On Saturday, Leah and I went to town to pick up a few things we needed for the week.  One of those things included a birthday present for a teacher that was having a party on Sunday.  Neither Leah nor I knew this teacher that well so we had some difficulty figuring out what we should give her, until we walked by a lady selling plants.  "We should get her a plant," I practically screamed when I saw the stand.  First, though, we needed to buy a pot.  So we went to Ada Baru and I found a clay pot that probably weighed about 10 pounds.  I went up to pay for it and found out that it only cost 50,000 rupiah (or about $5).  I was very excited until I watched the lady at the checkout counter come back with a much larger clay pot that looked exactly like the one I was buying and put it in the bag with the clay pot I chose (I guess they were a matched set).  Between the two pots, they probably weighted about 25 pounds and I had bought groceries adding on another 10 pounds.  This doesn't sound like too big of a deal except I had to carry this over a half mile before making it home completely exhausted.  Needless to say, the next morning my arms were rather sore.  It was definitely what we call here an "Indo" experience.

A cecuk (pronounced chechuk) is the Indonesian version of gecko.  So, if you ever hear me talk about the cecuks that live in our house, I'm talking about the geckos.  They live all over hour house in fact, in the cabinets, under the couches, on the walls, etc...  Anyway, the other morning one of my roommates calmly asked, "Is that a dead cecuk in the toaster?"  "Hmmm, looks like it."  To be a bit more precise it was a grilled cecuk.  The scary thing is, is that we have absolutely no idea when it died, or how many times we had eaten toast out of a toaster that was continually grilling it. 

Yesterday, I got sooo sick.  Unfortunately, I was at the school teaching so, there wasn't much I could do but finish the day.  It was definitely miserable.  Some terrible stomach thing had been going around.  I ended up leaving my classroom unattended a couple of times to make a quick getaway to the bathroom.  The weird thing is, it didn't even last 24 hours.  That evening, I was fine.  It was very strange.  I still feel a little queasy once in a while, but nothing remotely similar to yesterday. (Brandon, it might be something similar to the cheese Nathan brought home to us.  I'm a little scared of dairy products right now.)

Last weekend Leah and I decided to take the public transportation alone (meaning no one came who knew exactly how to get there) to Munshol (not sure how to spell it).  They have this neat swimming spring there with fresh cool water.  It looks like a swimming pool but is spring fed and has little fish swimming around your feet.  If you’re still long enough, they will nibble on your legs.  So we ended up taking the wrong bus and went a very long way around.  It took an hour and 5 different busses (or things similar to busses) to get there.  It should have taken about 15 minutes.  Other than the part that we were lost in Indo, and could not speak the language, it was completely beautiful!  We were in a very rural area and could see so much of the beauty of Indo.  Luckily, everyone was very nice and could point us to the correct bus.  Once we arrived, we were extremely excited to finally be there!  The water felt wonderful and we had no problems getting home.

On Friday, I went to pick up my 2nd grade students from music class and while walking back to the classroom; my students saw a very large, very fuzzy, yellow caterpillar.  Now, when I was a kid I would have picked it up, petted it, and probably would have wanted to keep it as a pet.  Not these students.  First one of the boys screamed and three others followed suit.  Another braver boy jumped up and stomped on it, which created a rather disgusting gooey sound from the caterpillar’s insides exploding.  I was appalled!  The beautiful fluffy caterpillar that was minding his own business is now dead!  I proceeded to lecture my kids about not being able to control themselves around bugs, etc, etc...  It turns out that those fluffy caterpillars burn you when you touch them.  You get an extremely bad rash for about a week.  Who knew?

After school today the elementary principal and my roommates went to Koinonia (an awesome coffee shop down the street - for you people from the burg, it reminds me of Java) and relaxed with our drinks.  It felt so great to take a break from school and start the long weekend.  Sunday is Indonesia's Independence Day so we don't have school on Monday.

Also, yesterday, Leah and I picked up our new roommate from the airport, Mari.  She's very petite and so sweet!  We ended up talking to her for a quite a while.   Hopefully, we didn't bother her too much since she was probably experiencing pretty strong jet lag, but someone had to help her stay awake so that she didn't go to bed at 3:00 in the afternoon.  hehe.

School starts in 2 days, and I think I'm about ready, although, it doesn't feel as though I am.  I will have 7 students 3 Indonesians, 3 Koreans, and 1 from the UK.  I can't wait to meet them!

Today, a group of teachers (me included) took a bus to Solo to visit an indoor waterpark.  It took about 2 hours to get there and the park was a blast, but on the way home I saw a bit of how the Indo government works.  We were stopped by a motorcycle policeman and told that the road we were taking (a four lane highway) did not allow buses anymore.  So we were fined (or gave money to the policeman) and we turned down a smaller street taking a different route.   I guess that in Indo it is quite normal to create rules in order to charge people breaking them who know nothing of these new rules.  This has not been the first episode of this I have observed either.  This week a man that works at the school went to renew his motorcycle license (motorcycle is the only way to get around in many places) and was told that foreigners were not allowed to have a motorcycle license anymore.  They also told him that this was a new rule for all of Indo.  The man then called people in Jakarta about this and they had never heard of such a rule, yet he is still unable to get a new license.  Many of those who work at Mountainview and the language school use motorcycle transportation, so as you can guess it is a bit frustrating that it is now illegal to drive their cycles.

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