On our own

Today marked the end of our classes and the beginning of our research. We had our final this morning and I’m just glad it’s over. It was all essay questions. Only four of us finished in the allotted time. I just need to vent right now and say that it’s really annoying when people go over time. Ya know, I could have written a lot more but I very purposefully set time limits for myself and followed them. Oh well. It’s over and I’m glad. I’m just a little nervous now about the research. We have a little over three weeks to do some original research and write a 40ish page paper. It’s just a little bit intimidating when you think about it. I’ll probably spend the next two days setting up interviews and developing my outline. Once I have that I know that things will go more smoothly but right now I feel like everything is one jumbled up mess inside my head and I have no idea where I’m going. The hardest part is not knowing what kind of information I’ll be able to obtain or what resources I will be able to access. Aside from that however ISP time should be just another adventure. Breakfast was our last meal here. For the next thirty days we are on our own. We’ve received a meal allowance that would allow us to go out every meal but I think the challenge will be shopping in the market and cooking using the few resources that we have available to us. We are allowed to stay at USP unlike many other SIT programs that require students to find their own housing. I think a few of us will be doing a little traveling/staying with families during ISP time but is seems like most will be sticking fairly close to campus.

One of the boys turned twenty today so we’re planning to go out tonight to celebrate. Most Samoans do not eat out on a regular basis and you can tell that by the small number of restaurants that are open in the evenings and on Sunday. The ones that are almost all cater to palagis/tourists. Our standard place is Italiano’s- which serves pizza and pizza. It’s not bad and its definitely the least greasy pizza parlor but its not deep dish gourmet either. We’ve gone their quite a few times in the past two and a half months, mainly because its convenient and we all know it. Personally my favorite place is a more locally popular restaurant called Seafood Gourmet. They have a really good seafood salad that is absolutely loaded with chunks of crab and other stuff. Mmm.