Picture Dump

Here are all the interesting pictures I have taken so far this year. I have divided them up into categories. Let’s start with…

HOME

It’s been raining REALLY hard the past couple of months. Good, get it out of your system, nature, then bring on the DRY WEATHER! I am ready for some sunshine and some dry clothes.

In other home news, my cats sometimes do really cute things. Like sleep in my neighbor’s planter, then ignore me when I take pictures of them. Because they are used to it.

That’s all for home. Anticlimactic, I know. Now, let’s move on to the other place I spend most of my time…

SCHOOL

Two of last year’s seniors came back to visit earlier this year! I got to see and visit with Vartika and JiHyun, two of my precious babies!! Haha…

I got to school one day and found this guy crawling around on my backpack. SCARY! Most of the caterpillars here have poisonous hair. If you touch it, you will get a skin infection or rash or boils. I’ve heard that some will never heal completely. Ew.

It’s getting to be the time of year where seniors start looking like this:

I believe the medical professionals refer to this ailment as senioritis. It is running rampant these days, even among the juniors!

Our beloved courtyard tree got a large chunk of its branches blown off in a storm one weekend. When we all came to school that Monday morning, roughly 1/3 of it was laying on the ground. In order to even it out and balance the weight of the remaining branches, several other branches had to be subsequently sawed off. Our tree with its nearly spherical foliage looks naked and sad now. But it had to be done to save its life.

Apparently, whiteboard erasers can mold. So that’s lovely.

And to close this section, here are two of my 10th grade students. I noticed them sitting and talking like this, so I pulled out my camera to take a picture, thinking this would embarrass them. It didn’t. They posed and demanded a re-do. I will never understand Asian boys…

I’ve taken a few trips so far this year. The first was in January to…

Jakarta

Melanie and I went to spend a girls weekend together before she moved to another island. We got discount plane tickets, and it was really interesting to fly in to the city over the north coast during flood season. What is normally a checkerboard of green rice paddies is now covered by a blanket of muddy water. Also, I love aerial photography, even if it’s just from the window of an airplane…

The ocean usually looks very blue from the sky, but it was completely brown every time a river flowed into it.

I didn’t take many pictures IN Jakarta because we were too busy shopping and hanging out! I did take this one though of a Chinese temple we saw from the highway at sunset.

And to prove that we were, in fact, busy shopping, here is the loot I came home with. I also brought home two cheeses that were already in the fridge when I thought to take a picture.

Look at all those delicious foods that I NEVER imagined I’d see in Indonesia!!! When I travel, food is really what I spend most of my money on. I mean, you really can’t pass up an opportunity to buy REAL molasses or Ghirardelli hot chocolate mix when you find it. Also not shown in the picture were the four bags of Doritos that I bought for $6 each…

One of the things I was MOST excited about was the fruit! Cherries, nectarines, and peaches were all available for sale in the supermarkets in Jakarta. They are imported, so not as delicious as they are in America, but still pretty amazing after years of not having them.

Now, keeping it a little closer to home, a bunch of friends took a day trip to…

SOLO

We went to spend time with Melanie the weekend before she moved. First, we hit up Starbucks, of course.

^^ Me, Melanie, and Navita. We took about 100 pictures, and I was a little cranky about it. This is one of the only ones where I’m actually smiling. Haha…

Next we went to one of my favorite bookstores. I was in a really random picture taking mood this day, so the only photo I took there was of the rack of dolls that freak me out EVERY TIME.

The mall… They built this mall last year, and it is quite fancy for Central Java! We went the weekend before Chinese New Year. It is now the year of the snake (in case you didn’t know), so they had a GIANT snake made of plastic cups stuffed in netting strung all the way around the interior of the mall. See it?

Out the window of the mall’s parking garage. It was rainy and gross and the streets were actually flooded.

Here we are after our dinner at the Malaysian restaurant. We call ourselves Tim AA (Team AA). I love this group of people so so so much!

So now back up to one of the oddest parts of the day. Before we began our drive to Solo, we swung by Dewi’s house (Dewi is second from the left in the front row of the picture above) to pick her up. And her husband was standing in the front yard with some friends… Giving their fighting cocks some practice! The things people do…

And another day trip to…

SEMARANG

We went to visit our friend Yohanes after he had surgery on his foot. I took some really weird pictures of nothing in particular. Here they are.

1. A random village.

2. New toll road in the works.

3. Reog street performers. I hate masks and large amounts of makeup and they always freak me out.

4. Some REALLY awesome guys that gave us directions. I love Indonesian old men. They are so cute.

Even more local…

SENIOR PICTURES

For the first time ever, I got to take senior pictures for some Indonesian students from the local Christian high school! One of them is my good friend, Cinta, and the other four are her classmates. They needed group and individual shots for their yearbook. We did an outdoor shoot at a nearby retreat center, and it rained the ENTIRE time we were shooting, but they were such great sports about it! The theme was vintage gothic, so I left all the pictures unedited so that they could edit them themselves to fit that style.

This is the only photo that I did edit a little bit. It is TOUGH to take pictures of brown skinned people wearing white clothes and hats in a forest on an overcast day!

And one last picture to leave you with. I found this photographer’s ad stuck to the inside of a door at a little hole in the wall restaurant. Anybody want a chicken in their wedding photos? Anyone?