Weekend

Internet has been as good as ever. That is to say it almost never works!

The weekend was nice and quiet, but the big, important news of the year is that it rained!

At about 3:30 in the afternoon, the usual threatening clouds gave us an awesome thunder and lightning show followed by a good half hour of torrential rain. Since then it has rained a tiny bit every night, but no more proper downpours.

There is now palpable relief among the locals. The roads were immediately awash, and the day after we went for a walk and saw a much greater multitude of birds, lizards etc. feasting on the bugly goodness.

The photo doesn't do justice to the river of water flowing down the road.

Anyway, since then it's only been in the mid 30s, rather than the previous 40+s. Pleasant enough for the local ninja brigade to be out jogging after dusk. (For those of us old enough to have played The Last Ninja on the C64 or Apple IIe, you may identify with the white figure...

The only real thing of interest we did on the weekend (apart from catching up on sleep) was go to the local big mall. It's about as big as Knox, but vertical rather than horizontal. On the ground floor is a Carrefours, can't remember if I talked about that store chain yet or not, but a mix between department store and supermarket. They sell everything (well, everything that's for sale here). That includes "standing dispensers" as well as DVD players, Rice Cookers and other things. Never found out what a "standing dispenser" was, but was in bold letters on the front advertisement next to TVs.

Iced tea drinks are cheaper by far than any other drinks here, so we've been having more and more of them, although Tari is a super fan of our local's lime juice too. We bought a stack of bottled water, the trip was about 5km so we Taksi'd there and back. I know it doesn't sound so far, but on these roads, 5km involves walking far further to avoid/dodge/backtrack etc. and it was still VERY hot and humid.

As I mentioned with the advertising, so it is with the actual shop contents. About 1/3 of supermarket space is cosmetics of all sorts. They have about two "helpers" per aisle too, which means you spend more time "permisi" (excuse me) than anything else as you wend your way through the helpful people.

Lunch was at the oh-so-local A&W All American Eatery, a mug of frosty cold root beer and that all American favorite meal, black pepper chicken and rice.

We also found a bookstore that had some books in Ingris (English). Tari got an Ingris - Indonesian dictionary, I got a bilingual maths textbook (for $6!!!). It's only higher level year 12, but Tari thinks we can track down a university bookshop somewhere. And yes, I admit that it's pretty geeky to be doing maths questions, but at least *I* didn't spend part of the afternoon reading a dictionary.

We finally found some dried fruit over here, mango, which is normally fantastic. However, it seems as though they have used at least partly a salt method to dry the fruit. Salty dried mango. I think I'm acquiring the taste. At least, you know me, I'm too "thrifty" to throw things out. It'll take a while, but I'll get through it!

As promised, we are now blending in with the locals.

Tari's giving me the grimace of "I just got back from work after walking 15 minutes in over 30 degree heat and you want me to smile for your blog?" look. It's all the rage in Milan, I think it'll give "magnum" a run for money.

We passed on the plastic sunglass rack outside the supermarket, even though we could have purchased super cheap "special imports" with Gucci, Prada etc. on them (must specially import them from Singapore then slash the price by several thousand percent).

Tari's favorite moment of the day was NOT actually finding the 47 types of dried fish available (seriously, 47! - We all know that 48 would have been overkill, so they stuck with a more modest approach) It was coming out from the supermarket and being stared at (not unusual here) by a 4 year old eating an ice-cream. She made a face and said "mmm, enak?" (enak = delicious). He got a shell-shocked, stunned expression before turning to his mother then laughing and being so excited that it was only the reflexes of his mum that stopped the enak ice-cream from flying across the room. Very very cute!

Treated TJ to an iced latte from starbucks, it was a discount bargain at 50,000. With a croissant. It's still bizarre to see price tags sometimes in the millions!

There have been conferences all weekend here at the uni club. Some of them we've had difficulty deciphering. We think there was a school parent meeting, but there were few kids (though all in immaculate military style uniform) and there was great pomp and circumstance. They do take their education pretty seriously over here, it's very highly regarded to be a teacher (guru) so I get props and niceness rather than slight disappointment or embarrassment. Quite nice really!

One of the other meetings was of shareholders of Garuda. This morning when we came downstairs there were military uniforms everywhere (this time being worn by adults rather than schoolkids). Some sort of military conference.

It's a bit hard for us living here, because most of the conferences seem to stay up late partying, then get up early the next morning while we (well, TJ anyway) has to get up and go to work like normal.

Well that's about it, nothing particularly exciting happening, and I imagine the week will be boring as all heck.

To finish off, Tari's got a story about some of her colleagues when they were in Singapore. Some places expect tips, some refuse tips, it's impossible to tell at a glance. They went out for dinner, paid (including a tip) and left the restaurant. A minute or so later they heard shouting as one of the people from the restaurant sprinted down the road chasing them, waving money until they took it!

Sitting here in the lobby, very hot, definitely dinner time so gonna leave it there, hope this finds you all well and healthy and happy.

Love to you all, Sim.