Break

This week is the first official week of summer break! School is done, graduation is out of the way, meetings are over. And yet, I still seem as busy as ever. The difference now is that I get to fill my days with all kinds of random busy-ness of my own choosing!

Yesterday I woke up early and drove to the next town to go to the animal market there. It happens every fifth day (because it follows the Javanese calendar which has a 5 day week) and it’s FULL of livestock and random jungle animals that people catch and sell. I posted about the animal market HERE once before. I’m still thinking of getting a turkey and raising it for Thanksgiving. So yesterday I basically just wanted to see what there is to see and get some prices on stuff. My good buddy, Hotjaga, was valiant enough to accompany me, and he even took me out for soto for breakfast too! I like going to the animal market with him. Creepy men don’t call me sweetheart that way. He calls himself my bodyguard.

After I finished there, I raced the rain home (and won), showered, changed, and headed to my first ever modeling job. So um… yeah. That happened. I counted not having time for lunch as part of the modeling experience.

A guy from my church is apparently a very well known fashion photographer. He’s worked in Australia and even America! He talked to me several weeks ago and asked if I’d model for him, and I said sure. It sounded like a fun learning experience. But I told him we had to wait until after school was finished. So yesterday was the day. He asked me to bring some of my clothes, and he brought some clothes too. It was kind of awkward for about 2 minutes, because we did the shoot at a construction site next to my church. So we used the church to do makeup, hair, and change clothes. More specifically, we used the church secretary’s office. While he was in there working. The church is also a school, and I kept running back and forth to the bathroom to change clothes, much to the confusion of many small children and the church janitor. I think the most awkward part though was being out at the construction site with all the men watching. I mean, working. This is the same construction site where I saw one man mixing cement while wearing only his underwear about two weeks ago.

Getting made up was like a 2 hour facial massage. The girl who did it was really sweet and gentle and patient, even when I kept blinking while she was trying to put mascara on me, thus splattering mascara on my cheeks, which she then had to go back and fix. She also attempted to straighten my hair, which was a short lived venture. It ended up being longer and frizzier, but still curly. At no point during this adventure did I see a mirror, so I really had no clue what I looked like. Ko Andy, the photographer, showed me the pictures on his camera, and other than “smoky eyes”, I thought I looked pretty natural. I didn’t realize until I got home that the 2 hours of makeup had made me look like an oompa loompa, sans green hair. That was fun to wash off. And thank goodness Hotjaga was on shift at the back gate. Any other jaga would have had some serious concerns if I came home looking like that.

So yes. Ko Andy was pretty great. I liked working with him a lot. He even bought me hot tea afterwards (because it started raining)! He sent me a few of the pictures last night. I feel weird looking at them because I really had no clue what I was doing and so they seem awkward to me. But as far as photographic evidence of my adventures goes, these will suffice.

 

PS – The hardest part of the whole thing was not laughing. Also, untangling my hair from that weird fur coat.