Results Day

Well for me this was a great start to my Saturday morning. Got my results from my most recent uni subject and got an HD from one of the hardest markers in the course! Yay! I have a big list of things from yesterday so if you really want to read on you might want to grab a drink.


Speaking of drinks, lime ice tea is really really good!


Anyhow, I'll try to be relatively coherent. For me anyway. Hope that drink you got contains caffeine. Segue time... Tari got back fairly early yesterday because it's their day to go to Church so pretty much everybody only works for the morning. With a whole afternoon free we decided to walk to another of the shopping malls in the area.


Because it's so hot and humid and transport is so cheap ($200 for a motorcycle if my divide by 7 skills are working and I had the signage correct as we drove past the other day) nobody walks here. There are a bazillion guys with rickshaws that "kindly offer" a lift somewhere. Either they're persistent or they just don't believe that we're actually walking any distance.


It's another 20-30 minute walk to the mall, did I mention the heat and humidity yet? We went about an hour or two before the afternoon rains so we get a nice breeze which makes things much more bearable. Also, there is pavement to walk on, which Tari says is definitely not the case in all places.


Things to squeeze past include:
Rickshaws with people willing to take passengers.
Rickshaws with their "drivers" having a nap in the back.
Rickshaws that are just parked.
Bikes (powered and unpowered)
Food stalls.
Stampi shops (still haven't worked out what the stamps are for).
People doing just a little shy of nothing.
People making repairs on pavement/bikes/insert just about anything here.
Oh, saw a store with computers in it. They looked very similar to our old original PC 086.
Anyway, it's hard enough to work out what is going on when you have to really look at your feet and duck regularly (awnings are not designed for tall people).


For those of you who watched Australian Idol I have two interesting stories for you. Firstly, a street sign that shows that they didn't want Carl to win:
Tell me that sign doesn't say "no trumpets". Our best guess is that it's no horns, but it was stuck to as well as we stick to our cautionary road signs back home.


Second Idol related news was when we got to the mall and went down to the foodcourt (always on the bottom level next to the supermarket) there was a stage set up and a couple of young things were having a sing. The songs were recognisable, but we couldn't quite work out whether they were singing in English or not. Sometimes you'd get an English word or phrase but then you couldn't tell whether they were singing in Indonesian or the sort of English that reminds Tari of how I try to prounounce French when I've only seen it written down. ie. Badly. Anyhow, between two songs there was a big long excited speech in Indonesian and we heard the words Indonesian Idol spring out clearly a few times. Still don't know whether the people we saw were members of that illustrious group or what. As one of my favourite Futurama quotes goes (after hearing another tragic pop song mangled) "You watched it.... You can't unwatch it."


Other things we saw in the mall? Well Tari suggests that people steer clear of green apple ice-cream. Actually her words were "it's just not necessary". I had a lick of it. I concur. The Coke I had was good and syrupy. Bit disappointed with the supermarket, no root beer in this one. There were "top quality" VCDs for sale. Barney the Dinosaur was the most expensive. Just thought you'd like to know.


Other stores were, again, oh-so-normal. There was a Body Shop and all sorts of normal named stores selling normal clothes. I thought that they could at least change the names of the stores to something more exotic! There was a little stall selling PC games, didn't stop for long, but noticed a few games, like Guitar Hero III, that apparently are now PC games. Hmm. Or not. I'm sure it's all perfectly legal =) A few copies of Windows XP - Photocopied case edition.


We stayed in the store for a while, mainly just to catch our breath before facing the humidity again. The stores all have a surplus of labour, often there would be two young ladies on either side of the doors who seemed to have the sole role of dipping their heads and saying "Halo" as you walk past. Perhaps I've misread the situation and they're actually well trained petite security kung-fu guards?


There were only two major intersections on our way to and from the mall. One of them was a relatively easy one, not too much fear of death. Of great interest (and something I've found useful for making a dash for the other side of the road) are wherever there are traffic lights there is a big digital timer that counts down until the light goes green. It's really useful for us pedestrians as you can see if you have 30 seconds in which to avoid half as much traffic as usual or 5 seconds.


At the larger of the two intersections, a massive crossroad with turning bits and stuff happening everywhere we were lucky because a local was about to make his crossing. We just kind of blinkered out the rest of the world and shadowed him. Three steps forward, pause, wait for motorcycles to whiz past in front and behind you. Two steps forward. Pause. Avoid van and several cars. Pretend the breeze is a pleasant ocean one, not the side mirror passing inches from your nose. etc. We all three made it across and I was very tempted to tip the guy and ask him to follow us to every intersection.



This next picture is of the river that winds its way through the city. I'll try to get another shot at some stage, I don't think this one really captured it properly. For starters, we're standing on a bridge quite a ways above it. The banks are really, really steep. It's kind of a nice Yarra coloured river. You can see how the houses use every bit of space they can get. Some of them are really really stilted to cope with the slope.

On the way back we stopped at a bank to top up on funds. The banks here are massive, ornate structures with guards at the entrances etc. We walked until we found one that had the mastercard sign on it. The guard let us through and as we walked towards the front doors we saw an ATM sign pointing around the side of the building. We followed the sign and walked around the entire building. At the back there was a small parking lot with a long rectangular building. Inside were a row of maybe 10 ATMs (I thought taking a picture of this might not be the best idea: smile with your PIN!) The building was just barely big enough for them and basically was just there to provide air conditioning while you withdrew your cash.


The ATMs on the right were all full, with people in line behind them, and yet there were three on the left hand side with nobody at them. Wierd. Anyway, we went to one of the vacant ones and withdrew the princely sum of 500,000 Rp (about $70 Oz). The machine spit out the money in lots of 20,000 Rp. That's when we worked out that the ATM has a little sticker on it that says 20,000. The others had stickers on them that said 50,000 or 100,000. I guess that's why they were busier. My poor wallet had to try and hold this many bank notes in it:


On the plus side, I'm a multi-millionaire and here's the picture to prove it:

And people complain about part-time Victorian teacher's salaries. Pshaw!

For dinner tonight we ditched Alif (we'll make it up to him tonight) and went down the road to Pizza Hut just to see what they had to offer. After being quite the test taster for the trip so far (I had some sort of beef stew, mie goreng and lime stewed fish for breakfast today) I thought I would just go for a traditional for dinner. I had a super supreme cheesy crust. It was almost just like normal, except as I munched on it I thought, hmm. It's not quite normal. No pig products. Just what is this stuff that's meant to look like shredded ham? Best not to ask. Tasted fine, just slightly wierd.

That was nothing compared to what Tari had. She had "Shrimp kress" pizza. As near as we can guess it was deep fried prawns, mayonnaise and... um... other orange, beige and white things. I think I won out in that one.

When we got back to the hotel it was, maybe, 8, 8:30 and, being a Friday, Tari wanted more chocolate so she room serviced a chocolate mousse. I heard half of the phonecall:

"Halo, could I please get a chocolate mousse room service?"

"Yes. Mousse."

"Chocolate, yes."

"Chocolate Mousse, please, yes."

"Thank you!"

About ten minutes later she's sipping on a chocolate milk shake.

Close enough?

I'll let you decide.

Well, that's about it for yesterday. Just to wrap up, yes Dad, they do BBQ over here:

I'm not sure what the BBQ question had to do with volcanoes and I'm not sure I want to know! There's an active volcano just out of town (it's advised that we don't climb it - yeah, that was on my top ten list of things to do). It causes problems from time to time. It's a geologically active area. There was an earthquake last year that did a bit of damage. Part of the joy of the national geographic channel is that there is at least once a day "The world's deadliest volcanoes" or "The worlds most devastating earthquakes" or "The Earth strikes back" etc. All of which start with peaceful shots of people going about their ordinary lives and a commentary... "The day started peacefully, quietly, a normal day with people going about their lives... not knowing that the terror was about to begin!"

Changing subject abruptly...

We'll probably be visiting a silver jewellry making place this afternoon. Not sure yet, today is Saturday and they're working pretty much all day so it will depend how they feel in the arvo I'm guessing. The 35 odd members (trust me, they're pretty odd) of the "fellowship" (hehe) start arriving today for the conference next week. It's been great having Tari getting afternoons off this week, next week they'll be full on days (she won't have had a day off until we get back home).

Apologies to the naming I attemped yesterday too, I made Tari tell me how to spell their names, I think they are:

Ale and Panca for the translators.

Fauziah and Diah for the fellows.

As always, it's now time for my post enormous breakfast mid-morning nap with some uplifting doco in the background, lemme see, it's "India's secret plague" today. After that I'll probably go for a wander if I can find another traffic human shield to use =)

Sim.