fine until about a week later when one of my coworkers called me and told me that he had just learned that a BlueSkynet crew would be headed to my apartment later that day to de-install my Internet antenna, 'cause, you know, I was moving off the island and stuff. Another call to Customer Service put a stop to that. They said they didn't know anything about who had called or anything like that.

So now I know that BlueSkynet is not only self-aware, it's apparently gained the ability to make phone calls.

___________________________________________________

Anyhow, my second day in Samoa started with a big Samoan breakfast and a drive along the shoreline back into town.

Once in Apia, we drove past the Magik Theater of Copyright Infringement.

Click for a bigger version that shows you how bad it really is. And I'm not talking about the shakiness of my camera.

Then we drove around that part of the island a bit.

Samoa's Parliamentary building, or something like that.

OMG WE'RE DRIVING ON THE LEFT-HAND SIDE!!!1!!!11!!!!

A future government building that is being paid for by the Chinese Government.

I'm sure they expect nothing in return.

The Faleata Sports Complex, home of the 2007 South Pacific Games.

Did you know they had South Pacific Games? You do now.

The other Maliu Mai. Just in case you thought it was the one in American Samoa.

Then we had lunch. And Kolio told me that the story everyone on the radio was talking excitedly about was that an emu had been captured on the island, and they were trying to figure out where it had come from. Actually, I think that part had happened the day before, but I forgot to mention it.

When I start telling things out of order like that, I'm either trying a new video editing technique or it's time for bed. More next time, including the actual wedding.

A Tale of Lua Samoas, Part One

2010-03-02T20:17:00.012-11:00

So my Internet appears to be finally fixed for good and now I can get back to writing without interru+++CARRIER LOST+++

...

...Okay, we can't be totally certain that it's back for good yet, but I think it's usable for now. Anyhow, I was preparing for my trip to Independent Samoa. I had locked the doors, turned off the A/C, and was all ready to go. I did one final check of my apartment, patted my pockets to feel the reassuring shapes of my wallet, keys, and passport, and went off. I was going to be right on time, arriving exactly when the airline had told me to be there. I hopped in my car and drove to the airport. I pulled into the parking lot, said hey to the guy that you pay for parking, and reached into my pocket for my wallet to grab a dollar

...and found my camera, which happens to be almost the exact size, shape and weight of my wallet. My wallet was nowhere to be found.

Oh great.

Long story short, I found my wallet within the hour and managed to get onto the very next flight with very little trouble. And because of a far less amusing story, I was only able to take camera phone pictures during the flight, but they came out OK enough.

Due to the camera's shutter speed or something, the propeller blades came out looking really cool. Either that or the plane was breaking down very quickly. More on that last theory in a bit.

The American Samoa Golf Course and the village of Ill'ili.

AHAHAHA! I AM FINALLY GETTING OFF THIS ROCK! IN YOUR FACE, TUTUILA!! AHAHAHAHA!!!shift-one!

I landed at Fagali'i Airport, a place so obscure that Wikipedia doesn't even know it's been back in operation since last July. And as we land, a very loud buzzer goes off in the cockpit. We weren't ever told exactly what that was all about, except that it's not a normal part of the landing process, which I presume is bad. Anyway, I believe that any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, so I didn't dwell on it too much.

I proceed to go through customs, pick up my checked luggage from the baggage claim area (a spot on the floor where it was unceremoniously thrown, and I mean literally thrown), and meet Kolio, my friend and co-worker who is originally from this island and whom I've co-rented a car with. We give a ride to two people I met on the flight; one from Switzerland and another from some less exotic country. We drive around the island for a bit, which is beautiful. Also much more spacious than the cramped island I've been living on.

Also, the car has the driver's side on the right because, as you may recall, the nation switched to lefthand-side driving back in September. We stop at a small roadside stand that happens to be run by Mickey Mouse's creepy cousin.

What he's saying translates to "I will devour your soul just as I devour this ice cream!"

Inside a different store, they are selling pigs' feet. Not pickled or anything, just pigs' feet.

I'm sure they're delicious, if you happen to be a wolf.

The stereo of our rental car. Notice the ChineseormaybeJapanese writing in the bottom-left corner.

Wait, there's got to be more to it than that...

BAM! It's also DVD Player! Bet you didn't see that coming!

I'm sure "BAM!" and "Didn't see that coming!" are phrases someone who uses it while driving will become very familiar with.

We arrived at Kolio's sister's house, where we'll both be staying for the weekend. They were very gracious hosts, and I had a very nice time staying there. But I'm sure you're all worn out from having your face rocked by that Transformer stereo, so I'll just end it for tonight with a nice picture of Kolio, his niece and our rental car. Aww, what a cute rental car!

It's like the offspring of an SUV and a teensy Eurotrash car.

Island Fever

2010-02-22T21:22:00.004-11:00

Good news. The island made it through the hurricane with barely a scratch. For whatever reason, it made a sharp turn at the very last second and the eye of the storm passed about 20 miles to the south of the island. Turns out that, like tourists, hurricanes don't want to come here either.

Jamie was the only casualty. And his family is doing better than I thought. Turns out that he wasn't the sole income earner for the family after all (his wife is a teacher) and his family is has strong connections to the rest of the Filipino community and will probably be getting all the help they need. Although his death is still a terrible tragedy, his family is a lot better off than it first seemed. So yeah.

Anyway, I've heard quite a few times that in order to maintain your personal sanity, you need to get off the island at least once every six months. Three months if you count trips to Western Samoa.

I first arrived on this island in November 2008. My first and only trip off was for 48 hours in July, and that was to Western Samoa. That was just over seven months ago. Not counting that brief vacation, I haven't been anyplace other than this tiny island for 1 year, 3 months and 6 days, or 40,003,200 seconds.

And to that I have to say:

Asdlfjk¨hasflkø∑jy&asflkjh afdfucmqieruexn! Uy2@0£uynpolneayƒ¢∞¶• fbae≤.

UYEGRB¥¢•≠¡ycu¡«• Dan Quayle †∑ßheoln§£∂çp]';;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Sdftrz T.

This past Christmas was the worst. In case being away from home for Christmas wasn't bad enough, about half of my on-island friends went off-island, plus I was going through some crazy unbloggable drama. It got to the point where I was fighting the urge to run outside with a shovel and start digging a hole in the ground just to deal the island a little damage. And I don't even own a shovel.

Hey, it makes sense when you're insane.

But that's all changed now. I finally got to go to Western again this past weekend, to attend my friend and coworker Sene's wedding. And it was amazing. The wedding too. I'm about to start writing about it, and will get the first part published as soon as my Internet connection stops cutting out for hours at a time.

Yes, I realize that the fact that I went somewhere last weekend makes a lot of the details of the second paragraph technically untrue, seeing as it's all about how I haven't been anywhere in ages. I actually wanted to write this entry about a week ago but my connection kept cutting ou

ENDNOTE: Right after I ended this entry with that joke, I lost my web connection just before I could hit "Publish." And I did the same joke with my Facebook status, and the exact same thing happened. Clearly my ISP has become sentient.

February 22nd, 2010: The day BlueSkyNet became self-aware.

Cyclone

2010-02-12T15:29:00.007-11:00

Cyclone Rene is expected to hit the island around midnight tonight. Right now the heavy rain and winds are coming in waves that last a few minutes at a time and then disappear. I think they must be the outer arms of the storm waving over the island. It's incredibly weird to be waiting the storm out instead of evacuating, which is the first rule for hurricane survival nearly everywhere else in the world.

I was hoping to blog the whole way through the storm and maybe even provide CNN with more awesome footage, but it seems that ASPA, the territorial power company, is expected to turn off power to most of the island in a few hours, due to the generators requiring someone to stay outside to maintain them. Perhaps I should be using this last hour or so of electricity to cook dinner, but hey.

The hurricane has claimed its first (indirect) fatalit y. A maintenance worker slipped and fell off of the wet roof of an apartment building while attempting to fix something up there. Not just any maintenance worker, but my friend Jamie Gulapa. And not just any apartment building, but this one. He was such a friendly guy, always got the jobs done (even the really difficult ones like fixing my air conditioning when I first got here, which required him finding about a trillion different replacement parts), and was always willing to help me get inside whenever I was dumb enough to get my keys lost, stolen or locked inside. It's hard to believe he's gone so suddenly like that. Worst of all, he was the sole income earner for his wife and two kids.

Before work this morning I was in my kitchen eating breakfast and listening to hurricane coverage on the radio via Channel 13 (a slideshow-like channel that I run that carries 93 KHJ as its audio feed) I saw someone climb up onto the roof via my balcony and didn't think much of it, seeing as Jamie and a few others had been working on the roof just a few weeks ago and that's how they got up there. I continued getting ready for work, leaving the kitchen to go shower. It was really eerie to learn I had been on of the last people to see him alive. Even more eerie was what greeted me on my balcony when I came home this evening.

Also, I guess this means he was up there without shoes on. Wonder if that was a factor.

His shoes. And I thought it was surreal to see his car sitting in the parking lot, knowing that it's owner had died.

I'm also kind of glad I hadn't asked him to board up my windows, or I'd be thinking I was the reason he was up there.
___________________________________________________________

In other developments, I'm about as ready for this storm as I can be (minus the windows thing I just mentioned). I even bought and filled a five-gallon water container. I made one last trip to KS Mart on my way back from work today and got all of the remaining essentials: Matches, candles, fresh fruit, and, of course, beer. I also looked around for an affordable battery-operated radio, but I couldn't find one.

KS Mart clearly wasn't thinking of emergencies when they put together their selection of candles. But I'll tell you what, if you're in the market for eensy scented candles, or oversize three-wick Christmas candles (complete with holly), that's the place to go. I ended up buying two candles in glass jars with Spanish-language labels of Catholic saints on them.

I'd like to take this moment to thank my sister for sending me a case of AA batteries as part of her Christmas presents. Anna, I don't really know what you intended them for, but as it turns out, I have a battery-operated radio after all: my portable CD player that happens to have an FM radio, last used right before I got an iPod nearly four years ago. Thanks, Anna!

Anyway, time to try and microwave some Bagel Bites before the power is cut off.

FFFFFFUUUUUU-

2010-02-11T15:32:00.005-11:00

CyclOWNED!

-UNNY how these things go. One day you're frantically preparing for a cyclone, and the next day there's a cyclone bearing down on the island. Seems like just yesterday I was vaguely aware that this cyclone was headed this way.

By the way, if you look at the center of that image of the approaching Cyclone Rene really closely, you can see the red outlines of the two bigger Samoan islands, which gives you an idea of scale. See them, just to the left of the main part of the storm? Aren't they cute?

You can also watch an animated weather map of it here. Assuming both that you have a halfway-decent Web connection and are not reading the archived version of this post in the distant future.

It's a "cyclone" here, not a "hurricane," even though they're really about the same thing. It's mostly being rated on the Fijian version of the cyclone scale. Currently, from the best source I can find (a bunch of weather geeks posting updates to a forum I found on Google) it's currently a Category 2 Tropical Cyclone, which would be a Category 1 hurricane on the superior American system, with winds of about 65 MPH.

Also, since it's in the Southern Hemisphere, it's going to be rotating in the opposite direction. A "reverse hurricane," if you will. Therefore, it should be building up everything in its path instead of destroying it. That's how a lot of people I've talked to are reacting, anyhow.

What you really come here for!

2010-02-08T21:53:00.002-11:00

...to watch commercials!

...that I made!

Now that I'm done abusing ellipses like one of those printed signs on the wall of a public bathroom around here telling people to flush¹ (yes, people here frequently need to be reminded of that sort of thing), here they are:

"Tausala" is Samoan for "beautiful maiden" and "E lava a oe i le tasi" translates to "One is enough." Which I assume you can figure out is a pun of sorts.

¹"Please"
Flush toliet...
AT ALL TIMES'S!

(That would waste a LOT of water)

Rain

2010-01-27T20:48:00.002-11:00

"And Dr. Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own."- From Rain by W. Somerset Maugham

So I've been noticing a lot of people on the mainland complaining about how much it's been raining there lately. Allow me to show you what real rain looks like¹

Note that this clip is from last April, which is why everything in Pago looks relatively nice and not all tsunami-ravaged. I would have uploaded a higher-quality version, but it would have taken about 33 hours. Really. So try to imagine it coming down in sheets when I'm facing the mountain.

For most of this week there was a large trough over the island, which means there were some really big barnyard animals feeding here. And they were slobbering constatnly, so there were almost nonstop heavy rains overhead. Today we didn't have to worry about the trough...because we had a brush with Tropical Cyclone² Nisha. What fun we're having here!

¹As opposed to imaginary rain, which is what the rest of the world has.
²Really a hurricane, pretty much

Because some of you haven't heard yet...

2010-01-12T20:34:00.002-11:00

The Territorial Immigration Office was raided last week by the FBI and two other law enforcement agencies. Hilarity is ensuing. Seems that human trafficking has been afoot. Read all about it here, with a quote 93KHJ's own Monica Miller, who happens to be awesome.

And if you have a few more minutes to spend deciphering high school-level newswriting (with as many unnecessary parentheses as this blog), you can read a more detailed version on the Samoa News website. (That said, I'm really glad they're covering it. I'm sure there are plenty of people that would rather they didn't).

I'll give you a hand for the beginning of the article:

One of the places named in the second article is KS Mart, which is easily one of the most popular stores on the entire island. After giving the what is considered on this island to be the appropriate level of advance notice,² they were closed all day today for an all-out ~~document shredding session~~ company party. VERY interesting, as this place doesn't even close on Christmas.

And this is not only being covered by the local press. It's getting attention from the international media as well. Since it was picked up by the Associated Press, the story easily appeared in the LA Times, The Seattle Times, The Honolulu Advertiser, Radio Australia News, the two sources that I've already linked to, and a bunch of other places that I can't be bothered to look.

¹They never explain who OTICIDE is. It's the Office Of Territorial And International Criminal Intelligence And Drug Enforcement. Knowing that makes

²A couple of fliers at the cash registers, put there the evening before. Not even our newsteam knew about them until today.

A Flashback

2010-01-02T14:23:00.002-11:00

A lifetime ago, on the evening of December 31st, 1999, the Town of Mooresville held a Millennium celebration downtown to ring in the year 2000. One of the many things to do was write down a message in a book that would be opened and read in ten years' time. In my infinite middle-school wisdom and maturity, I put down:

T
Th
Thi
This
This is
This is t
This is to
This is to t
This is to ta
This is to tak
This is to take
This is to take u
This is to take up
This is to take up s
This is to take up sp
This is to take up spa
This is to take up spac
This is to take up space
This is to take up space.

And signed my full name.

The best part about that is that I may have actually used a variation that took up even more space. The more I thought about it over the following years, the more I wanted to be as far away as possible when that book was reopened on January 1st, 2010.

Mission accomplished.

The End of the A-Team

2009-12-30T22:36:00.000-11:00

Note: I was originally going to make this an entry entirely about what I really thought of each show, but then I realized that talking about how much I liked most of them made for a really boring entry. So I decided to make the whole entry about a single show that a lot of you ~~are not cool enough to have seen~~ have never even seen. I made the opinions on the shows into a seperate entry that you can find right below this one.

As a few of you may know, we at Island Television¹ will no longer be showing any syndicated programming after this week, and will be switching to mostly locally-based programming. The one exception is SAW Wrestling, because they let us air that² for free.

So thus ends my favorite part of the job: Getting to sit back and just watch the shows, the way nature intended. One of the shows that I'll miss the most is The A-Team. There just aren't enough shows that are so awesomely good and awesomely bad all at the same time. Nothing combined so much great action, memorable characters and theme music while simultaneously being awesomely dumb and the most formulaic show on TV since Scooby Doo. Seriously, one time we were preparing to shoot thehosted segments that go in-between the commercials and the pieces of episodes, and the following exchange occured:

Larry: What's the plot for this week's A-Team?
Me: (Reading) "A mob kingpin threatens a restaurant owner to sell out to him or be destroyed."
Larry: Wasn't that last week's episode?
Me: Nope, last week it was a coffee shop.

And it's even educational! Here are just a few things that I learned from watching it:

Once a stolen plane has left the ground, there is absolutely no way of pursuing it further, and everyone chasing it will give up.

If the mafia or a band of thugs is harassing you and your business, don't bother going to the police, just go directly to a group of people wanted for war crimes.

If you're finally captured after escaping from prison, years of resisting arrest, firing at military police and destroying things in order to get away, you will only be in trouble for your original crime.

An attacker who is knocked into water is absolutely, positively incapacitated and will not attempt to get back out and take another shot at you.

Mercenaries on the lam can allow reporters to tag along with them for months at a time and continually publish stories about them without fear of being captured. Also, the military will never think to find said reporters where they work and trace said mercenaries from there.

Even if you're wanted by the military for war crimes, nearly all of the public will automatically be on your side. This includes large corporate entities that have to keep up a pristine public image, like Carnival Cruise Lines.

And those are just the points that I picked up myself. You can find a much more complete list of valuable lessons from the A-Team here. Teachers take note!

Another great thing about this show is that after watching as many episodes as I have, I feel like I can write entire episodes by myself. All it needs is:

- An evil person of power such as a mob kingpin, drug lord or corrupt devloper attempting to extort the owners of a small business.

- The victims being screened by a disguised Hannibal.

- Murdock getting under B.A.'s skin.

- A good-looking woman who is in some way related to the victim. There will be chemistry between her and Face that will ultimately go nowhere.

- Lots of bullets will being fired, but no one ever getting hurt. Bad guys thrown through windows or out of helicopters conveniently fall into dumpsters or into the ocean.

- The A-Team disguising themselves to get inside the villain's lair and learn that there is actually a more nefarious reason behind their plot.

- Their cover blown, the heroes get locked inside a room that happens to include a blowtorch and a ton of metal objects that can be used as weapons.

- Hannibal extolling the virtues of a plan coming together.

See? What am I doing here? I should be in Hollywood writing episodes for major network shows!

I'm giving A-Team a pretty good sendoff; I had Joey and Larry extend its run to Friday (we were going to end all syndicated shows on the 31st), so I could show an episode that is considered one of the best. So yeah, if you happen to be living on the island, you should stay in Friday night and watch TV this week. This one actually breaks nearly every rule I've listed above. Shocking, I know.

Finally, you should watch this, because it's the most relevant, awesome, and nerdy thing you will see all day:

¹ Me.
² "Air" as in "dirty socks"

Out of Syndication

2009-12-30T22:34:00.002-11:00

So I'm finally free to say what I really think of all the shows that I've been getting paid to watch for over a year now. However, my predecessor sometimes got way ahead on certain shows, so I barely ever got to watch them. But without further ado, here is my personal, thundering, take-no-prisoners, industry-insider's critique of every show that we aired:

Roseanne: Eh, it's OK.

Will & Grace: "Your shoes are ugly!" *Laughtrack* "Not as ugly as yours!" *More laughtrack, Repeat for 22 minutes* Bleh.

Baywatch: It kept having multi-part "dramatic" episodes where someone would get injured and have to summon the courage to get through rehab. I think one of the producers didn't understand why people watched this show.

The West Wing: I've actually been on the set of this show (no, really). Outside the studio, they had a sign listing all of the awards it had won. It was ten feet tall. They deserved every one. Too bad I didn't get to see more than a few episodes.

My Name is Earl: Funny, funny show. Works even better if you grew up around white trash in the South or elsewhere. And there's an episode that mentions American Samoa. Be sure to go back and watch every single episode until you've found it.

The Office: One of my current favorite shows on TV, and the only one we showed that's still making new episodes.

Everybody Loves Raymond: I actually almost never watched this show because my predecessor had ripped EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. It has nine seasons, we show them in order, and we're not going to get past season three. Yeah. She really liked that show.

Northern Exposure: Awesome, strange show. When someone moved here from New York City, my first reaction was to ask him if he had seen this show.

The A-Team: See most of this article.

MacGyver: I've been told that this one is even more awesomely cheesy than The A-Team. Tragically, it was one of the ones that my predecessor liked a lot and I only got to see a few episodes of. Oh well. At least you have this.

Walker, Texas Ranger: You know, after you get past the whole joke thing with the famous Chuck Norris Facts, this is actually a fairly dum-*POW!*

Manuia le Christmasi!

2009-12-22T21:54:00.002-11:00

Somewhere, an ASPA¹ manager is crying.

I filmed,² edited, and uploaded³ it all myself. And there's 6 more clips of it here on the station's YouTube channel. Don't say I never worked way too hard to give you something for Christmas.

¹The island's power company.

²Pretty difficult, considering that the whole display was about three shots wide, and that I never knew which section was going to light up next. I think that's why all the good Christmas light shows on YouTube can fit into a single static shot.

³As anyone living here can tell you, this was easily the hardest part, since the Internet connection is powered entirely by a single hamster wheel. And they couldn't find a hamster, so they used a gecko. And geckos don't move very much without motivation.

A Blog Miniseries

2009-12-08T22:06:00.003-11:00

Those of you old enough to remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, or maybe just that remake of The Prisoner last month will know that in the TV business we have something called a "miniseries." It's when a TV show, instead of having a full-length run of several years, is intentionally made with the short lifespan of a few episodes that shows get in lesser countries.

Here's a link to a blog miniseries of the wacky adventures of a few researchers who came here in 2005 to try and install stations for studying earthquakes or some other silly potentially lifesaving nonsense. At least one of them happens to be from a university that I totally visited once. I'm sure at least one of you has heard of that school.

Be sure to read the entry on Mt. Alava, which I finally got to hike this past weekend.

This should keep everyone happy while I work on another long blog entry talking about the aftermath of the tsunami. Not as long as the one on when the tsunami hit, but longer than those lousy entries where I just write a little bit and leave everyone a link.

A Year on the Rock

2009-11-16T20:15:00.002-11:00

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it may be hard to believe it, but as of today, November 16^th, 2009, I have been here an entire year. And I mean that in almost the most literal way possible- I’ve spent a totally of roughly 48 hours of that year off of the island, and most of that was in Upolu, the next island over.

I’ve decided to mark this occasion with an educational experience for all of you, and so here is my list of:

Random Facts About American Samoa

John Williams, the first missionary to the island, landed in Leone in 1832. His statue is one of the only things in that village to have fully survived the tsunami, despite being right next to the water.

He later drew on that experience for inspiration while composing the musical score to the Star Wars films.

Due to the 25 MPH speed limit and the existence of only two or three passing zones on the entire island, it is very common for a dozen drivers to get stuck behind a single SUV with flame decals going 17 MPH.

All of the traffic problems are actually caused by a single really slow driver. He started on the east end of the island in 1997 and just recently made it up to the mini-mall in the middle.

Apollo 10, 12, 13, 14, and 17 all landed in American Samoa waters. All of these astronauts flew out of here via Pago Pago International Airport.

According to some rumor that probably isn’t true, LBJ Hospital was built mostly with said astronauts in mind. Although that would explain why they built when it was and why no one seems to care about it anymore.

Wikipedia seems to think that this map does an adequate enough job of showing everyone where Tafuna is.

Speaking of Wikipedia, there is a Samoan language version of it here with nearly 400 articles. Please contribute if you can.
Water is really, really powerful stuff.

A solid ¾ of all world maps either cut off the Samoan Islands entirely or mark Pago Pago with a star that covers up the entire island.

The ads for KSBS-FM are actually made by an LSD-using gecko who thinks the chipmunk effect is the funniest thing he's ever heard.

Most Google results for "chipmunk effect" are instructions for how to avoid making audio sound that way accidentally.

The territory consists of five islands and two atolls, for a total area slightly larger than Washington, D.C.

According to legend, Ottoville, the village where I live, was founded by the original Otto Haleck of Haleck Enterprises. Depending on who you ask, he either got the land by immigrating here from Germany and basically squatting it in the late 1800s, before it was really sorted out by any colonizing Western governments, or got it through a series of debt defaults. Or so the legend goes...

It is very bad for one's sanity to be confined to an area that size for more than six months at a time.

No matter where you are in the world, there will always be a neighbor who will wake you up at 7 AM on a Saturday mowing their lawn, be it with a lawnmower or a weedwhacker.

Visitors to the island can do just about everything there is to do here in about a week, and this includes things like the all day hike up and down Mt. Alava.

The average monga-monga, or Samoan cockroach, is big enough to terrorize a Japanese city for several hours.

Pisupo, despite its pronunciation, is not pea soup, but corned beef. And Samoans will never tire of eating it.

I’m not at liberty to say how I know, but CNN is not done with G.A.S. just yet.

With the destruction of the Leone post office and presumed layoffs of the people who worked there, at least half of the mailboxes on the island have been removed. I now have to drive 20 minutes just to mail something. Take a moment to look to the end of your driveway or maybe even your front porch and be thankful for at your at-home service.

At least one of the doormen at the Tradewinds Hotel does not know the difference between a real mailbox and a cardboard box for sending Christmas cards to troops stationed overseas.

Someone somewhere decided that people here were driving too fast and that there weren’t enough bumps in the road, so they had speedbumps installed.

The Governor's personal assistant was shocked, SHOCKED to learn that not everyone likes him. More on that one another time.

Sitting on the porch at dusk and watching bats fly overhead is really fascinating.

The first Google result for "American Samoa facts" goes to a site that appears to have been written by a failing middle school student. One that used really outdated sources. Either that, or the U.S. Navy has retaken possession of the territory.

Said student also heavily confused American Samoa with The Independent Nation of Samoa™, and just went downhill from there. Either that, or "Queen Elizabeth the II is the most famous New Zealand member of the Crown."

It's also written like a string of random facts, with almost nothing connecting them. I mean, who does that?

What did the Thumb say to the Middle Finger?

2009-11-04T22:20:00.005-11:00

Some of my readers may not be familiar with the phrase "Oh snap!" Allow me to explain its proper usage:

And here is an example of someone "getting told." In this particular situation, it's GAS (Government of American Samoa), getting told by CNN investigative reporter Drew Griffin:

And here is the CNN-US version, where he walks through the parking lot of the building where I work:

I actually had a hand in producing these, kinda-sorta. The bigger version that aired on TV included an interview with Congressman Eni (yes, the same one that was on the Colbert Report), which was filmed in the Mr. Joey's Cartoon Club Studio.* So now I can say I've filmed two things that have aired on CNN. Watching a high-ranking individual affiliated with ASG actually get asked tough questions was a thing of beauty. Eni actually did a pretty decent job, answered all of the questions, and was a really great guy in person.

On the other hand, I would have paid to have been in the room during that interview with Governor Tulafono, who normally has some really strict conditions for interviews and doesn't make a lot of media appearances besides his weekly radio show. Which is another reason why seeing him get publicly taken to task was such a thing of great beauty.

Governor Tulafono also likes to complain about all the mean things that people say about him on WVUV's weekly call-in show.

That's all I have to say for now. Except that Duke sucks.

*The back wall in my office.

Adam's Story

2009-10-07T20:18:00.032-11:00

Before I begin, I'd like to put this map of the island here so that this blog entry can make at least a little sense when I refer to all of these villages. I live near the star mound site in the Tafuna area:

I was awake that morning a little earlier than I planned on being. Rolled over, tried to get back to sleep. 6:45 AM, still have 15 minutes before I have to wake up.

Then, the whole apartment started shaking violently. Surreal moment #1. Could it be a low-flying helicopter? I wasn't that far from the airport. No, it's lasting too long to be that. Has to be an earthquake. Am I safe here? Is my air conditioning going to fall on me? Probably not. Should I be filming this? Yes. Maybe some people's instincts would tell them to evacuate the building, but not mine. My reporter's instinct kicked in and I ran into the kitchen and grabbed my new still camera and started filming.

Knowing that their might be a tsunami and that my apartment was not only on the third floor but on a village that was too high to get walloped, I stayed right where I was. I turned on Island Info Channel 13, which I just so happen to run, to hear what they were saying about it back at the station. "Get to higher ground, there might be a tsunami coming." Don't know why, but I really didn't expect one. Probably because we had had a tsunami warning a few months ago that didn't come to fruition. I just kept getting ready for work, expecting things to go back to normal soon, like last time.

Took a shower and got dressed. Dad called and has already heard about the earthquake. I tell him I'm fine, only one small aftershock. I go back into the kitchen/living room and Channel 13 has gone off the air. Why?

In fact, both of my channels and government-run KVZKs are off the air. The other local channels are still showing filler footage of Flag Day 1997 as always. I turn on the radio and all of our stations have gone off the air. Some sort of after-effect of the earthquake? Rival station KSBS is still playing music and filling the breaks with something in Samoan long enough to be important. A lot of good that does me. I try to call into work to see if I should be coming in, but the cell phone system seems to be overloaded.

I watched coverage of it on CNN International for a while. Reporters on a major news network actually talking about American Samoa? Really? Surreal moment #2. Soon after, the Internet, which had momentarily gone out, had come back on. I uploaded my video to CNN's iReport.

In the week since then, it's garnered almost 7,000 views, not counting all the times it aired on TV.

I'm watching it upload when a REALLY static-y call comes through on my phone. It's Joey. With the boxes representing static/dropped-out moments, it sounds something like: "▒▓░▒▒▓▒▓▓You OK?▓░▒▒▓▒▓▓Wh▓t?▒▒▓▓▓ Everyone here is fi░▒▒▓▒. Ca▓▓▓ou go se▓ ▓f Muana lef▓ ▓or work ▓et? Thanks. ▒▒▒▓▒▓▒N▓, you don't nee▓ t▓ come in toda▓.▓▓▓▓▓░▒▒▓.

With that, the call dropped and the cell network absolutely refused to let me call them back. I think that they must have also told me that a tsunami had come and gone, but hadn't elaborated on that, so I assumed it wasn't that big. Muana is Joey's girlfriend who lives at his place a few blocks from here. I was about to go over and check on her when I was hit by Surreal Moment #3: A CNN producer emailing me asking about my video and what I knew. I told him everything I knew, which was next to nothing. I went out and checked on Muana, who was fine. But I couldn't tell Joey, who was reachable only by non-working cell phone.

I went back to my apartment and continued watching CNN for my video and talking with CNN producers (!) via both email and Skype. The main one that I had been talking to mostly just wanted me to confirm or deny that there had been one village destroyed, at least two more underwater, and there were a handful of deaths. Kinda hard to do from my apartment. I gleaned what I could from Facebook and KSBS's 15-second English segments, and let her know about them (Most what she had heard turned out to be true).

About the same time, I got a Skype message from John, our morning show host that had been out sick that day, asking if I wanted to go with him up to Pago. As much fun as it was telling this CNN producer everything else I knew (nothing), I decided to go, especially as the tsunami warning had just been lifted.

John came by in the 93KHJ SUV with his family and picked me up. I told him about the CNN producer I had been talking to, and he told me about the producer from the CBS Evening News he had been talking with, his interview with them, and several conversations with a few other major news outlets. No, he wasn't joking. Surreal moment #4.

We tried to stop and get gas from the first station we came upon, but they didn't have any. Went to a bigger place a bit down the road, and got in line for it, something that's pretty rare here. John was on the phone with a CBS producer (!) and passed the phone back to me to talk to him (!!!). Moment #5. He wanted to know if I could send him any pictures or footage. "John says there's no power in Pago and we can't turn around and go back to Tafuna now." But he has to have footage RIGHT NOW! Do I know anyone who may have something they can send him? I go through my phone and give him the names of six or seven different people. Later I learned that he called them out of the blue and didn't bother giving a single one of them the slightest hint as to how he got their numbers, which was kind of awkward for them. Yeah, it was probably me who gave it to him. Hope you didn't mind.

The ATMs and credit card readers were down, so John had to borrow a little cash from me for enough gas to get us to Pago and back. We drove down the road past Coconut Point into the curvy section of the road in front of us to discover how everything was so shockingly different.
There...was...SAND IN THE ROAD!

I took lots of video.

Lucky for you, it takes too long to upload them, so I won't trouble you with scrolling past them. The amount of debris strewn everywhere grew higher and higer as we neared Pago. When we got to the Samoa News building in Fagatotgo, traffic came to nearly a dead halt. This didn't stop me from taking pictures and video anyway.

Finally getting tired of waiting, I jumped out to see if we could go any faster on a semi-legal side street. and took more pictures and video on the way.

Yes, that's a chair in the middle of the parking lot. There's actually a little flooded area off to the right, but that picture didn't come out right or something.

The Matai Restaurant, mostly spared from the tsunami, was the target of looters.

Firefighters cleaning up.

The first store cleanup begins.

An aiga bus, enduring symbol of American Samoa, damaged by the tsunami, then vandalized. Sad.

Part of the reason for the gas shortage.

Almost a month later, this boat is still there. I took two pictures of this and my camera's memory card filled up. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken all that video of the sand in the road. Turned out that this was just the beginning of the really heavy damage. I switched to my camera phone.

Around the time I took this picture, John's SUV had gotten through the traffic and had managed to catch up with me. I guess that's OK, because it let me take more pictures and notice things like how the piles of rubble were massive enough to make it impossible to walk along the road in some places.

Big chunk of drywall from what used to be someone's home or workplace.

Outside Pago Plaza, the building where I work. The security guards were standing outside the front entrance, but they let me walk right in.

Downstairs of Pago Plaza. A total loss.

I wondered if those steps were even safe to use, or if someone would stop me. Could I really just walk right up them, the same way I had every day for the last 11 months? Sort of. It involved a lot of carefully stepping around what was left of the National Park Visitor's Center, a lot of which ended up on the landing.

I made it into the station to find that, aside from the power and running water being out, it was surprisingly normal. The highest part of the wave had hit about two feet from the ceiling of the first floor. A small roaring generator was in the hallway, allowing Joey and Lupe to keep a very limited broadcast going on WVUV, which we happened to have installed an extra antenna for on the roof just a month before.

Joey was, as someone else put it, "in Spartan mode." You could tell that he had been through a lot, but was determined to keep the station on the air and the public informed on how to stay alive and what to do next. When he got the chance, he gave us all things to be working on. He handed me the station's main video camera, and told me that there was some really priceless footage on it, including some of the actual tsunami coming in. I was to capture this on my laptop for the world to see. In the meantime, I was free to run around and get footage of the damage in the area while John was to drive around and see how far the station's signal went.

I went about 10 feet past the door of the station before I found the first bit of destruction: The hallway below.

It didn't take long for me to find more destruction. The second part of this clip is the restaurant where I had been filming a commercial and and eating lunch just the day before:

Notice all the traffic that I was talking about.

An attempt at a still from some fairly busy video. Either these guys had won two bowling tournaments in a row and had decided to celebrate by fishing, or they had been looting.

I walked across the muddy debris-strewn space that used to be a park, ducked under a downed powerline, and found Joey's car lying in the middle of another parking lot, still upside-down. Entire SUVs were thrown about like toys, one with a coconut in its grill.

Dead fish baked in the tropical sun. Bay Hardware was now nothing but a concrete slab.

"POLICE! POLICE! THE POLICE ARE COMING!" a man yelled, frantically throwing his arms around and running toward a boat that had washed up onto the sidewalk 50 yards away. Kids jumped off of the boat and scattered. I grabbed all the footage of this I could, then asked him what was going on. He barked, "THEY WERE LOOTING! AND YOU LET THEM!" as if I hadn't just made it abundantly clear that I wasn't even close enough to know what was going on. I guess some people lash out at others when they're under stress. And some people are just jerks.

Still wearing my good work shoes, I sloshed back across the field to Pago Plaza. I checked to make sure John hadn't come back, then took a look at the actual shops downstairs.

In the middle of filming how the maintenance building was now mostly just a spot where the porch abruptly dropped off into the car-filled ravine, I got a voicemail message that I couldn't listen to, due to cell phone service still being overloaded. I went back to filming the reason we had gone off the air: The building's generator, despite being half the size of a shipping container, was now in the ravine as well (Sorry, I don't have any good still pictures of that, just some video that would take a while to upload).

I checked to make sure that John hadn't returned yet, then went to the front side of the building and interviewed a few survivors and the CEO of BlueSky Communications.

This end of the ravine was filled with even more cars, one of which I later learned still had a body inside. Across the street, a tow truck was pulling an agia bus out of the ditch, with a driver behind the wheel. An interview with him showed that he had not been the driver at the time of the tsunami, and that the guy who was had gone missing.

Having filmed just about everything close to the station, I went back inside and waited for John to return and take us all back. On my third try, I managed to hear that message on my phone. It was from the CBS producer, wanting me to call him back ASAP! I frantically tried about 30 times to call him. When that didn't go through, I tried another 50 times. I saw that I had a missed call from home, but couldn't get through to there either. Pastor Rocco's family (the same one from the previous entry) came by and were awesome enough to bring us some much-needed food and water.

John came back, having discovered that the station covered pretty much the harbor area and nothing else. But the important part was that we got to leave. John and his family took myself, Andrew, and Lupe back to our respective homes.

Once back, I STILL COULDN'T CALL THAT CBS NEWS PRODUCER! Had to find a landline phone, fast! Neighbors didn't have one. Maintenance guy Jamie had one...that could only make local calls. Called David, the pastor of my church (getting through on the fourth try), to see if I could use his phone. He's fine with that. I race down to his home in Illii. On the way, I get a call on my cell phone from my parents. Amazingly, it goes through fine. I tell them that I'm OK and a little about what I know, and who I'm racing to go talk to as I bounce over an unpaved back road.

I arrive at the Willis's house, thank them for letting me use their phone, explain to David how that CBS News producer got his number that morning, and start dialing like mad. On the fifth or so try, I get through. The guy is delighted to hear from me. He happens to be from The Early Show. I tell him what's going on, what kind of footage I have and that he should talk to Joey for a really good interview. I call Joey on my cell phone and do a lot of mediating between the two. Surreal moment #644. Lots of media-politics on whether or not we want the footage to be a CBS News exclusive. I get to talk to two other producers (!) who tell me to begin uploading footage from my laptop at home. Joey also wants me to make him an email-sized clip of the tsunami coming in.

I rush back home and set up my "media command center" (my laptop and two external drives on my living room floor, in front of the TV and next to the radio). I then capture THE footage that Joey had told me about. And it really is that incredible:

A lot of that night is an extremely fast-paced blur of media fame and photos of tragedy, but here's about how it went:

While editing that, I had started chatting with the CNN producer on Skype again, and was simultaneously exchanging emails and the occasional phone call that made it through with the CBS producer, who is trying to explain to me how to use their FTP server. Chugged Sprite straight from a 2-liter bottle because the tapwater isn't safe to drink anymore. I was also making several more video clips into something that I can send to Joey and others. In the middle of all that, I get a Skype message from Australia's Seven Network, who also want to interview me, but first I had to send them some pictures or footage to to air while I talked. Found them something, stopped all my other uploads, and did the interview via Skype videochat right there on my living room floor. That came out pretty well, even if it was heavily edited and most of the pictures were taken by someone else:

Wrapped up that interview and went back to the madness. Joey sent Muana over to pick up my clip of the wave on a flash drive. But before she came over, the CBS producer called to ask about Joey's interview with their show. Apparently Joey has gotten an offer from Good Morning America and is thinking about interviewing with them instead. And apparently they steal the Early Show's guests all the time. I started to explain how I really couldn't do much to change Joey's mind on that, but then I got an incoming call from Lupe who had seen my kitchen rattling on CNN and was wanting to know what was going on with all these media interviews (Did I seriously just put a CBS producer on hold? Holy crap, I'm a serious bigshot now!). I wrote down her number and closed my phone when I was done talking to her, accidentally hanging up on the CBS producer (making me a REALLY serious bigshot?), who called right back. Then I continued my Skype conversation with a new CNN person who said that I was backlit, could you please turn on that desklamp or something? Then Joey called to say that the clip I had given Muana was too big to upload quickly. Could I cut it down to a smaller clip for emailing? Almost simultaneously I had email exchanges with a different person from CBS who wanted to know if Joey could do the interview via Skype at my place? He doesn't have Skype of his own. Ran to the bathroom to brush my hair and straigthen the work clothes I had been wearing all day. Shut off all uploads again. Took a swing of Sprite.

-STOP EVERYTHING-

Did the CNN International interview right here, in the very same kitchen/living room that I'm usually watching it from this time of night. Talked to the world via the teeny little built-in webcam on my MacBook Pro. Told them that there wasn't a lot of panicking, except panic-buying of gas. Told them that the destruction in Pago was the same sort of thing I had seen in Texas after Ike, just on a smaller area. I told them about looting and Joey's car. I told them everything I could think of. I had my moment on the world stage.

And I NAILED IT!

Back to media madness. CBS production team member is now also saying the two-minute version of the clip was taking two long to load, could I send a smaller one? (I guess they've finally learned how ear-bleedingly slow Internet connections are around here) At the same time, I had to scarf down something for dinner and wonder why my cable TV went out an hour ago. Get a call from my friend Alden, who had also been taking pictures of the cars in the ravine. He says he's been talking to the BBC, and they're looking to do a phone interview with someone who was in Pago at the time of the tsunami. I find Lupe's number in front of me and make her an international media star as well.

Kept going with that same sort of insanity until things started to calm down around 11:30, then I finally went to bed around around 2 AM. By that time, I had done two interviews with major news outlets, sent Joey about ten clips of footage, responded to about a zillion Facebook messages asking if I was OK, had agreed to do another interview tomorrow morning for Seven Network's morning show and still had to email back someone from the L.A. Times. Joey ended up appearing on both the Early Show and Good Morning America.

I finally climb back into the bed where this bizarre day had begun. So much, pain, destruction, excitement, and chaos rolled into a single 24-hour period.

Joey's Story

2009-09-30T11:18:00.002-11:00

Hi all,

Right now I'm just really grateful to be alive and still in possession of a function home and car, something a lot of people don't have any more. Like I said on my Facebook status, yesterday was a day where I woke up to an earthquake and went to bed with my world rocked.

Since then I've been doing interviews and uploading pictures and video to so many news sources, from CNN International to Australia's Seven Network. As you know, it takes me a while to write out major blog entries, as I like to cram in as much detail as I can. So until then, I present to you the tale of Joey, my boss, which is a lot better than mine anyhow. After all those media requests, he finally just typed out a long email to send to all of them. Below is that, unedited.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Very dreamlike.

John Raynar called in sick this morning and I am so glad he did because I would have been on the road to work when it hit. I was sitting in for him on the morning radio show on 93KHJ when the earthquake hit about 7:50am. It lasted several minutes. we immediately sent out an EAS earthquake warning to tell everyone to stay away from possible landslide areas. we were in quick contact with the EOC and other emergency personnel to find out about a tsunami that might be coming. They advised that no tsunami was reported but to direct everyone to go to higher ground or to the second story of a building. We also asked school to initiate their tsunami plans to get kids up the mountains. We sent a tsunami warning EAS message 10 minutes later as we saw the first rising water. We stayed on the air as the water reached three or four feet in the parking lot. Our building Pago Plaza is located deep in the belly of Pago harbor close to seal level. The water stayed at that level for many minutes until it surged fantastically to around 15 feet. Tree, cars, buses, boats all rushed by in a river of mud just outside my window. I actually saw that my own car... a VW new Beetle was surprisingly boyant when floating on ut's roof. We continued broadcasting for people to move to high ground. for the next 5 to ten minutes until the batteries on our back up power system died. There was lots of panic by the office staff and it was struggle to keep everyone calm while i was still on the air. When we went off the air and I grabbed a video camera to try to capture some of the action. The first thing I caught was the second wave and me and Lupe praying. I'll post video later. All of the staff at the station went outside to the second floor balcony to see what was happening the air was filled with screams. The whole downstairs was completely washed out. The devastation was complete. Tables, windows, jewelry, trophies, dvds and bottles water lay strewn across the murky floor. The villagers immediately started looking for trapped survivors. I dedicated myself and my staff to helping those that were hurt and gathering food and water. I put out a call on the handheld EAS network walkit-talkie asking for a generator at my location then hooked up with two guys from the government to survey the damage in the area and look for gas leaks and live power lines. Debris was everywhere. Broken furniture mixed with old tires and trees. Children's clothing and road signs crushed under telephone poles. All under a thick layer of much that smelled like chemicals and deisel. Two more lesser waves came but they were equally scary. We screamed for people to run up the mountain but they just ran down the street away from the wave rather than make a sharp left and up the steep mountain just feet away. We walked down the road only to find that people that weren't trying to help had already begun looting the stores. Teenagers roamed the area with spray paint tagging buildings and overturned cars with meaningless scribble. We set up a security perimieter around our building and confirmed with plaza security that noone was trapped inside. Large fishing boats were washed up on land. The cars were washed into the harbor. I found my own car about 300 yards down the road upside down in the middle of a tennis court. I got a generator from a friend and got one of our FM's back on the air about 3 hours later. John and Adam our TV guy showed during this time and helped get things situated, We performed our broadcast on low power over the next 5 hours just spreading information. Keep the roads clear. Beware of falling debris that may have shifted during the earthquake. Dissuade the looting. Body counts kept piling up. News from other islands was very sporadic. The cell phone networks were only working intermittently. Details were sketch...as they say. And talk about sketchy. By the time I finished my second or third patrol of the area, I was wigged out. I watched a slew of Taiwanese fisherman trying to get off a 100 ft. tuna boat that was leaning against the sea wall. School buses full of kids that were bring shipped back home were smiling and waving at all the excitement. Behind them were pick up trucks with two bodies in each of their beds covered up by lavalavas. Their feet were hanging out over the tailgate and I remember noticing that there was no mud on their feet. Everything is so nasty here. The other FM stations on the island were also on top of the situation so around 5:30pm, I signed off and sent everyone home with John and I caught a ride from some friends Rocco, Debra and Robert from the local Christian station KULA-LP who came to check things out and bring us water & food. As we drove through the area I saw more and more horrible things. The photos attached are from Rocco's camera and some are from my camera phone. The place has changed. Where i buy my morning snacks is a concrete slab and Marge Crispin, the lady who makes the most delicious meatpies, is no badly injured at the hospital. The new day spa that my girlfriend Moana works at is no tiliting precariously on it's foundation. The Korean store is gutted. The store where I get my lambflaps for lunch has a truck in it. The Sacred Heart aiga bus has a telephone pole skewering it like some sort of crazy shishkabob.Gas storage tanks at the fuel stations were carried off and leaking. Water mains are probably still gushing. The power generation plant near the canneries was badly hit but back up portable units were on the way in on big 18 wheelers. As we got further out of the belly of the harbor the damage was less and less noticeable. The radio station was ground zero for the worst natural disaster in recorded American Samoa history.

After grabbing some food, I took shower at my apartment and have been checking email and trying to spread as much info as possible on what happened. I've received calls and email from the USA, Canada, France, England, Australia and I think I'll be on TV on the network morning show in a few hours. I can't keep up with who I've talked to. The phone has rang every three minutes fot the past 3 hours..... I've been writing this email for two. It should have taken 15 minutes.

Video will be put here when finished uploading: http://www.joeycummings.com/client/SSB/

It's only half finished uploading currently.

Best,

Joey Cummings
General Manager
93KHJ (KKHJ-FM)
V103 (WVUV-FM)
Island Info Channel 13
Island Music Channel 10

Helen's Story

2009-09-23T22:10:00.004-11:00

From: HELEN <he******@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 1:25 AM
Subject: hello
To: Art Leonard <artl*********@gmail.com>

Travelled around the two biggest independent islands, Upolu & Savii which are both less than 200 kms in circumference. Spent time in Apia, the capital looking at the food & flea markets and generally walking around the streets. Five km’s out of Apia is where Robert Louis Stevenson’s lived and died in an old large wooden residence with a lovely large garden & grounds. It has now been turned into a museum. Robert lived his last 4 and half years in Samoa as the climate was kinder to his medical problem. Walked 45 minutes along a steep path up a hill to his grave site and was rewarded with great views over Apia. Travelled by local bus to a few beaches on the southern coast & spent time walking, reading and doing a bit of snorkelling. Rained some of the time and the middle of the day was usually uncomfortably humid/hot even though it is the coolest time of the year in Samoa. Took a ferry across to Savvi the other island and stayed in a place called Manase at Janes Beach Fales. Did a day tour, approx 180 km’s around the islands and saw most of the main attractions. First stop was a large Babylon tree which you could climb up stairs which lead to a Canopy walkway which on the day we went they decided that we couldn’t walk across it which was disappointing, apparently some days they let you & some days they don’t. Second stop was Alofaaga blowholes where they put coconuts in one of the blow holes & the coconuts shoot up into the air. The ocean around this area are very rough. Third stop was a nice waterfall with a pool below which we went swimming in. Fourth stop was the lava fields which were formed in approx 1911 with the eruption of Mount Matavanuthen, saw a Church which the lava came right through & a crater which is now covered with grass. Fifth & last stop was swimming with the turtles in a turtle enclosure. With a bit of Papaya in your hand they would come up to you and take it out of you hand which was neat.

The rest of the time on the island was spent walking & reading, a little bit of snorkelling. The weather wasn’t the best for swimming as it rained some days, was windy some days plus it wasn’t pleasant when the tide was out.

Samoa is one of the least visited Pacific Islands and the cheapest to visit. We paid around $35 for a Fale which included communal breakfast & tea. Samoa is relatively cheap but it is 3^rd world and more expensive than South East Asia but not complaining as I spent less than $800 for the 2 weeks. Western goods are very expensive as they import most things, same as Vanuatu. Approx 80% of the tourists are from New Zealand. There were some religious singing groups visiting, seems the ideal place.

My holiday in Somoa was tragic as on the third day we were there Ruth drowned when we were snorkelling as we got caught in a channel at Lalomanu beach. There was a sign on the beach which warned of strong currents when the tide is high or going out but not of channels. I found out later that where we were there were 3 channels all going out the same place in a gap of the corral reef. We swam for about 10-15 minutes then hit the channel, Ruth was taken out a few feet, swam to her & from then on Ruth panicked and held onto me. For approx one & a half hours I tried to swim with Ruth holding onto me but I would swim forward with the current then we would be brought right back again, I could only hold ground, not gain any distance. I didn’t know what we were in and kept looking for a way out but the waves seemed to come from either side & all around. Ruth kept saying she was sorry and I kept trying to persuade her to swim, she also kept asking me if we were closer & I would say yes to try and give her confidence. After 30 minutes or so it was dark so even if there were people walking along the beach they would not have seen us. We weren’t getting anywhere & I was tiring so I decided my only option was to try & swim to shore by myself & get help. I had no idea that it would take me over an hour to reach the shore, we were inside the corral reef and not that far out but it was going from high tide to the tide receding, which is the worst time. It was a nightmare swimming, constantly swimming towards shore, getting taken out again, getting dumped, even trying to float for some respite but then a wave would go over my face. I ended up getting really determined as I knew I couldn’t keep this up for a lot longer and one time when the current started to take me out yet again I saw a rock about a foot high and wedged my leg against it and then when the current came in again I swam quickly to gain some ground. When I got closer to shore I held on to the coral on the bottom of the ocean when the tide was going out, sometimes the coral would break & sometimes it held but slowly I inched my way to shore bit by bit. Ended up getting to shore after 8 pm, I was pretty exhausted. Went for help, they sent out 2 kayaks first then I went out with a fishing boat from the next village with the locals to no avail. After 2 days Ruth’s body came to the surface, her hair had been caught on the corral until then. The locals and some of the tourists were very kind and I felt really bad as they made a fuss over me and telling me how strong and brave I was. They told me how lucky I was to get out of the channel & I think it was the fact that I swim regularly & I am strong minded & very determined. The fisherman that recovered the body had air tanks & they said that they had to go on the bottom of the ocean & pull themselves along to get out of the current. Four people have died in the channel in the last few years but they still won’t put up danger signs where the channel is or put buoys in the water and say don’t go past this point. I suggested it to the police, owners & different people. The owners said they told us of the dangers but they didn’t nor did they tell other people as I asked different people. I had to identify the body at the hospital chapel, the face was hardly recognisable. Spent some days walking around in disbelief, trying to rationalise the situation, thinking of all the ‘if only’. Ruth only has a brother (and a sister whom she dis-owns) and other than her brother I will miss her the most as I am the one that did everything with her, going to the pub, camping on long weekends, holidays etc. The Australian Consulate in Samoa took care of the arrangements of transporting Ruth’s body to Australia. Took awhile and the funeral was nearly 3 weeks after her drowning.

The day after the drowning Ancilla an English South African girl who is living in Auckland as a primary school teacher came to my room and asked if I needed a friend, we had met her the first night we arrived in Apia as she stayed in the same place as us. I wasn’t sure if I would go back home or not but I ended up deciding that whether I was in Australia or Samoa I still had to get my head together & try and cope. With Ancilla’s friendship and support we travelled together for the rest of my holidays. Ancilla viewed the body with me and was a good person to talk to and she kept reassuring me, I was luck to meet her.

When I got back to Australia I got bacteraemia (bacteria in the blood, not normally dangerous) from the corral cuts I got on my legs on the day of Ruth’s drowning. I thought I was nauseas from the plane but it went on for a few days plus getting shivers and fever. I was feeling a lot better 3 days later but one of the cuts was oozing so went to the doctor and had to take antibiotics even though the doctor thought my body had got over it.

All I can say is that we never know when our time is up so we need to make the most of every day of our lives.

Bye for now,

Helen.

__________________________________________________________________

We met Helen on the tour of Vailima, Robert Louis Stevenson's place, and she joined us on our hike up to his grave on the top of the mountain. Along the way, we learned her story and were moved by it. This was the day after her South African friend left and the day before she was scheduled to leave, so it was good that we were there to give her someone to talk to. Back to posting pictures and such next time.

OMG!!!1!!!11!!!!!

2009-09-16T21:07:00.003-11:00

GET EXCITED!

No, not the Klondike Bar commercial, the thing after that.

(Actually, I'm not even sure if that link works anymore, because it gave me an error two of the three times that I tried to watch it).

And, because people keep asking, no, I was not involved in any way with that show's production. Though I really wish I was.

Also, there is no way that one show with the host standing in front of the giant wave is real. Oh, awesomely dramatic waves like that happen here all the time, but it would carry him away if he were really standing there.

Touring the Vampire's House

2009-09-10T21:52:00.017-11:00

As you may recall, we were about to take the tour of the home of some fellow name Robert Louis Stevenson.

Have the tour guide show us how Robert Louis Stevenson was straight up gangsta.

Lots of guns and liquor. He may also have been a cowboy.

Or perhaps some sort of model. Or maybe Buddha's right-hand man.

In this one, he looks like he could have been a vampire. One who collected pointed sticks, perhaps to keep them away from those who wanted to drive them through his heart.

Even in the days of the gangsta-cowboy-model-Buddhist-vampire-werewolf, white people living in the Samoas had to have lots of things shipped to them in order to get by.

A really big front yard. Possibly to allow plenty of space for spotting random people at night before swooping down on them and biting their necks.

Mr. Stevenson, while trying to frighten a small boy, tragically discovered that the new look he has been modeling doesn't work as well as the traditional vampire cape. Or maybe he's teaching his stepson history, like the caption says.

Oh yeah, definitely a vampire. And possibly a model, going by the pose on that statue.

All that shiny silverware and he could never see his reflection in it. What a waste. What a waste.

This? Oh this is just a sculpture on Robert Louis Stevenson's porch about a story where the king of Samoa nearly ate his son.

No, really. Click to see a version that I think might be big enough to read.
It's actually a pretty good story.

TRAITORS!

2009-09-08T21:44:00.002-11:00

So it seems that after decades of doing things the American way, those Communist Nazis in Western Samoa have decided to switch sides!!!

I have obtained raw video that starts at the exact moment that the switch took place. Clearly there was chaos in the streets!

More coverage here.

(Seriously, I'm mostly just excited that the international press noticed this part of the world).

More of that Vacation We Took More than a Month Ago!

2009-08-26T20:29:00.007-11:00

Thursday, July 23rd

Eat a giant lunch at Hong Kong Palace, then head on over to wait for the commuter flight to The Independent State of Samoa™.

For about seven hours.

Yeah. We were already leaving a day later than we wanted to due to booking issues, and then our flight was delayed by three hours. Then a bit more time. Then there seemed to be a holdup for no apparent reason. At least we weren't wishing that we had spent the day seeing the island, as it was pouring down rain the entire time. Heavily enough to cause at least one of our delays, actually.

So FINALLY we got to board our plane, which was now headed for the much farther away Faleolo Airport, because Fagali'i, the airport where we were originally supposed to arrive, doesn't have lights.

Arrive in Samoa somewhere around 10, still without having eaten dinner. Hire a taxi to the hotel and ride with a fascinating guy who works for Starkist and is absolutely certain that they aren't leaving American Samoa anytime soon, which is awesome. Learn that in a rush to get us out of there 15 minutes earlier, the airline won't bring the checked bags until tomorrow. Learn that we put everything in our carry-on bags, but that our new friend is down to whatever he has in his carry-on bag in the trunk.

Which the bellhop took out with our bags when we arrived at the hotel. Which we didn't notice until the taxi was long gone. With absolutely no way to contact him. Oh well.

Leave his bags at the front desk and check into our awesome bungalow. Order room service for dinner because everything else closes at eleven. Dad's facial expression really says a lot here. Kind of a tired, excited, and relieved face all at once.

Or maybe I'm just posting this because it's one of the only pictures we took the entire day.

Thursday, July 24th

Wake up and see what our bungalow looks like from the outside.

Take a cab to Vailima, Robert Louis Stevenson's old place. Convince the cab driver who must really be having a hard time finding passengers that he does not need to wait for you there all day. Stand on the front porch and take a classic cheesy waving shot.

Decide that it's better to stop and go to bed now rather than in the middle of the tour.

A Really Cool Story that No One Knows About, but You Will After you Read this Post with a Legnthy Title!

2009-08-25T21:58:00.005-11:00

Well, I was totally going to keep on blogging about that awesome vacation I had over a month ago, but breaking news events tend to derail everything that I'm doing, and tonight some political figure of some sort appears to have passed away.

So as promised, I won't go more than a week without posting something, so I present to you the tragic tale of (kinda-sorta relatively) nearby Howland Island, which went from a tiny abandoned speck, to a poop-mining center, to a fledgling colony, to the center of an international tragedy, to the target of little-known follow-up attacks the day after Pearl Harbor, to a base hosting around 1,000 Marines, and then back to an abandoned speck. Really quite an interesting read for something I just happened to look at because I saw it on a map in the office.

Still Updating!

2009-08-18T21:20:00.006-11:00

I'll tell you what, nothing seems to derail my bloging habits like a multi-part entry. Or is that entries? Or...yeah, let's just get back to it.

We left off on the nearby min-island of Aunu'u, with that wild-looking tree.

Wednesday, July 22nd, Continued

From that tree, take a fairly intense hike through the jungle to a really big tree at the top of the mountain.

Meet a nice local man who lets you take a shortcut through a giant, mostly water-covered, taro plantation.

This is just a little less than half of it.

End up in the back of the village, where no white people are ever seen. Meet a small Samoan boy who points at your dad and exclaims "Palangi!" with awe, like it's the first one he's ever seen. Because it just might be.

Ride another "ferry" back to the main island. Deal with some jerk from Parks and Recreation who can't give you a ticket for parking in the space he considers reserved for him, so he double-parks you in.

Forget about that and go to the umu feast at Tisa's Barefoot Bar.

Enjoy free entertainment while you eat.

Finish another fun-filled day on the Rock with a nice 45-minuite drive back to my apartment.

Let's start something!

2009-08-14T20:40:00.003-11:00

All right, I've been a bit lax on the blogging lately because I've been working on the script for an episode of a new local miniseries. Perhaps I'll post the screenplay, but what I'd really like to post is video of the finished product.

Anyhow, I'm going to start something new on this blog. As you may have noticed, sometimes I'm just too busy to make a real post. From now on, when I don't get the chance to blog for just over a week, I'm going to post a link to something interesting/entertaining, preferably something about the Samoas.

So as high school football season begins (which you can now hear on V103 FM, by the way), I don't think there's anything more appropriate than this article on football and poverty in American Samoa. I'll admit that I haven't yet had the chance to read the whole thing. Includes a video for those of you with off-island Internet connections, or like a whole hour to wait for a 7-minute video to load.

Yet Another Update!

2009-07-29T21:11:00.010-11:00

Let's see, where did I leave off?

Sunday, July 19th, Continued

Go snorkeling while at Two-Dollar Beach.

Monday, July 20th

Take a vacation from your vacation and relax for a day while Adam is at work. Visit the Star Mound Site and try to figure out what it's supposed to be without being allowed to go on the big viewing platform, because it's apparently decaying.

Tuesday, July 21st

Visit the Turtle and Shark Site, because it's easily one of the most beautiful places on the island and has lots of waves crashing dramatically into lava cliffs, and that makes for good picture-taking.

Get hit by a giant wave while standing up there and then immediately see a shark. Catch it on shaky still camera mpeg video.

Drive all the way down past Leone to That Place that Adam Likes to Take Pictures From.

Wednesday, July 22nd

Drive down to the East End to take the ferry to Aunu'u. Teach Mom how to pronounce Aunu'u correctly (OW-nu-ooh). Discover that the ferry is just a handful of small boats over extremely choppy waters that don't give out life jackets. Go anyway.

"You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought."

Briefly look at the one village on the island and then begin hiking on the closer loop of the figure-8 trail on the island. Check out the entire lake of quicksand.

Throw rocks in that light brown area and watch them do a weird sandy splash thing. Drop one a thicker spot and watch appear to do nothing at first, then sink down into a bubbly dent in the sand.

Keep following the trail and get a great view of this cool outcropping and more dramatic waves crashing into it.

Also take a look at this, uh, unique tree right on the same beach where you can watch that from.

Decide that this is as good a time as any to end this entry and go to bed.

Another Update!

2009-07-21T20:13:00.009-11:00

Okay, now that all of that fun stuff like not working, having my parents here, and getting off of the island for the first time since I got here eight months ago is over, I can get back to blogging! Horray!

With my first guests on the island, and with my first string of more than three days off in a row, I made a startling discovery: There isn't really that much to do here. Especially if your guests aren't completely obsessed with hiking.

But I asked around a lot, borrowed some travel guides, and even browsed through my pictures on my laptop, and was able to scrape together enough for a satisfying seven days on The Rock¹ and 1.5 days in Indie Samoa². Yeah, that's totally what I was doing the entire time I wasn't updating much, and never, ever playing computer games. Nope, nope.

I must also give credit to my awesome girlfriend who came over and ~~helped with~~ completely spearheaded a massive cleanup of The Nest.³ During said cleanup, she taught me important things, like how my water pitcher-filter had been put together wrong (basically making it an ordinary pitcher for the two months that I had owned it), and how my stovetop OPENS UP for easy cleaning!

OMG!

So anyway, I managed to scrape together nearly everything there was to do on the island, and I think they had a pretty good time. And I got to take some pictures with Mom's camera and transfer them to this laptop, so you get to actually see where we went, and I get to pad out this entry with them.

Friday, July 17th

Go on a driving tour of the entire island, directed by the pastor of Adam's church while Adam is working. See first fautasi race and dancing fafafines at Blue Sky's 10th Anniversary festival.

Including a tour of the National Park and the spectacular views it has to offer:

Buffet dinner of Samoan food at the Tradwinds Hotel. Enjoy oka until you learn that it's raw fish. Take in a show of fiafia dancers while you eat your taro chips.

Saturday, July 18th

Lunch at L&L Hawaiian BBQ. Hike up to the WWII-era cannons, which happen to offer some spectacular views (More pictures of these and others when I get around to them on my Facebook albums).

Realx at Maliu Mai Resort with some cold beverages and enjoy the view.

Sunday, July 19th

Go to church, meet everyone there and have lunch with them and taste the exotic menu at a strange place called "Carl's Jr." Relax at Two-Dollar Beach. Discover an eel that the local kids say is poisonous but probably isn't.

Get tired and go to bed. Write more later.

¹ American Samoa, not the wrestler who happens to be half Samoan. I'm going to dedicate and entire entry to explaining nicknames given by locals.

² "The Independent State of Samoa.™" I guess I'll have to include nicknames that I made up as well.

³ My apartment. It can get a bit messy.

An Update!

2009-06-28T21:10:00.003-11:00

No, the Internet is not lying to you! I REALLY updated my blog!

Been really busy lately hanging out with Steph, my new lady-friend, and planning a trip with my parents to The Nation Formerly Known as Western Samoa. Also been busy at work, but I've only ever made a few really short blog posts from there.

Anyhow, I've found lots of really cool things to do in Western like an underwater cave pool, lava tunnels, watching fire dancers, swimming with sea turtles, and much much more! And by that last one, I mean that I'm not even halfway through reading the guidebook yet.

I also got a LOT of stuff stolen from me when, as I put it on my Facebook status, my pants were stolen, along with their complete contents. I was out paddling in my bathing suit by the Yacht Club and had left my pants partially hiddend under the picnic bench where they always went. The pants, along with my wallet, keys, cell phone, and still camera were stolen. Of course I hated myself for leaving them out like that, but not as much as whoever took them.

A day or two later, that same guidebook told everyone planning a visit here to not ever, ever, ever let their on stuff out of their sight, because in Samoan culture, "stealing isn't really a sin," mostly due to communal concepts of ownership.

NOW I learn that!

Oh well, learning that now is less annoying than how in the moments right after all that stuff getting taken, the only thing that 9 out of 10 people (both Samoan and white) could do was tell me that I shouldn't have left them out, which basically just starts the self-loating phase before I'm even ready to concede that my stuff is really gone.

Where I'm from, the culture is very different. Very few people who saw a pair of pants lying there would think to steal them.¹ In fact, they'd probably think that going through another man's pants is pretty gay.

The really bad part is that this is actually the third thing that I have had stolen from me. My iPod was stolen a few months ago from my car (I think because I didn't notice that the window was stuck open, because I'm pretty good about locking it), my shoes were stolen from the Yacht Club when I accidentally left them there overnight, and now this. Perhaps the same person stole them all, and there's a Samoan kid walking around with an iPod full of loud punk music, a pair of shoes that don't fit him, and a really worn-out phone with the theme from The Office as it's ringtone.²

At least now I have finally learned to keep everything behind at least five padlocks and six guard dogs³, because stuff WILL get stolen here. It's probably a good thing that I couldn't upadate this blog for so long, because without some time to cool off, I'd be talking about how I feel like I'm on an island full of kleptos. But I'd never say nor imply that, not even in the slyest indirect manner. Nope, nope, nope.

__________________________________________________________________

On a completly unrelated note, I was saddened to learn of a recent celebrity passing. One who moved us all on many occasions. Yes, Billy Mays, the infomercial guy and star of the Discovery Channel's Pitchmen died today at age 50. Love him or hate him, her was a great salesman, which is apparently really, really important in my industry. Here is the best tribute YouTube has to offer, a gangsta rap remix.

I also want to share this great Fark posting, which I had planned on tellin Mays about after I become a Hollywood bigshot and meet him.

First poster: "Billy Mays is an underappreciated genius. He could read the phonebook, and I would find it amusing."

Second poster: "BILLY MAYS HERE FOR THE WHITE PAGES! LOOK, ARE YOU TIRED OF SEARCHING THROUGH COUNTLESS ROLODEX CARDS LOOKING FOR PHONE NUMBERS? TIRED OF LOOKING THROUGH COMPUTER FILES, PAPER FILES, EVEN THROUGH OLD MATCHBOOK COVERS OR BUSINESS CARDS? WELL THEN LOOK NO MORE!

WITH THE WHITE PAGES YOU GET MEN'S NAMES! WOMEN'S NAMES! YOUNG PEOPLE'S NAMES! SENIOR CITIZEN'S NAMES! EVEN FOREIGN NAMES! AND IT'S ALL ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY! WHAT COULD BE EASIER?

AND IF YOU CALL RIGHT NOW, IN ADDITION TO THE WHITE PAGES, WE'LL INCLUDE THE YELLOW PAGES ABSOLUTELY FREE! HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS OF PAGES OF NAMES AND NUMBERS OF BUSINESSES YOU WANT TO TALK TO, ALSO ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY BY BUSINESS TYPE! YOU WANT A CHINESE TAKE OUT? BOOM! RIGHT THERE! YOU NEED A PROCTOLOGIST? BAM! HERE'S A DOZEN OF THEM RIGHT AT YOUR FINGERTIPS... AND THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU!

AND IF YOU CALL IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES, WE'LL ALSO INCLUDE THE GOVERNMENT PAGES! THAT'S RIGHT, RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK, YOU'LL GET A COMPLETE LIST OF GOVERNMENT SERVICE PHONE NUMBERS -- FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL! -- WITHOUT THE EMBARRASSMENT OF ACCIDENTALLY CALLING 9-1-1 FOR NON-EMERGENCIES!

SO RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR, YOU GET THE WHITE PAGES, THE YELLOW PAGES, AND THE GOVERNMENT PAGES! A $199 VALUE, FOR ONLY $19.95 PLUS SHIPPING! CALL NOW!"

¹Also, in the mainland there would have been lockers to store things in and an adequate number of parking spaces, so that I could have parked nearby and kept my stuff in my car, but that's just me feeling bitter.

²If you see him, you have my permission to hurt him.

³This part is easy. Dogs are really plentiful here.

A Twosome!

2009-06-13T18:20:00.003-11:00

That's right, everyone! You get a post with two (somewhat) new photo albums for the price of one, one of which has never before been posted to my Facebook news feed, so ~~no one~~ only one or two of you have ever seen it before!

Grand Samoan Adventure, Part Lima (5)- Captions that I don't think many of you have seen.

Grand Samoan Adventure Part Ono (6)- New to (most of) you!

I also have one of the ever-popular "story"-type posts coming up that I started working on, but got lazy.

Take a Look

2009-05-31T20:39:00.002-11:00

Yes everyone, today is an important anniversary. It was just a week ago that I did that post about it being a year since I graduated. Let's spend some time looking back on...

OK seriously, I just want to post this awesome music video that I did most of the shooting work on. It's directed by BlueSky's Tukaine, who learned just about everything he knows about videomaking from YouTube. Joey, my boss, explains as follows:

LOCAL MUSICIANS MAKE "ROCK" VIDEO

Four guys made quite a stir in the MacConnell Dowell rock quarry this past weekend while taping scenes for a new music video. And I sure had a blast! The story starts 18 months ago when I wrote and recorded a track called Monkey On My Back which I sent to my friend and fellow musician Tulaga "Tukaine" Whitcombe. He remixed it with a hip-hop flavor and added lots of his own personality to the song. We're both busy guys, so we haven't done any other projects together but we always talked about shooting a music video for Monkey.

Saturday was the day. I got 93KHJ morning show host John Raynar, our friend Tusi, Tulaga and myself down to a rock quarry for the shoot. We tapped TV guy Adam Leonard to run the camera for us. Tulaga had a concept for the video. Work. Dirt. Another Place. You see, all the other local music videos invariably have an island theme. Beaches. Palms. Green stuff. We, on the other hand, had rocks, dirt and grease. It was a ton of fun. Tulaga did all the editing and post-production work. He just sent me the first cut.

More Anniversial Brooding! Horray!

2009-05-24T15:58:00.004-11:00

Well everyone, it has now been a year since a very monumental event in my life. On that beautiful, fateful spring day in 2008, something that I will remember as long as I live took place.

I had my best Facebook status ever:

"Adam Leonard beat college. The end boss was hard."

Oh, and the "end boss" was hard. My last day of finals involved both a major presentation and a final project for animation class, both of which turned out pretty well in the end. Probably because I got about two hours of sleep that night.

Yes, it was 365 days ago today that my world was turned upside-down and I was no longer a college student. I took my first steps in to the adult world, to be followed with five months of being unemployed and living in my parents' house.¹ Finally, I left what I had dubbed the "Parallel Universe" (being stuck somewhere between college and the real world), and came to the Surreal World, as the tagline of this blog calls it. Eventually, I'll get around to joining the real world. Maybe.

You know, if you had told me a year ago that I was going to be spending more than six of the next 12 months on an island, I would have thought it was a metaphor of some sort.

Anyway, I'd go over what's happened to me in such a wacky year, but I already blogged about that in my wrapup of 2008, and last week. Instead, let's look at where a few of my friends are now. There's a special focus on those that graduated (or were originally intended to graduate) as part of the Class of '08, but I'm going to be pretty loose with that. I won't name any names, as some of them may not want the great rush of fame and media pressure that comes with being mentioned on such a wildly popular blog.

So, as of now, what I know from the top of my head and Facebooka is:

At least seven of my friends are living and working in Hollywood.

One is also living and working in the Outer Rim Terriories (At a newspaper in Guam).

One climbed mountains all summer before going to grad school during the winter before he starts climbing again.

At least eight are going to grad school somewhere.

At least five have gotten married or are about to be, one of whom happens to also be in Hollywood.

At least five appear to have bounced around Europe for at least a few weeks or are currently doing so.

At least two graduated early.

At least six are just now graduating.

At least two um..hope to graduate next year.

Nearly all of my friends that wanted to work in media are getting to. We're talking about at least 15, going by what I know alone. Only two are working elsewhere. Awesome!

However, the majority of my friends didn't fill out their work info on their Facebook pages, which might mean that they're not working at all. Or that they're lazy. Probably both.

Six talked to me on Skype just today.

One has a party to go to now and can't keep blogging forever without missing more of it. I'll try and refine these numbers a bit later.

¹It's worth noting that just within the last few weeks, I had finally spent more post-graduation days being employed than unemployed.