Post US Sum up.

So we did a holiday to the US. 3 weeks Aeroplanes, spare ribs, supersized sodas, las vegas, Disney, knots berry, visiting family, freeway freaking out, freeway ACCIDENT, catching up with old friends, meeting NEW family, sleeping eating, walking in malls, running in malls, shop til you drop and fast food on the go all you can eat seafood chinese buffets. Uma laia.
It was a fun filled trip. We all put on weight (shock horror) .Most satisfying are the people we met/caught up with and taking the kids to theme parks, the looks on my kids faces meeting mickey mouse and Cinderella....my daughter yelling at the top of her lungs (she is 4) at a robot-olaf snowman (from Frozen cartoon) "OLAF! ITS ME MOANA,YOUR FRIEND" on top of a roof of a shop at disney because she was over the moon to see him in "real life"...was awesome.

We have done that trip, ticked that box. Would I go back again...I don't know, it would be hard to say yes to that. Thats my honest answer. Maybe for a wedding, or a family function, or even a shopping trip if I had lots of money (to pay the fare!) ....but as a holiday?? it was actually kind of hard to relax. Maybe because we had a jam packed itenirary, maybe because it was just too fast for me...life on the go, on the run it felt like.

The impression that the big USA left on me was....masses. Mass consumption, mass production, everything is Massive so as to make life more convenient. I was giving way to people at a park one day on scooters feeling sympathetic that they were disabled, only to watch one lady hop off and say to her partner "ok your turn I'm gonna get my legs moving for a little while" ie....the sit on scooter was actually just so that they didn't have to walk ...wow.

What I saw was that everything is done great- packaged and perfected, even 'having a good time' had been well thought out. We went on a 3 day cruise to mexico and were told it was all about the fun. And it sure had fun thought up and mastered. At 12 noon a big disco broke out on the main deck by the pool, a handful of waiters marched around with really inviting looking cocktails, cheap too, handing them out and charging peoples rooms in all of about 2 seconds (like fastest waiters ever) , then a really cool looking pirate gets up and MCs and manages to get everyone on the dancefloor and teaches them a pretty cool looking line dance . All pin pointed and pasted..12 oclock awesome boogie.  Fun is timed and on time. The whole trip was planned and thought out like this. And there were plenty options.

But where it started to suck for me, was when rote learned greetings replaced common sense. I stood in a line to get off the boat (which holds >1000 passengers) and my dad had to turn around for 5 mins and backtrack to grab something he had left around the corner, and me my kids my mum and husband got chased back to the end of a loooooong ass line because some (dickhead)staff member was(yelling) giving instructions- NO WAITING IN LINE....the line needs to MOVE (ie we were letting people overtake us waiting dad who only took 5 minutes) but they had no ears for our explanations and we just kept getting that above instruction yelled at (infront of everyone) common sense no more.... instances like this cropped up throughout our entire trip..in stores, in restaurants , in the park even by "park police" ( which by the way - who the freak are park police??) people did not have the time of day to listen, there was no common sense. Maybe this is why this country has gone bonkers and sues every tom dick and harry for the dumbest things......?

Then, I started to miss just fresh food....all this fast food, burger pizza taco shit....every corner every street you drove on had fast food places side by side...like 4 burger places on our block on one street across the road. How do they make money? How could they make an all inclusive breakfast $2?What is in those sausages/hashbrown/bread that makes it so cheap??and How long has that been in the freezer for?? Give me an oka, limu or a poke any day over a burger. Then the waste..so much waste...waste of food in restaurants etc....all I could think was, consume, produce and let someone else deal with the devastation. That someone is people in the pacific who will be the first to suffer from rising sea levels from the by products of mass production which is getting out of control The side effects of the waste of mass production are already known but only few are worrying about it. In Samoa, everyone is aware of all the climate change stuff that is in the media all the time. In the US, I honestly felt like no one gave 2 hoots. You never caught a drift of this issue anywhere. You had fast food and a glamourous life being shoved down your throat (the latest gadgets, clothes, celebrities in the media all the time) Climate change?? I don't know....SMOG. I don't get why someone cant build a big suction fan mop in the sky and just filter all that crap out of the air. Honestly I am sure it could be done??SURELY. It is so thick it obscures buildings sometimes so its like a blanket hanging in the air. I say put a wet cloth in the sky and suck air threw it...ok, patent that idea :)

So what else has that made me think of ?? Ancient civilizations - I can't get over the fact that there are civilizations that existed 1000s of years ago who were so brilliant. History tells that some like the Indus valley civilization housed about 5million people (! like waaaaa) they built great buildings, had smart architects (like...what happened to all that knowledge??) had sewage systems and bustling trading centers etc...artists and all sorts... one day ,that all  disappeared. All their awesomeness , their intelligence, all that they had built and gained and acquired over time...lost. Why and how they can not be sure of but there are theories of getting too big for ones boots and being unable to sustain so many people, disease, climate change droughts and famine. Then they just disappeared off the face of the earth, their 'peoples' maybe resettling into smaller nearby villages but without all the grandiosity that they once had. This is what I worry will happen to  us again, except it will be larger scale...we are getting too big (well , 'some of us' ) for our boots. too greedy to gluttonous with the way we live, we are going to out do ourselves and destroy the earth we live on ..and poof everyone will die and disappear. Then maybe 10,000 years from now,pockets of surviving humans revive a new era of humans  and " our time" will be discovered and remnants of our buildings etc will be dug up and our history pondered on, and it will be found that we were stupid enough to destroy ourselves. Amen.Uma laia i'i ga.