better late than never

I should've started one of these in January 2005 when I arrived on this tiny little rock in the South Pacific...but today seems like as good a day as any. I have to give props to my friends Sara and Alex (mostly Alex) for providing such a riveting blog of their new life in Brussels. These first few posts may be in somewhat of a flashback mode to try and recount the crazy things that have happened since landing in American Samoa...all 76.1 square miles of it! I'm sure I'll forget some of the crazy occurrences, and will be overwhelmed with new ones, like the pickup truck in front of us on our drive to work this morning that had an old oil drum with no lid in the bed of the truck and whenever the truck accelerated or turned too sharply a strange chunky, yellow liquid would overflow into the bed and slowly dribble out the back onto the road...sewage sludge? restaurant grease? vomit? upon further inspection (we passed a car so we could get right up behind the truck...average speed on the way to work is 15mph) it was determined that there were noodles...as in spaghetti noodles...hanging over the side of the drum. Why in the world these 2 dudes were transporting a large oil drum full of noodles in the back of their truck is beyond me, but if any restaurants on-island are featuring a pasta special in the next few weeks, I'm gonna pass. Stay tuned.