Restless....

Tell me why I have a biochem and physiology exam coming up in a week and all I can do is dream about summer vacation?? To make matters worse, I'm counting down the days already...7 weeks and 2 days exactly! This is when my happy ass will be on a plane to the city of sin to visit my familia and sit on the couch and wait for my 10 hour trip to Samoa, a place I still consider home after moving away 9 years ago. Gosh, it's going on ten years now that my family moved from a tiny little island in the South Pacific to Las Vegas, Nevada. It still feels like yesterday when I first walked into a Wal-mart and was absolutely amazed at how many cereal brands they had! I was used to choosing between corn pops, frosted flakes, or raisin bran.

So, yeah, it should be interesting to go home and see how things have changed. I'm sure there are many things that haven't though and these are the things I look foward to. For instance, there is this particular aroma that permeates the villages on Sunday morning. It smells like burning leaves mixed with a rich "green" smell. I know it doesn't make sense because green leaves don't really burn that well but that particular smell reminds me of home because every Sunday right after church at about 8 or 9 in the moring, you will see a haze of smoke all over from families making their sunday feast or toona'i. Samoans still cook through traditional means with what is called the "umu", an outdoor makeshift oven that uses hot stones to steam cook food under a blanket of banana leaves. This is where the smell of burning leaves and green leaves come from because you start burning dried leaves to make the stones hot and then with the food underneath the hot stones, you cover the whole spread with fresh green banana leaves.

Every Sunday, this toona'i marks the end of a long hard working week where extended families get together, eat good food, and spend quality time together. The only establishments open on Sundays are churches (of course) and a few mom and pop shops. What I remember most about Sundays is the ride home, on the back of my dad's pickup truck, from spending the afternoon at the beach. Before heading home, we would stop by the bakery to buy a loaf of freshly baked bread...the kind that you have to slice yourself. Me and the little sister would just pick out the center of the loaf and squish the bread between our fingers and mold it into little bread balls. These were the good old days of having salty fingers molding hot bread on the back of a truck and not looking forward to getting home to prepare for school the next day. This memory just makes me smile at how simple life was back then. Now, it's medschool stalking me to get off the computer to get back to studying....