Bali – Leg 2 – Jimbaran

On New Year’s Eve, six of us made our way to a location new to all of us – Balangan Beach, just outside the town of Jimbaran. It was way out in the boondocks, which worked out well, as we were trying to avoid the mad drunk tourist crowd which usually swarms the beaches of Bali for New Year’s Eve. On our way there though, we stopped at Hard Rock Café for our token ridiculously expensive meal.

Why, yes… Yes I did spend $40 for nachos, a burger, and a bottled water. But I tell you what, that’s the best meal I ate all year, and it’s the best I’ll eat until the next New Years in Bali. I justify the cost just this one time a year. It’s so worth it. Red meat. And bacon. And cheese. And real tortilla chips. And oh my goodness I need to stop talking about it or I’m going to go crazy.

So back to Jimbaran. Speaking of back to Jimbaran, all six of us crammed into one taxi for the 30 minute ride back after dinner because it was the only transport we could find on New Year’s Eve on Bali. That alone was an adventure!! So anyways, the six of us stayed in this awesome open air bungalow that I didn’t get many good pictures of.

This place also had an open air bathroom, but no hot water. That ended up working out well because it was basically blazing hot the entire time we were there.

After we got back from dinner at Hard Rock, we decided to hike down to the beach. It was a bit of a walk in the pitch black darkness, and as we discovered when Sam stepped in something warm and slippery, the field we had to walk through is actually a pasture for local cattle known as sapi Bali!

 

It was fairly quiet down at the beach until a little closer to midnight when some drunk Australians thought it would be a great idea to come down and shoot off fireworks. They didn’t really seem to be paying attention to what direction the fireworks were pointing, and they ended up shooting toward us, at buildings, straight into the water, and sometimes even up into the sky! That last one seemed to take quite a bit of concentration and effort though… So I took a picture to capture their momentous feat of brilliance!

We don’t actually know when the new year happened. There is no ball that drops in Indonesia. And at that beach, there is barely electricity anyways! There is a small village located along this beach, but the electricity is pretty sketchy, so power kept flickering on and off, and nobody really had any clue what the real time was. I think we heard about 8 different countdowns from different village houses and groups of people on the beach. About 10 minutes after the last one, we decided to really confuse people, and we started our own countdown. Besides that one moment of immaturity, the rest of our ringing-in-the-new-year time was spent talking about what God has done for us this past year and what He has been teaching us, hopes and goals for the new year, and just encouraging one another.

Besides awesome friends and uplifting conversation, the best part of the night was being able to lay back in the sand, listen to the waves crash against the shore, and watch all the airplanes take off from nearby Denpasar and fly overhead. So peaceful. Until we realized that it felt like we were in an episode of LOST.

On New Year’s Day, we got to visit with our friends who used to live in Salatiga but have since moved to Papua. They are expecting a baby any day now and are working with a midwife here on Bali, so they flew in for the occasion. Obviously, I wore my Sunday best for lunch with them. Actually, our bungalow was too small to unpack anything in, and I was having trouble finding clean-ish smelling clothes in my duffel bag.

This was outside the Italian restaurant where I made my New Year’s post from my Blackberry. It was super fun to see them and to get to spend time with the kids. We spent almost all day with them around town and at their small rental house.

The next morning was all about the beach though. It was about a 7 minute hike from the bungalow, through the cow pasture, down a cliff, and through a tiny village.

But it was a beautiful hike, and the beach was definitely worth breaking a sweat to get there.

HARDLY ANY TOURISTS!!

One of the best parts of this day was watching an old man walk his (wait for it…) MONKEY down the beach. Like with a leash and everything… Then the guy decided to go swimming, so the monkey simply crawled onto the guy’s head! WHAT?!

Do you see the airplane that just took off? Do you?!

Do you see it now?? If not, you should probably get that checked out.

Happy New Year!!

Bali – Leg 1 – Ubud

Our group this year was 10 people total, but we didn’t all stay in the same place at the same time. Though we kind of fluctuated a lot, we all started out together in Ubud for our first leg. Well, I guess technically those of us who rode the bus for 26 stinkin hours (as opposed to flying) ended up coming a day and a half later than the rest… Won’t be doing that again if I can help it. But anyways, Ubud is a traditional place for us to stay each Christmas. This was our third year in a row to stay at the T-Houses, located just outside of town. Basically, we love it here. Ubud has some of the best food and culture of anywhere on Bali. And if you recognize the name, it might be because it’s where Elizabeth Gilbert spent time for her whole Eat, Pray, Love deal. If you watch the movie (not a strong recommendation), you’ll see how beautiful Ubud is! In fact, Ketut Liyer, the traditional medicine man she worked with, lives just around the corner from where we stay! The only downfall is that there is no coast/beach in Ubud. This is nice around the holidays though, as it tends to keep the tourist levels down. This was our rest and relax leg. The guys did lots of yoga with an instructor they found in town. The girls spent lots of time hanging out by the pool and getting to know our neighbors from around the world who were staying in the other guest houses.  And trying our best to figure out if our neighbor was a topless woman or a very gay man in a speedo. Conclusion: he’s French!

(The house all the girls stayed in)

(One of three bedrooms in the girls house)

(My favorite part of the T-Houses – outdoor bathrooms!!)

(Note – always check to make sure nobody is harvesting coconuts before you strip down!)

Every night we got dressed up and went out to dinner together. We had some awesome Thai, Mexican, organic, Italian, and Cuban food. That last one proved interesting. In the Cuban restaurant, I was sitting with my back to the door, and halfway through the meal, a friend across the table from me casually said, “That’s Tyra Banks”. I turned around and looked, and sure enough! – Tyra Banks had just walked in the door and was making her way to a table across the room! (We googled it later and found out that she is there for some kind of spiritual retreat after her breakup with her boyfriend, someone-or-rather.) Other than one creepy stalker-ish bald guy with a camera, I was pretty impressed by how low key her being there was. (Question: How come I can’t go to the grocery store without getting my picture taken 25 times and comments, proposals, and wolf whistles thrown at me, but Tyra Banks can walk into a restaurant and nobody bats an eye?!) As we were eating, a salsa band started playing, and turns out our waiter, Karma (the name he was born with – we asked), was also a salsa dance instructor! He got everyone out on the dance floor, and we ended up staying there a good 4 or 5 hours, dancing the night away and working off all that rice and beans!

Sam, our Mexican friend (though you wouldn’t know it to look at him), left a note on the wall after we were finished. It was fun to go around and read all the other things people had written over the years! And it was nice to find that even though I can’t speak Spanish anymore, I can still read it pretty well!

 

(A sweaty Sam after hours of salsa dancing in dress clothes)

(Peco, me, and Yohanes – we have spent every New Years together in Bali for the last 4 years)

One other big thing we did in Ubud was go see a Kecak dance.

(The program for the dance, which tells the story of the Ramayana - Indonesian Romeo and Juliet, Rama and Shinta)

In case you need more information, you can read the following excerpt from the program which we all found amusing. Please pardon its French.

On Java, when they perform the Ramayana, it is accompanied by traditional Indonesian instruments called gamelan. The Balinese version is accompanied solely by voices. The 100 men *sit* in three concentric circles and kind of beatbox the rhythm of the story while the dancers act it out. There is also one guy who sings/tells parts of the story in what we think was a Balinese tribal language. There were some other minor differences in the story which were interesting to spot. A big part of why the traditional story varies between the two islands might be that Java is predominantly Muslim while Bali is almost entirely Hindu.

We had to go to a temple at night in the pitch black to see the performance. I have a few pictures, but not a whole lot.

(First step – lighting the candles in the center of the “stage”)

(The singers come out and form their concentric circles centered around the fire)

(Eventually, the singers sit down, and the dancers come out, dancing the story. The one dancer you can see above is Shinta (Juliet))

(A part of the show where there were no dancers. All the sounds you hear are voices – there are no musical instruments used in this performance. Pretty cool, no?)

And I leave you with a few more pictures of the beauty of Ubud.

Vacation from Vacation

Home and semi well rested. Pictures to come.

happy new year!!

Happy January first, 2012 from jimbaran, bali!! I'm actually writing this from my blackberry while using the wifi at an Italian restaurant here. Can't wait for my berry smoothie and pizza! The food on bali is definitely a highlight after a year of rice and chicken. I get to eat lunch with 4 friends who now live on papua as well as two others who currently live and work on another island in the archipelago. I have to say, this year is off to a great start!

We rang in the new year laying on the beach and watching airplanes take off and fly overhead. Several drunk people were in a particularly celabratory mood and were setting off fireworks in all directions. It was less than safe, but fun to watch!

We'll be headed back to java in 3 days. In the meantime, we're just enjoying the beach life, swimming a lot, hiking a little, getting a nice tan, visiting with friends, living in an open air bungalow, eating lots of delicious food, learning to salsa dance, and sleeping in! I haven't taken too many pictures (sorry dad), but I'll post as many as I can when I get back!!

It’s the Most Unusual Time of the Year

Let’s start with Christmas Eve. That was my first busy day of this holiday season. I’d been taking it easy and watching lots of Gilmore Girls up until this point when I realized I needed to crack down and get something done. My to do list (because I always have one) included these items: Do laundry, make Christmas cookies, clean out fridge, feed and worm cats, pick up bus tickets to Bali, go to market and get apples and aluminum foil, repot plants, bake an apple pie, wrap gifts.

Laundry went well. Our ghetto washing machine (which I’m thankful for because it was free and we don’t have to wash all our laundry by hand anymore) didn’t clog up or ruin or lose any clothes. I even got about 30 minutes of sunshine to let the clothes hang out in before it started monsoon-ing. I had my sister send me mom’s recipe for Christmas cookies since I haven’t had those for four years by now. I whipped it all up and tasted the dough (just like mom always used to let us), and it tasted so much like Christmases of my childhood! So I rolled the dough out and was getting ready to cut out shaped when I remembered – I don’t own a single cookie cutter. So I tried cutting some shapes out by hand, but that was getting messy, so I improvised. These became my cookie cutters for the day:

But I still love my hand carved Christmas tree!

But the red food coloring I bought was actually kind of maroon. Sadness…

While the cookies were baking, I cleaned out the fridge, gave all meat items to the cats, and repotted some pepper and cilantro plants I had planted a few weeks back. They were getting big enough that they each needed their own separate pot.

And I also wormed my cats as they were having a rare moment of tranquility.

Aswan ended up going to pick up the bus tickets and buy the things from market while I was at my friends’ house wrapping presents. They both are living here studying language, and this is their first Christmas away from home. We had all gotten packages from our parents in the mail, so we all traded boxes, locked ourselves up in separate rooms of their giant house, and wrapped the contents of the boxes so that we could all open up actual presents on Christmas morning, not just USPS flat rate shipping packages. I left all my presents there because Aswan and I were already planning on spending Christmas with them – our little family. We didn’t get a chance to make that apple pie, but we did stay up til 11 watching Rudolph (the oooold Burl Ives one), which Aswan was less than thrilled about.

So skip ahead to Christmas morning. Our friends wanted to experience the town Natalan (Christmas celebration) which is an annual sunrise service on Christmas morning. So after going to bed at midnight, we all woke up at 3:45ish and walked to the Pancasila, the field at the town center. When I first woke up, I had to pee as always, but I wasn’t ready for the florescent lights to be on yet, so I didn’t bother turning any on. I did my business and went back to my room to get dressed. Then I went BACK to the bathroom to brush my teeth and put my hair up. For that I did turn the lights on. And when I did, I found a surprise on the floor right in front of me:

He then tried to hide by forcing his way under the sink.

“Merry Christmas to me” was my first thought. Then my second was, “WAIT A MINUTE! I was in here with no lights on earlier! How did I not step on this?!” I call it my Christmas miracle that God kept me safe in the dark that morning…

Anyways, we eventually made it to Natalan where it was really cold and damp.

We sang Christmas carols by candlelight and marveled at the beautiful Christmas tree they had set up. The marvel ended when the sun rose and we realized it was made out of corn husks…

Can you say classy? Anyways, after all that was finished, we went back to our own homes to rest and freshen up. Aswan and I made that apple pie we didn’t get to the day before. We made one for his mom last year for Christmas, which was the first time I ever met his family. She’d been hinting lately about how much she enjoyed it. She’d never had one before. Indonesians don’t really do pie. So I really wanted to make her another one this year. After we finished that, Aswan went home and I got to sleep another 2 hours before we headed over to our friends’ house to open presents. They had made crepes and a breakfast casserole. Silly me didn’t bring a camera, but here’s a really rough phone picture of the tree (which is actually a potted plant from their back yard) that we spent the last week making decorations for.

Beautiful, no? It’s way more fun to open presents like that than from a box! I hope that these particular friends are super dumb so that they will still be here studying language during Christmas next year!! Hehe…

After Christmas there, we left to go spend Christmas evening with Aswan’s family in Semarang. For part of the trip, we followed this truck, which I was super happy about!

Christmas with Aswan’s family was really nice. We all went to church together. The singing was a bit crazy with jumping and screaming and eardrums nearly bursting. But the sermon followed the national Christmas theme of being light. The pastor spent quite awhile talking about darkness and light and the world’s need for light. He even made the point that a tiny flame can make a huge difference in a dark room. And it was at about that time that all the electricity went out in town. So we all lit up the tea candles that we had been saving for singing Silent Night at the end. I was a little worried that the church was gonna burn down with all those candles lit, but it ended up being a great illustration and a very peaceful Christmas service. I enjoyed it immensely.

I forgot to mention one more thing I did this weekend – I started packing!

I’m leaving later this afternoon and will spend the next 10 days in Bali! Aswan says I’m bringing way too much stuff for 10 days, but I say that as long as it all fits in the bag, I’m doing OK! : )

Merry Christmas and happy New Year everyone!!

update on me

SCHOOL
IS
OVER

Six more Christmas parties/dinners/get-togethers.

Then...

BALI!

Breakfast

For some reason, I couldn't fall asleep last night until 2 AM, and I didn't crack an eyelid until 10:30 this morning. By then, I was pretty hungry since I never ate dinner last night (up til 2 and never got hungry! so strange) and I really wanted pancakes. But I had no syrup.

So what did I do?

I made syrup from scratch!

To go on my fluffy pancakes that I made from scratch.

LIKE A BOSS.

(Lest I become prideful, I did use store bought butter.)

Rain, Rain, Go Away

The first of many Christmas parties to come is tonight. It's been raining and thundering all day long and out any window I look, I can see at least one coconut tree. It doesn't feel at all like Christmas. I was feeling kind of mopey about that and wishing for some better weather until I opened up my browser to write this post and read the headline on my homepage, "At Least 180 Dead After Storm Pummels Philippines". I bet that's the storm we're catching the tail end of...

Tropical storms killing people doesn't really put me in the Christmas mood either, naturally. But after reading that, I do feel blessed to be safe and healthy this time of year, and I'm thankful that my family can say the same.

Bizarre

The (Indonesian) father of one of my (Indonesian) students has the same first name as my mother. Blows my mind every time.

Rotten Milk

YES. Rotten milk. In my mouth. My only indication? - It tasted like mothballs. So maybe rotten is an exaggeration.

Here's the story. On Sunday, I bought a carton of milk at a brand new import store just down the road from my house. Funny that I have to go to an import store to buy milk, but it's true. Indonesians just aren't down with the dairy. They don't even use butter. They use lard instead.

Anyways, I digress. I love milk in the morning, so I filled a thermos with cold milk on Monday and brought it to school with me. It tasted like mothballs. It was the weirdest thing. But I'd never tried that particular brand of milk, and some brands here definitely do have an off flavor, so I thought it was just the brand and drank that whole thing down. Yesterday (Tuesday) I got home from school and was craving a tall glass of milk again, so I pulled the carton out of the fridge. As I was pouring it into the glass, I remembered the mothball taste from the day before, stopped pouring, and set the carton down on the counter. I sniffed the glass of milk carefully as I pondered whether or not I really wanted to drink it.

Then the expiration date on the carton caught my eye.

22 11 11

That's right. My milk expired almost a month ago.

So last night I went to the store to tell them about it. I found a bunch of other cartons in their fridge that were also expired. Like I said, Indos don't do dairy, so they didn't know that you shouldn't drink expired milk. I wasn't upset or complaining or asking for my money back or anything. I just wanted to explain to them that you can't sell expired milk, especially not to a bunch of white people - their primary sales demographic. They were super nice about it and apologized and thanked me profusely for telling them about it. Then they gave me my money back, which was super nice, since I didn't have a receipt or even the bad milk with me to show them.

That's me. Saving the world, one import food store at a time.

Ideas

I just got this message from my friend, Liz, who is from Jakarta but goes to college in Salatiga. It made me smile, and as you read it (unedited by me - straight up copied and pasted), marvel at how amazing her English is, y'all!

"ok so I couldn't sleep last night. and i came up with this brilliant idea. I found you and mas Aswan a great business project after you guys get married. it's selling Salatiga post card!!!!!! first, there's no Salatiga post card available yet (as far as I know) and two, since you are really good at photography, bet you'll make a very awesome post card with awesome Salatiga views in it. "the post card that actually shows the true identity of Salatiga" third, it'll be perfect for the Mountainview community, since you guys send letter and packages to home/sponsor, right? people are longing for it. Salatiga post card--that's the dream. ah it's so perfect! so what do you say?"

So besides the fact that it's kind of weird that my friends think about my future as they try to fall asleep, I kind of like the idea! It would be a fun thing to do - and she's right, there are no Salatiga postcards yet. This is going on my list of future jobs! Thanks, Liz!

December in the Tropics

Yup, so that was my Saturday. How was yours?

PS – See that person in the water over by the rocks? I went exploring over there and found lots of jellyfish, sea urchins, crabs, fish, and TWO octopi! They made my day.

Projected Costs

Aswan and I were just talking about college. College for our kids, which are as of yet nonexistent. He wants two or three kids, I'm shooting for four. We'll see how we feel after the first few. But worst case scenario, we pay for 4 kids to go to college. I looked up a state school in Indiana and we calculated that to send four kids to a four year university twenty years in the future will cost a minimum of about $700,000 (because they most likely won't be residents of any state, and possibly even listed as international students, for which the costs are higher). Our total combined annual income is currently $8500. If we save EVERY penny at that rate (which is likely to go down considerably, because I eventually won't work for an international school anymore most likely) and spend no money for the next twenty years, we will have $170,000. This is bleak.

The options we came up with are:

a) Pray that our kids are super smart and/or athletic and get really good scholarships to really good schools.

b) Move to a village, start a family cult, and never educate our children so that they have no chance of going to college.

Obviously, option a is the ideal one. It's always good to have a plan b though.

Teaching

Well. Next semester should be an adventure. I'll continue teaching my four math classes every day, which means grading homework for four classes every day. I'm pretty sure that math teachers have more work than other teachers, but I might be biased. Also, the yearbook teacher is in America until March due to his wife giving birth (and wanting to do it stateside for legal/processing reasons), so since I "taught" that class last year, I'm subbing for him for two double periods per week. Our art teacher left in November (I bought his desk, remember?), and since he was the only art teacher we had for K - 12, we've been trying to come up with ideas for art classes next semester. After much thought, the administration finally settled on offering a graffiti/street art class, choir, and batik making (taught by a local Indonesian) for the 9th - 12th graders.

At this week's teacher meeting, the batik class was brought up, because at that time, nobody had met the person who was going to be teaching the class, so nobody knew if he/she spoke English or had ever even taught in a school before. It was recommended that another teacher sit in on the class to help translate, to enter grades in the system, and to try to maintain some semblance of classroom order. Naturally, I'm not busy enough, so I offered to help. I like batik, and it would be sweet to learn how to make it! So for the first half of next semester, I will be teaching 6 classes, and I will have one prep period per day. Aish.

This morning, I met the man who will be teaching it, Pak Agung. He's an older man, VERY soft-spoken and reserved, and doesn't speak a lick of English. Absolutely perfect for teaching a class of 20 rowdy foreign high schoolers. Or not... So we'll see how that goes...

If you are reading this and you have no clue what batik is, I've linked the Wikipedia link HERE, so check it out! It's really cool!

Stats

I just happened to notice that blogger now has a “stats” feature. Of course, I clicked on it, curious as ever. Found some interesting things such as which pages of mine are most viewed and what sites viewers are referred from. Then, at the bottom of the page, I found the stats about what people are searching for online when they stumble across my website. Here’s the list:

This makes me feel like I have an incredibly varied blog. I’ve got everything from “pacuan kuda” (horse race) to “penguin classics” and “abercrombie” to… umm… “suck out marrow”? Do people really do Google searches for “suck out marrow”?!

Insect Invasion

I went to brush my teeth last night to find what I can only assume was the beginning of mass suicide emerging from beneath my sink.

Are they ants or termites? I don’t know. Either way, I was kind of freaking out, so I left the bathroom light on and shut the door tightly, hoping they’d stay in there, attracted to the light. It must have worked, because only one made its way inside my shirt during the night. The rest were scattered around the bathroom this morning when I got up to take a shower, mostly dead. I mean the bugs were mostly dead, not me. Although one might be able to consider me mostly dead as well at 6 AM. Live ones were crawling up the walls and in the towels on the shelf and inside the toilet, but they were moving really slowly like they were drugged. It was bizarre. I didn’t take a picture this morning though because a) I was mostly dead and b) all my available powers of concentration were geared toward not stepping on the dead insects all over the floor.

I kind of left them there, hoping that Ibu Sri would know what to do about that when she came into work this morning. I’m still at school and won’t find out for a few more hours, but hoping for pleasant results and no more night raids.

Meet Soon

His name is Soon. He’s my student, he’s in the 10th grade, and he’s Korean. He has given me a few reasons to smile this week. The first was when he nonchalantly showed up to school yesterday “wearing” a moustache for no apparent reason.

Also, I was introduced to his YouTube channel this week. He is a fantastic musician. He’s posted a bunch of covers he’s done on his YouTube site. My favorite is probably the Bob Dylan one. Not a favorite (or terribly wholesome) Dylan song, but still – a 17 year old Korean singing Dylan? Awesome. And he plays all the instruments himself. So check it out HERE.

The picture below is a little off topic, as it was not drawn by Soon. I found it drawn on the bottom of a PreCalculus quiz I graded this morning and it made me smile.

So in case you haven’t heard, I’m engaged! : ) Here’s a rough but real picture of the ring…

And here’s how he did it…