Samoa - Manase, Savaii - April 16th

Today's update will only be about my birthday because I am currently updating from the library and for some odd reason the internet connect is terrible compared with Stafford. However, I don't want to waste my bandwidth at Stafford, so I am at the library.
My birthday was a good day, although not very productive or particularly interesting. We woke up early, as we did almost everyday. It was near impossible to sleep later than 9:30 because it got so hot and humid and it was very uncomfortable to try and sleep under those conditions. So we woke up early and went to breakfast. After getting out usual meager servings of fruit (usually one slice of papaya, 2 or 3 small slices of coconut, a small slice of orange, and occasionally (if we were lucky) a slice or two of pineapple and other random assortments of fruit), toast (with butter and jam, which there was never enough of) and our choice of egg (I always had mine fried, Chris always had his scrambled and Brian started out with the scrambled but ended our stay always getting fried). We always had to request ketchup. Even though we had been requesting it every morning, they never just brought it out, they would wait for us to ask. Usually the procedure for asking for ketchup went like this: One of us timidly saying as they brought our toast or eggs out, "Oh, do you think we could have some ketchup, please?" The server then would either nod or not even look at us and act as though she never heard us say anything. Several minutes would go by and we would be uncertain if ketchup would never come, but then she'd come out with a small portion of ketchup (never enough for all of us, especially because I'm a ketchup hog). And usually she would stand staring at the table until one of us would rearrange our plates on the table to accommodate the ketchup to a spot on the table she wanted to place it, when she would easily have placed it somewhere else. Although I'm being rather negative about this dining experience, don't get me wrong. We were quite happy with our situation, but the servers and overall service (as I have said before) was really the only downside to our vacation in paradise.
Back in our fale, around 9:30ish we went for a swim to cool off. We spent the better half of the morning exploring the shoreline, picking up shells and swimming. By the afternoon we decided we needed to buy some water at the local gas station (one of the only "stores" in the area and was to become our stomping ground because of the constant need for fresh water and snacks.) We bought water, a bottle of coke and some pringles and headed back. We were slightly bitter about the fact that Stevenson's charged so much for us to get lunch there (our payment to stay there had included complementary breakfast and dinner but not lunch) so we decided to try and find a cheaper and better place. Right next to Stevenson's was a BBQ place that offered BBQ (chicken, bananas, and sausage) for 7 tala. We decided to eat there and got a chance to talk with the locals that ran the place while we waited.
One thing that really pestered me during our stay were the bugs. I guess that's really girly and sissy of me to be irritated with, but I could not stand the abundant amount of mosquitos, little red ants (they were literally EVERYWHERE, all over the fale, all over the ground, all over the bathroom), and cockroaches (in the bathroom). Obviously the bug problem was something out of their control and for the most part they were just little annoyances that by the end of the trip I was really grateful to leave behind, but it's worth mentioning. The nice thing about the bugs was that they attracted really cute little geckos that would sit by light fixtures, that all bugs are inevitably attracted to, and flick their little tongues out and consume them.
ANYWAY, I digress, while we were standing talking with the BBQ owners we noticed a huge amount of red ants (no surprise really) crawling around the counter top. I asked the woman if the ants bit. She looked down, almost surprised to see all the ants and started brushing them off the counter. She answered with a sort of vague yes. I asked her if the ant bites hurt. She replied, again somewhat vaguely, "I don't know". Thinking back on it, I feel sort of silly to have cared so much because I was only bit once by the ants and it didn't really hurt at all. I now realize she must have been confused why I was so concerned over the bite of these tiny little pests.
We got out BBQ (they had no sausage so we got extra chicken) and brought it back to our fale. The food was nothing special, but filling and I had a lot left over because they had given us so much extra chicken. We were all a little worried that we'd get sick from the food, (so far we had not eaten any local foods) but none of us did.
We went swimming again and then decided to walk down the beach to "Raci's" (I can't remember the full name of it) shop for snorkle rental, kayak rental, etc. Raci is a 50 something, little, tanned, wiry man from Switzerland. How he came to live and work in Samoa was beyond me. He spends his days sitting on his deck, that functions as his rental shop as well as a bar in the evening, talking with tourists that come by. He notes the tide patterns for his customers and also runs several other shops in the area including a coffee shop and an internet cafe that his wife monitors. Overall, he's a well-off beach bum. What a lifestyle. We rented a snorkle set for half the day to share between the three of us and walked back down the beach to our fale which happened to be the best snorkling in front of it. When we got back, Jon Bell, our friend from Wellington who was to join us, had arrived and was sitting on our little fale porch. Due to the fact that all the other beach fales in Stevenson's we no longer occupied (all our neighbors had left after the first day we were there) Jon and Brian moved into the fale next door and Chris and I shared the original fale. This began a wonderful few days in which the fales and beach were entirely ours. We called it our private beach.
Jon had his own set of snorkling gear and after presenting me with a gift of a large bottle of rum (for my birthday celebrations later that night) he and Chris went snorkling for a while. After Brian went, I had a go at snorkling as well.
Snorkling, for me, was eerie and scary. I've never been technically trained how to swim and thus don't always trust my abilities to swim very far out or for a prolonged period of time. Snorkling made me nervous that I'd get too far off shore (you sort of lose perspective of how far you're going out and in what direction you're swimming) and not be able to swim back. Further, I really didn't like that I could only hear the loud sound of my breathing and the laping of water against my body. I felt really alone and isolated, which made the idea of getting pulled out to sea even more daunting. But, I sucked it up (realizing what a silly fear I had) and snorkled for maybe 10 minutes. It was pretty cool. I saw some really vibratly colored fish, some really large ones and some very tiny ones. I saw a wide range of coral, some small and bluish colored and some red colored ones that grew quite large, some up so close to the top fo the water that I got scared to get too close for fear of touching it. I saw sea cucumbers, angel fish, little black clown fish, and even a puffer fish. It was amazing how easy it was to paddle along, simply watching them, and none of them really got scared off by my presence.
We continued to snorkle, some of us sitting reading in the fales for the rest of the day. As the sun started to set we returned the snorkle gear, bought 3 large cokes for the rum later and then watched the sunset on the beach. We enjoyed dinner (sans the bad service and stray cats constantly pestering us) and talked for a while.
The rest of the evening was spent drinking rum and coke, playing several games of uno (the last game, which lasted WAY too long) and then talking late into the night. I ended up going to bed earlier than the rest of the group (when you wake up so early, it hard to stay awake so late).
Overall a very good birthday. Birthdays, for me, always pass without any real significance. Brian and Chris joked all day, "You're the lady, it's your birthday" when we had to make decisions about what to do, and it was left up to me because of the specialness of the day. I don't feel older and although the day is spent with a special sort of tenderness, nothing makes me feel as though I've reached some pinnacle age.
I'm 21, an age that so many people, Americans in particular, wait for with great anticpation and usually celebrate by getting extremely inebriated. It the celebration of adulthood and the legal ability to drink alcohol. And although I can now legally drink and am now legally considered an adult I still feel very young, as though adulthood is something I need to achieve not something I am granted at a certain age. I feel like I need to earn my right to be called an adult.

To be continued... hopefully soon.