The Island of LOL WUT

I think everyone has their own personal nickname for this island. Barbara refers to it as "Neverland," Jeremy uses the popular (and possibly wrestling-related) nickname "The Rock." I like to refer to it as "the Island of LOL WUT."

It comes from a popular Internet meme picture:



And for those of you who don't speak fluent Internet, it means:



I call this The Island of LOL WUT because of all the strange things you see here. Trucks driving down the street with two flat tires and then turning down a road that leads away from any place where it could be fixed. Inflatable moving snowmen decorations on top of relatives' tombs...in a front yard. Stores that sell "edible beef blood." Oh, and I have photographic proof of both of those last two...somewhere on my hard drive.

This past week I met one of the guys that runs KVZK-TV. He said that when he first moved here around 1999, blogging existed, but it wasn't a big thing like it is today. So instead of a blog, he sent everyone who requested it a daily email consisting of a single strange thing that he had seen here. "Today I saw someone mowing their lawn with a weed wacker." "Last week I saw a pickup truck with no fewer than 10 kids riding in the back," etc.

One day, after about a year of living here, he announced that he had lived here long enough that nothing was strange to him anymore. He had become accustomed to even the strangest of customs.

It's very true. One day I'm taking pictures of thingsthat look strange to me, and the next I find myself carrying half a dozen cinderblocks around in the trunk of my car. To be used as furniture, of course. And just last night, I discovered how well I can sleep without air conditioning.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On a completely unrealated note, I recently recieved my copy of The Onion's Our Dumb World in the mail, which I had bought on eBay just two months ago. It's a parody of an atlas, and makes fun of nearly every single country and territory that's big enough for them to notice (not this one). While the entry on (Independent) Samoa is particularly hilariously mean, so much so that I'd better not repeat it, it's not the reason why I'm mentioning it here. It's actually because of the forthcoming apocylapse that it warned of:


I realize that it's already the post-apocalyptic world in most of the planet. So for those of you in time zones that have already survived this catastrophe, please let me know how I can survive in the comments section.

Another One Rides the Bus

As promised, here's my tale of riding the aiga buses two weeks ago.

It was Saturday, and I had but three things to do: Get a haircut, pick up my meds from the hospital pharmacy, and run down to the station to see if we were still getting the Armed Forces Network feed so that I can go there the next day and watch the Daytona 500. If there's time, I'd also like to see about joining the paddling club.

It seemed so simple. I should be back in just a few hours.

Looking back on it, I haven't felt so naive since, going into my freshman year in college, I expected my the alcohol-free suite that I signed up to live in to actually be remotely alcohol-free.

By the way, the buses here are no ordinary buses. They're aiga buses, and they're made out of modified pickup trucks.



As you can see here, "aiga" is Samoan for "freak of nature." OK, not really. "Aiga" (pronounced "ah-ING-gah") is Samoan for the entire extended family. I'm guessing that the idea with the bus is that it's big enough to carry around the entire aiga in.

Anyhow, I walked about 3/4 of a mile to the bus stop, not too far. A bus was already there and waited an extra minute or two for me to get on. This guy must be really smart and nice, right?

Again, may I refer you to the story about when I first signed up for housing my freshman year.

The bus was pretty full, maybe about 80% of it's relatively few seats taken. I got my own seat, but pretty soon I found myself thinking of the old Weird Al Yankovic song "Another One Rides the Bus." It's a parody of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" and a lot of the music sounds the same, but it's done with an accordion:

Riding in the bus down the boulevard
And the place was pretty packed (Yeah!)
Couldn't find a seat so I had to stand
With the perverts in the back.
It was smelling like a locker room
There was junk all over the floor.
We're already packed in like sardines
But we're stopping to pick up more, look out!

The bus pulls in at another one of the stops and it looks like there is about one seat left for every three people waiting to get on. Miraculously, only about half of the people get on, and the rest are content to keep sitting on the concrete bench. What they're waiting on, I have no idea. The bus continues on, it's plastic half-windows rattling and it's more-expensive-than-the-vehicle stereo blaring island music covers of hip-hop songs. Most of the stops have only a few people getting on or off, luckily enough.

(Chorus)
Another one rides the bus.
Another one rides the bus.
Another comes on and another comes on.
Another one rides the bus.
Hey, who's gonna sit by you?
Another one rides the bus.

As anyone who has ridden these buses before knows, the way to make them stop is by knocking on the window or wall when you're almost at the spot where you want to get off. When we were nearly at the place where I was getting my hair cut, I knocked on the window.

No response.

I knock on it again. The bass of the island hip-hop music keeps thudding away. The driver has to be completely deaf by now. A bird could nest in his ear and he wouldn't hear it. It's a good thing that there are no railroad crossings on the island. Oh well, on to the next errand. About ten blocks past my stop, the woman behind me knocks as well. Nothing. We keep rolling down the highway.

The window doesn't open and the fan is broke
And my face is turning blue (Yeah!)
I haven't been in a crowd like this
Since I went to see the Who
Well I should've got off a couple miles ago
But I couldn't get to the door.
There isn't any room for me to breathe
And now we're gonna pick up more! Yeaaah!

We come to the intersection nearest the hospital, and I bang on the wooden wall like mad. It's a lot louder than the windows. The guy actually stops and lets me off! I am amazed and pick up my meds from the hospital. Only problem is that I'm carrying $200 worth of drugs around for the rest of the day, which ends up not being a problem. A half hour or so later, I get ready to ride back and take another stab at getting my hair cut (probably a bad choice of words on this island).

I walk to the nearest bus stop. A high school-aged girl is waiting there as well. She gives up and walks to the village that she's going to. I decide to wait for a bus. I learn that she was probably right. A bus comes up and stops. I get on. The driver is trying to ask me something, but his English isn't very good. He keeps asking me which way I'm going, and finally one of the passengers fills me in that he's turning the bus around here. I get off and wait again.

After quite a bit more waiting, another bus comes by and I get on. I ride it back to the palace where I was supposed to get my hair cut. I knock on the wall again.

Nothing.

I keep knocking furiously on the wall. I'm seconds from jumping up and yelling "STOP THE DAMN BUS!" Finally, I luck out and my metal watch bangs against the wall in the right way and the driver stops, only a quarter mile from where I wanted to get off. I walk down to the haircut place.

There, I find that there are a lot more people waiting than the last time I was there. They give me a number. It's actually a page from a 2008 Chinese daily calendar, but at any rate, it's number 16, and they're currently serving number 4. All I can think about is the waiting room scene in Beetlejuice. And how I'm getting hungry. And how I'm so glad that the TV is showing a cool H-O-R-S-E basketball tournament, instead of the Hannah Montana marathon I had to watch while getting my prescription renewed two weeks ago.

About two and a half hours later, the ladies cutting the hair tell me that I'm second-to-next. Hooray, I'm almost out of here!

Again, did I tell you about how I expected to live in an alcohol-free dorm my Freshman year?

Suddenly, both of the hair-cutting ladies stop everything and eat lunch. At the same time. And of course, all I can think about is how badly I want lunch. There's a laundromat in the same building with a mini-store inside. I run in for a quick snack. I spend quite a bit of time figuring out what I want and can afford on the little bit of cash I have on me. Finally, I decide I want popcorn, which they have a sign for. The guy behind the counter laughs and tells me that they don't have any. In fact, they don't have much of what I want at all. I finally decide on some chips and go back to waiting next door.

Finally, I get my hair cut and out of there. Still hungry, I get on the bus and ride it to my weekly Laufou Shopping Center (where several people will inevitably get off), use the ATM there, and then walk about a half mile to my weekly free meal at L&L Hawaiian Barbecue (my bosses are the owners), because I'm not about to get on another bus if I don't have to.

Lunch is good, except that they're working on a water main across the street, and the soda fountain runs out of water. So all the soda that it dispenses is pure syrup. Which is actually a pretty good thing. I thank them for my free food and a receipt for $0.00 (which I think is awesome) and move on. I later learn that the water main was supposed to take 30 minutes to fix, and was currently in it's third hour, leaving the village with no water until they fixed it late that night.

With an attitude of "God help us all" I board a bus to take me down to the TV station in town to see if I'll be able to watch the race. The driver asks me which way I'm going. I start to freak out for a second, but he's actually going the right way and I get to tell him in advance where to drop me off. The rest of the trip is pretty smooth, except when we had another "bus is nearly full and there's a dozen people about to get on" situations."

There's a suitcase poking me in the ribs
There's an elbow in my ear.
There's a smelly old bum standing next to me
Hasn't showered in a year.
I think I'm missing a contact lens,
I think my wallet's gone!
And I think this bus is stopping again
To let a couple more freaks get on. Look out!

People start to pour in. One of them is an especially obvious fa'afafine, or traditional Samoan transvestite. I get kind of uncomfortable because I have one of the only empty seats left and well, I'm really not used to that kind of thing yet, particularly if I don't know the person. Luckily for me, she moves on and sits in the back.

I ride on to the station and discover that a) we don't use the air conditioning on the weekends when no one is there and b) we no longer have the AFN feed. I walk back to the nearest bus stop, a nice, brand new one, and sit on the covered concrete bench.

A bus passes by without stopping. He didn't have any passengers. Maybe he was done for the day? Another one passes, with a few passengers. I'm now standing out on the curb and waving at the drivers. One more passes by without passengers. Screw this, I'm walking to the Yacht Club to see about paddling. Even if it's three miles. I walk there and take a lot of good pictures along the way, and discover lots of little things that I never saw while driving. The Fono (territorial Congressional building) still has it's Christmas lights up. One store has a sign up advertising the New Coke, and I don't mean that it has an old sign. I later went in that store trying to find it, but that's another story for part of another entry.

Eventually, I make my way to the Yacht Club. It's pretty cool there. I learn when the Paddling Club meets and make up my mind to join. I hang out for a while and have a water before taking one more bus home. about 90% of the way back, and then having to walk the last half-mile. Not a big deal.

Another one rides the bus

Another one rides the bus ow
Another one rides the bus hey hey
Another one rides the bus hey-ey-ey-ey ey ey eyyyyyy

________________________________________

EDIT: OK, apparently someone who doesn't understand context noticed that this rather long entry contains the word "freaks" once in the middle of one of the song lyric quotes and interpreted that to mean that I think Samoans are freaks. That could not be more wrong. I left the line in because, well, it didn't even occur to me that someone would make that leap in logic. I used this song because it's a song I like about a weird experience on a bus, which was appropriate to this entry. I didn't go through the meaning of every single word it contained with a fine-tooth comb looking for possible alternate meanings and neither should you.

EVUN MOAR PITCHERS!

That's right, I've completed my third photo album of the island. I'm now up to one for every entire month that I've been here!

And, a bit more fairly, around 1.5 for every month since I've been here where I had Internet access.

Also, for those of you that already saw it on Facebook, I've now filled in the captions of the last twenty or so pictures. There are explanations for almost every one of those towers on the mountain.

Joey, if you get the chance, check over the last fifteen or so of those pictures and let me know if I have it right.

The story about riding the buses to come...sooner or later. Hopefully before I forget most of it.

Also, did I mention that you can watch and rate Barbara's video? Because you can.

PICK BARBARA!

UPDATE: The links to the video now work. But if something goes wrong again, just go to islandreefjob.com and then click "all applicants," and then click the drop-down menu and select "American Samoa." Browse through all one of the videos and select Barbara's

There seems to be some kind of tradition going on with this blog: Every time that I say exactly what I'm going to be blogging about next time, I end up writing about something else. So I'll write about riding around on the buses...soon.

So anyhow, I helped my friend Barbara make this awesome video for her application to The Best Job In the World, the job of being the caretaker of a tiny island on the Great Barrier Reef where she would get paid $100,000 to live in a giant house on the Reef and blog about diving, hiking, snorkeling, and generally adventuring* on the island for six months.

So anyway, please go here and watch the video. Then rate it five stars. Then share it with all of your friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances and tell them to do the same. Then rate it five stars again on your school or work computer. Then go to your local library, log on to every computer, then rate the video five stars each time. Then drive to the next town, sign up for another library card, and do the same thing again.

Did I mention that if she wins, a lot of people will see that video that I helped make? And that I will get to be one of her guests on the island? Oh. They will. And I will.

Even if she doesn't win, Barbara, who is originally from Italy, will continue adventuring** like she has been doing for the last ten years. Her contract as a Marine Biologist here has ended, and she will be leaving us soon. And by soon, I mean that while typing this, I looked out the window and saw the plane that will take her off of the island come in for a landing. While leaving the going-away party for her and someone that I didn't really know last night, she spoke some great words of wisdom: "You only leave once!" Later on, I realied that sometimes her accent is a little heavy sometimes, and that she actually said "You only live once." That makes a lot more sense.

Next, she plans on visiting friends in San Francisco, then mountain climbing in Oregon while visiting other friends there, then possibly heading up to Alaska to meet more friends during the Idiot A-Rod Iditarod. Presumably not as a contestant. You can follow her further adventures on her blog, which is on the list of blogs to the right. I think that she's really shown us the value of making lots of friends along the road of life. That's something we should all be doing for a very good reason:

To get more people to watch and rate the video!


*It's a real word! No, really!
**Even Firefox's spellchecker says that it's a real word!

Lake Mormon

So a week ago it was raining hard. Really hard. Imagine the hardest rain you've ever been in. Now throw that image out of your head completely because it's nothing like the intensity that goes on here in tropical rainforest areas. While leaving church and then going to lunch, I took some pictures:



This was actually taking the long way around, because there was an even bigger puddle in the way of my normal route. But on the way back, I decided that I was being silly, and that I could certainly wake* it through the big puddle in front of the Mormon church, known as the Great Salt Lake and Lake Mormon.



"See, there was no need to drive all the way around town just to avoid this puddle!"

*Car dies*

"AW, DAMMIT!"

Some Samoans who saw me jump out and wade through water that was just beneath the floorboards of my car were nice enough to help me push it out of the water. Refer to the picture at the top of the post, taken three hours later. One of them told me to come back in a few hours and try to start it again, so I went home and learned about how my engine may have been destroyed through the magic of hydro-locking. A few hours later, it didn't start. I almost called a tow truck that night, but at the advice of my friend Barbara, who's blog can now be found to the right, decided to wait until the next morning so I can have this Indian she knows come and look at it for much cheaper.

I come outside the next morning to leave the key for the mechanic. Joey is with me, ready to give me a ride to work. Just for the hell of it, I start up my engine and...IT WORKS! I drive it all the way to work without any problem but a clacking noise from the engine and a chugging at very low speeds. I drive it for the entire next few days without any more problems, save for when I drive it up a steep hill and can here a boiling sound coming from the engine after I stop the car.

Yeah, I'm getting it looked at.

I'm expecting to get it back in the middle of next week.

Next time: My wacky adventures of riding the agia buses around this weekend.



*This was an actual typo that I made, but I think it was more of a Freudian slip.

MOAR PITCHERS!

So, after reading the previous entry, Joey filled me in with the following detail about the AFN feed:

The feed of the Super Bowl came from AFN, which carries no commercials. AFN instead airs military announcements in place of commercials. These are of a sensitive military natures and are not allowed on civilian airwaves. Therefore, KVZK played alternate programming during the AFM program breaks.

Also, there's another album of pictures up on Facebook for those of you who haven't seen it yet. And for those of you who went through the whole thing before I had a chance to write all the captions, it now has all of the proper captions.

And for those of you who have seen it since I finished writing the captions almost a week ago, I've started working on the next one, so that'll be up eventually.

The Super Bowl, Samoan Style

I just watched the Super Bowl for the first time since arriving here. It was...ah...different.

But first, the runup to the Big Game. American Samoans LOVE American football, so it's a big deal here. Due to their size and athletic ability, there are quite a few Samoans in the NFL. And of course, the locals favor any team with a Samoan player. A lot of Samoans claimed to be "HUGE Steelers fans," but have never even heard of the world-famous Terrible Towel. The real truth is that they're fans of California-born safety Troy Polamalu, a Samoan.

I was also interested to learn that one of the players for the Carolina Panthers is a Tongan. Which really gave everyone here a reaction of "Oh." Turns out the Samoans and Tongans don't get along very well. Possibly due to centuries of war between them.

I ended up watching it in Taps Sports Bar, because our radio station had a live braodcast there, and I figured I might as well watch it with the people I know best (and where they have $2 Heinekens). The live broadcast ended about 10 minutes before the game started, and half of the people with the station left at that. But the rest of them stayed, and I was pretty nicely settled in (had just started a beer) so I stayed. I had a couple of nachos and some "Chile fries," according to the menu. I had no idea that Taps had such international cuisine.

It's incredibly weird to see a Super Bowl in the middle of the day. For almost the entire first half, it felt like just an ordinary football game on a Sunday afternoon. Plus, all the excellent Super Bowl commercials are gone.

See, since my station is set to become the NBC affiliate and already kinda/sorta is, we had the rights to the game. But Joey wanted our small sales staff to focus on getting long-term sponsors for the station, rather than just a few short-term sponsors for the game. Plus, it would be a lot of work to get ready for, and we're still only available on cable in a place where only about 5,000 homes have it. And it would suck to have to cram your giant Samoan agia (extended family) into the house of the one guy you know that has cable (as rival station/fake Fox affiliate Malama forced them to do last year). So we gave the game to government-owned station KVZK.

All live sports get here via the Armed Forces Network satellite feed. But for whatever reason, the AFN doesn't want the Samoan populace watching their commercials (I guess the website for info on how to get the most out of your GI Bill money is a closely guarded military secret), so they have to be covered up with something. Presumably because we gave them the game, we didn't let them air any commercials. So KVZK instead used footage of some kind of candlelight vigil for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And something else that appeared to be a funeral for a Samoan soldier killed in action. They also cut out almost all of the speakers and hymns from both of these things, so the first five commercial breaks were literally just people walking up and putting candles on an altar.


















Yeah.

It's like they decided to air the most depressing thing that I couldn't possibly make fun of.

Anyhow, watching the game went really well. Except that the captions on the TV were set with all of our Spanish-speaking Samoan friends in mind.















I tried to help them fix this during the "commercial" break, but the controls for that were only on the remote, which had been lost. Turns out it's one of those TVs where they used up all the buttons on the set for things that 99% of people are afraid to touch, lest they find themselves watching everything in black and white with a permanently squished horizontal picture and all of the captions in Tongan.