Celebrate the Small Things 28-7-23

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small things...

What am I celebrating this week?

I had a wonderful vacation.  It was definitely too short, but also definitely better than nothing.  Samoa is beautiful.  Much busier than I remember from the early '80s, and with far better roads.  It's also much bigger than I remember.  I don't recall it taking an hour or so to get to the airport, but it does.  I don't remember the drive across the island to the beaches being so long, or the drive to Piula being so far.

I also think there was only a single Chinese restaurant and that was the only option for a meal out other than going to a hotel.  Not the case anymore!  There are lots of restaurants and cafes and the food was surprisingly good.  Just not a lot of vegetables.  Check out the size of the lobster I ate at the Island Grill!  At home that would probably have cost $200 or so.  In Samoa it was the equivalent of about $35.

I was with a friend who had also lived in Samoa as a kid, just a little while before me, so we did a lot of looking around at places we remembered.  I saw my old house and my old school (which is now the archive for the ministry of education) and we saw the school where my mother taught.  We couldn't go in there because it was holidays and locked up.  We also couldn't go to the beach my family used to go to almost every weekend because it was closed off for pre-production on a TV series.  This was also the reason we weren't allowed to go to the beach next to my family's favourite which was annoying.

We did get to go swimming in a couple of extraordinary marine reserves.  One is a place where they're cultivating giant clams which was quite extraordinary.  Those clams are truly giant!  They're the size of sheep and have lips in all colours of the rainbow.  There were only four or five clams that size, but hundreds of smaller ones which will hopefully grow up to be giant.

We also snorkled at Palolo Deep which is ridiculously close to the port.  It's where the seabed was dredged to create reclaimed land on Apia's waterfront and is now a reserve.  The most beautiful coral has grown back in the trench and there were more fish than you could ever imagine and in every colour of the rainbow.  There were a few places where we were so surrounded by Damselfish it was like being in a snowstorm.  Those little fish came up and basically kissed my mask.  It was amazing!

On Friday night we went to Bingo at our neighbours church.  Bingo is the only church sanctioned gambling in Samoa and is taken very seriously.  This particular Bingo was to benefit the church's youth group and Celine, who invited us, explained that she had to play.  If someone from the family doesn't show up each week, they have to pay the church 60 tala.  I've never really played Bingo in English before, so you'd better believe it was difficult in Samoan!  I was really dredging the back of my brain to remember my numbers.  And it all went so fast!  Suffice to say, I didn't win...

We stayed at a resort one night to see how the other half live.  And also because we had to pick up my friend's other friends who were arriving the next day.  The resort we picked was close to the airport, but when we got there, the room they'd given us was not at all what we'd asked for.  Thankfully they were willing to refund us and we managed to get into another resort down the road.  The amazing power of a sob story...  And yes, we did lounge by the pool.

We also went and saw the To Sua Trench.  This wasn't open to the public when I lived in Samoa as a kid, so it was a whole new experience for me.  I didn't go down the ladder to swim in the pool because it was raining and everything was super slippery.  The photo probably doesn't do it justice, but the water here is 30m deep and crystal clear.  It's quite beautiful.

And there you go!  Highlights from my holiday.  I also caught up with some people I knew in Samoa 41 years ago, which was probably the best thing.  So odd to see these children all grown up!  Everyone was so friendly and so nice, which was also very different.  Back when I was a kid people were pretty rude to palagis (white people), but everyone was very helpful and very nice, even when telling us we couldn't go where we wanted to go.  And so interested in the fact we'd come back to Samoa after so long.

I'll definitely go back again.  I can't actually believe I left it so long, given how close Samoa is to New Zealand.