Hola everyone! I just wanted to send a quick update from across the Pacific...
First of all, Happy Thanksgiving!! And all of you who were lucky enough to eat turkey on that wonderful day, I hate you. Actually I was really bummed that I wasn't going to have a Thanksgiving dinner. But then Robe organized a big Thanksgiving dinner for me with my housemates, and I felt so incredibly blessed. Although it was Chinese food, it still felt special because we all ate together and laughed together. We played games, talked about the Thanksgiving story and we talked about why we were thankful. It was so great, and we didn't even go to sleep until 1:30am, which is unheard of in Indonesia. Granted, this was not the best idea we've ever had, as I had to wake up at 5am the next morning to teach at 6:30. Needless to say I was a little groggy when I walked into the classroom...
Anyway, nothing exciting really happened last week. I FINALLY got my passport back from Jakarta, but actually some of the other Darmasiswa students at my uni still haven't gotten theirs back. Keep in mind we sent in our passports to get our extended stay Visa at the beginning of September, when all the Darmasiswa students first arrived in Indonesia. It has taken Indo Immigration almost 3 months to get my passport back to me. Ridiculous. And some of the kids who don't have theirs back yet are planning on going home for Christmas. Clearly they can't leave the country if they don't have their passports. So we called Jakarta to ask them about this, and do you know what they said? "You will just have to wait until we can finish them. We are sending out about 10 per day and if yours is on the bottom of the pile, well then that's too bad." Then they said they hoped to be finished with all of the passports by mid-January. When we then told them some of us wanted to go home for Christmas, they pretty much said, "Too bad, so sad for you. You'll just have to wait." AH! INDONESIA!!!
Anyway, we found a nice little "warung" (very small restaurant/food stand) near our house that is extremely cheap and good. We can get a full meal - rice, tempe (fried goodness made from soybeans), veggies, and fish for Rp4000, which is about $0.43. Isn't that ridiculously amazing? And the best part is that the woman who owns the place doesn't skimp on portions. Wonderful.
What else? Oh, hanging out with all of these Asians for 5 months is starting to take a toll on me. Before I went out the other day I put on sunblock and when I walked outside, I opened my umbrella to shade myself from the sun. I didn't even realize I was doing it until it started raining and I thought to myself, "Oh, I better get out my umbrella. I don't want to get wet." Yea...I'm now afraid of getting a tan. I must protect my beautiful white skin!! Oh my goodness I'm becoming Asian...When I told this story to Hindy and Lily (the 2 Chinese girls I spend all my time with), they laughed and said I've been using my umbrella for quite some time now. Oi.
Okay I think that's about it. We're all still doing well here, battling the sun and the bugs and the rain. I miss you all!!! Later :)
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
World War III : Humans vs. Bugs
...and unfortunatly I'm not talking about Bugs Bunny.
I'm not going to lie to you all, my house is quite the battleground. Ever since the rainy season started, bugs of ALL kinds have been invading our house. Every night has become a guessing game as to which bugs will inhabit our humble abode, and we've managed to turn it into a game. Whoever can guess all the different kinds of bugs we will see that day in the house does not have to do his or her household chores the next day! It's great fun. I promise.
We have begun calling the situation in the house "World War III" which is kind of difficult for the 2 Chinese girls to say because they mix up their Rs and Ls sometimes...
So let me tell you about one of the worst nights of this whole thing...it was about 1.5 weeks ago....
It was about 7pm when the rain started. And of course, it wasn't a nice, cool drizzle. No, no, no. It was one of these torrential downpours that lasts an hour. Now, of course houses in Indonesia are not really built all that fabulously, so when it rains hard, you can't hear anything. We were in the middle of watching a movie on Hindy's laptop, and we couldn't turn it up loud enough to hear it. So we abandoned that idea and moved on to quieter activities.
Now, we were keeping the door open because it is so incredibly hot in this country and it's nice when it rains because usually we get a little breeze. Keeping the door open was a huge mistake. I was laying on the couch reading the newspaper, Hindy was listening to her mp3 player in the living room, and Lily and Maksum were working on some Indonesian homework. So there we were, the four of us, all very quietly going about our business when all of a sudden about a thousand of these flying insects swarmed into the house all at once, catching us all off guard.
I actually didn't realize anything was happening, as I was quietly dozing off, but then when I heard Lily's piercing scream, I practically jumped out of my skin. There were so many of these nasty little things that it actually got dark in our house! Not knowing what to do, we all ran into our bedrooms and slammed the doors shut. Of course I got bored in my room after about 10 minutes, so I opened the door and peeked outside into the living room. It was seriously like a scene from some war movie. There were all these dead insects lying dead all over our floor. Upon further investigation, we found that these little guys looked a bit like those helicopter leaves that fall from trees in Autumn. You know, those ones that kids (or Tori) pick up and throw because they fall down to the ground like little helicopters? Anyway, it was absolutely disgusting. Luckily we have tile floors, so we just swept them up with a broom and threw them outside.
About a half an hour later, I went into the kitchen to make a little late-night snack. I reached up into the cabinet to grab a loaf of bread, and as I pulled it down to the counter, a cockroach jumped off of it and landed on my shirt. And I completely lost it. I started jumping around and flailing about as if on fire. The three Polish ppl had come home from the gym at this point, and were all sitting in the living room. Robert thought I was actually on fire, and reached for a bucket. He was about to pour the water on me when he realized I was screaming "kecoak! kecoak!" ('cockroach' in Indonesian). By the time I calmed down, the cockroach was no longer clinging to my shirt and was gone somewhere.
So just a few minutes later, I heard Hindy scream from her room. We all went to investigate, hoping not to find some crazy ax murderer in her bed. What we found was possible worse. There was a ridiculously huge trail of ants leading from her window to the middle of her room, where one of those ugly helicopter bugs lay dead. There might have been a million ants there, and I am not really exaggerating. So, each armed with our own individual economy-size cans of insect repellant, we went after those darned ants. Then we swept them up like the other bugs...
Since that night, there have been more incidents with the helicopter bugs (which apparently are similar to cicadas in that they live underground and come out for a 2-hour lifespan, in which time they must mate and lay eggs. And when they come out, Indonesians rush out after them, to collect them and eat them. I'm not joking. It's disgusting!), we had a frog problem the other day in which there were 3 frogs trapped in our bathroom and we couldn't get them out. And we have a huge, New-York-sized resident rat who comes in and out as he pleases through a hole in the side of our house that the owner says cannot be fixed. Great times!
Okay well I've got to get going now. I have to teach in 30 minutes....
I probably will not get to the Warnet (Internet cafe) before Thursday, so in case I don't, I want to wish all of you Americans a HAPPY THANKSGIVING!! And for the Martin family, Happy Thanksmas. I will be thinking of all of you eating your nice, salty turkey and sweet cranberry sauce and deliciously scrumptious pumpkin pie while I am taking a test and teaching 2 classes and doing my radio show. Yea, no rest for Tori on her holiday...So sad!! haha anyway love you all and catch you later!! :)
I'm not going to lie to you all, my house is quite the battleground. Ever since the rainy season started, bugs of ALL kinds have been invading our house. Every night has become a guessing game as to which bugs will inhabit our humble abode, and we've managed to turn it into a game. Whoever can guess all the different kinds of bugs we will see that day in the house does not have to do his or her household chores the next day! It's great fun. I promise.
We have begun calling the situation in the house "World War III" which is kind of difficult for the 2 Chinese girls to say because they mix up their Rs and Ls sometimes...
So let me tell you about one of the worst nights of this whole thing...it was about 1.5 weeks ago....
It was about 7pm when the rain started. And of course, it wasn't a nice, cool drizzle. No, no, no. It was one of these torrential downpours that lasts an hour. Now, of course houses in Indonesia are not really built all that fabulously, so when it rains hard, you can't hear anything. We were in the middle of watching a movie on Hindy's laptop, and we couldn't turn it up loud enough to hear it. So we abandoned that idea and moved on to quieter activities.
Now, we were keeping the door open because it is so incredibly hot in this country and it's nice when it rains because usually we get a little breeze. Keeping the door open was a huge mistake. I was laying on the couch reading the newspaper, Hindy was listening to her mp3 player in the living room, and Lily and Maksum were working on some Indonesian homework. So there we were, the four of us, all very quietly going about our business when all of a sudden about a thousand of these flying insects swarmed into the house all at once, catching us all off guard.
I actually didn't realize anything was happening, as I was quietly dozing off, but then when I heard Lily's piercing scream, I practically jumped out of my skin. There were so many of these nasty little things that it actually got dark in our house! Not knowing what to do, we all ran into our bedrooms and slammed the doors shut. Of course I got bored in my room after about 10 minutes, so I opened the door and peeked outside into the living room. It was seriously like a scene from some war movie. There were all these dead insects lying dead all over our floor. Upon further investigation, we found that these little guys looked a bit like those helicopter leaves that fall from trees in Autumn. You know, those ones that kids (or Tori) pick up and throw because they fall down to the ground like little helicopters? Anyway, it was absolutely disgusting. Luckily we have tile floors, so we just swept them up with a broom and threw them outside.
About a half an hour later, I went into the kitchen to make a little late-night snack. I reached up into the cabinet to grab a loaf of bread, and as I pulled it down to the counter, a cockroach jumped off of it and landed on my shirt. And I completely lost it. I started jumping around and flailing about as if on fire. The three Polish ppl had come home from the gym at this point, and were all sitting in the living room. Robert thought I was actually on fire, and reached for a bucket. He was about to pour the water on me when he realized I was screaming "kecoak! kecoak!" ('cockroach' in Indonesian). By the time I calmed down, the cockroach was no longer clinging to my shirt and was gone somewhere.
So just a few minutes later, I heard Hindy scream from her room. We all went to investigate, hoping not to find some crazy ax murderer in her bed. What we found was possible worse. There was a ridiculously huge trail of ants leading from her window to the middle of her room, where one of those ugly helicopter bugs lay dead. There might have been a million ants there, and I am not really exaggerating. So, each armed with our own individual economy-size cans of insect repellant, we went after those darned ants. Then we swept them up like the other bugs...
Since that night, there have been more incidents with the helicopter bugs (which apparently are similar to cicadas in that they live underground and come out for a 2-hour lifespan, in which time they must mate and lay eggs. And when they come out, Indonesians rush out after them, to collect them and eat them. I'm not joking. It's disgusting!), we had a frog problem the other day in which there were 3 frogs trapped in our bathroom and we couldn't get them out. And we have a huge, New-York-sized resident rat who comes in and out as he pleases through a hole in the side of our house that the owner says cannot be fixed. Great times!
Okay well I've got to get going now. I have to teach in 30 minutes....
I probably will not get to the Warnet (Internet cafe) before Thursday, so in case I don't, I want to wish all of you Americans a HAPPY THANKSGIVING!! And for the Martin family, Happy Thanksmas. I will be thinking of all of you eating your nice, salty turkey and sweet cranberry sauce and deliciously scrumptious pumpkin pie while I am taking a test and teaching 2 classes and doing my radio show. Yea, no rest for Tori on her holiday...So sad!! haha anyway love you all and catch you later!! :)
Friday, November 2, 2007
Rainy Season!
Happy November! It's probably getting quite cold wherever you are reading this, but let me tell you how it is NOT getting cold at all here. In fact, it's getting hotter and hotter each day. From October through March is the hottest time of the year in Malang. Oh joy!!
Anyway, I would like to share with everyone the funny adventures of living in a house with 6 friends. As you all know, it is the rainy season, and that means it rains A LOT every day. The first time it rained a lot, we realized that we have a serious problem. Our new house leaks! We ran around like chickens with their heads cut off when we realized our roof was leaking for the first time. It was quite a spectacle - trying to find enough buckets to collect the dripping rain. Okay, it was less like "dripping" rain and more like "flooding" actually. I don't know how we missed it, but there's actually a huge hole in the roof above our living room. We finally decided that there were 4 major leaks and about 5 or 6 minor ones. Oh my goodness! So we contacted the owner of the house immediately, but of course things in Indonesia move slower than molasses. It's been 2 weeks and we still haven't heard anything from him. We call him about three times a day :) Actually we all laugh about it, and the buckets that we've placed to collect the rain have permanent places in the house, so more than anything we've come to love them and appreciate them :) :)
We also just had an adventure the other day. All of a sudden one night, our water stopped. We thought it was because we forgot to pay the water bill (that actually happened once with the electricity, but we quickly sorted that out! it was NOT my turn to pay the bills, I promise!!). But after realizing that someone had just paid, we tried to figure out what was going on. There are two random nozzles on one of the walls upstairs. It looks like there should be a tap attached to them, but there isn't. Now initially we just thought the people building the house forgot to put the taps in, but then we realized that the nozzles had something to do with the flow of water throughout the house. So when our water stopped, we ran up and down the stairs trying to figure out if any combinations of turning those nozzles made any difference. It didn't really, and finally someone realized that there was this hidden water pump outside that had been turned off. We still don't know who turned it off and why, but we finally have water. Granted, it's freezing cold water, but at least we can bathe!
Okay, that's about all for now from this side of the world! I love you all and miss you all dearly!!!!
Anyway, I would like to share with everyone the funny adventures of living in a house with 6 friends. As you all know, it is the rainy season, and that means it rains A LOT every day. The first time it rained a lot, we realized that we have a serious problem. Our new house leaks! We ran around like chickens with their heads cut off when we realized our roof was leaking for the first time. It was quite a spectacle - trying to find enough buckets to collect the dripping rain. Okay, it was less like "dripping" rain and more like "flooding" actually. I don't know how we missed it, but there's actually a huge hole in the roof above our living room. We finally decided that there were 4 major leaks and about 5 or 6 minor ones. Oh my goodness! So we contacted the owner of the house immediately, but of course things in Indonesia move slower than molasses. It's been 2 weeks and we still haven't heard anything from him. We call him about three times a day :) Actually we all laugh about it, and the buckets that we've placed to collect the rain have permanent places in the house, so more than anything we've come to love them and appreciate them :) :)
We also just had an adventure the other day. All of a sudden one night, our water stopped. We thought it was because we forgot to pay the water bill (that actually happened once with the electricity, but we quickly sorted that out! it was NOT my turn to pay the bills, I promise!!). But after realizing that someone had just paid, we tried to figure out what was going on. There are two random nozzles on one of the walls upstairs. It looks like there should be a tap attached to them, but there isn't. Now initially we just thought the people building the house forgot to put the taps in, but then we realized that the nozzles had something to do with the flow of water throughout the house. So when our water stopped, we ran up and down the stairs trying to figure out if any combinations of turning those nozzles made any difference. It didn't really, and finally someone realized that there was this hidden water pump outside that had been turned off. We still don't know who turned it off and why, but we finally have water. Granted, it's freezing cold water, but at least we can bathe!
Okay, that's about all for now from this side of the world! I love you all and miss you all dearly!!!!
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