The Fast started last Friday. Baha'is fast for one Baha'i month (19 days) of the year, from March 2 - March 20. Before that was Ayyam-i-Ha, the Days of Joy, and we celebrated with parties after we got back from Lombok. I went to my friend Vena's boarding house, and Greg went to a party at Pucang. The fast is from Sunrise to Sunset, which is always almost exactly 12 hours so close to the equator. We don't have to deal with the new daylight savings time, thank goodness, but we do have lots of heat and humidity! So we started by going to Malang where it's nice and cool (er) with my friend Pritta. We visited her aunt and uncle (our friends before we met Pritta) and had a very nice time walking around, going to a waterfall, and buying flowers to plant in front of our house in Surabaya. Then it was time to start the real week. On Monday, I accepted a job teaching English at a school in Sidoarjo. I was asked to talk about "American Culture" to motivate the students to progress in their English studies. Not knowing what to talk about, I asked the students to tell me what they already knew about Americans. For example: Americans are white; Americans are rich; Americans are beautiful. Then I talked about each point they'd brought up with an emphasis of the diversity in America. It's odd - I've never really even liked America, and spent my whole life looking at the mistakes that have been made. But talking about the diversity in America (granted, it's not always a pretty picture), really made me wish that every one of those Indonesian students could go there and see what it's like. The students were really shocked to know that there were poor people in America, and that there were lots of different skin colors in America. Every class had a big debate when we got to "Are all American's beautiful?" because it's a hard fact here that white skin is beautiful and black skin is not. I told them about all those Americans who pay for tans - it was hilarious. The kids spoke better English than I thought they would, thank goodness, but were surprisingly disrespectful and had side-conversations through the whole class. Apparently that is accepted and if I got 'stern' with them and asked if they wanted me to go on, the teacher would tell me to be patient. Whatever that's supposed to mean. So after shouting for 6 45 minute classes, it was time to go. But first we had to make a stop to see the mud, which I still hadn't managed to see. It was pretty incredible. Whole villages have been wiped out, and all you can see is this:

I know it’s been a long time. Not having internet at home was one thing, but when the closest hotspot (the Supermal) didn’t have internet for three weeks, it really threw me off. But now I’m back to tell you about my more recent adventures in Indonesia. I suppose that before I do that, I should just remind you all that Greg and I are fine and unaffected by the more recent disasters in the country. If you haven’t heard of those more recent disasters, don’t bother looking them up. I’m just saving you the stress!

After a stressful year thus far, Greg took a day off work and took me on a surprise vacation for Ayyam-i-Ha. I had the choice of it not being a surprise at some point, but I like surprises, and didn’t find out where we were going until we got to the airport. Actually, even knowing the name of our destination city didn’t help me at first (“Where’s Mataram?”) but I found out eventually. We went to South Lombok near the town of Kuta (not Kuta, Bali) to a Novotel resort. It didn’t seem like my thing at first, and we had to complain about our room, but by day 2 it was an incredible and relaxing vacation. We were there for three nights, and after our complaint, were able to stay in our own thatch-roofed hut very close to the beach and to the amazing raised swimming pool. We spent the whole time walking on the beach, reading, swimming, and eating. The beach was off of a tidal bay, so when the tide was out there wasn’t any water. But when the tide was in, you could swim very far from shore and the bottom was only 6 feet under. It was beautiful. I finally was able to swim a few strokes of butterfly. We ate breakfast on top of a hill, and got to try weaving (both of us) when a woman came to sell cloth on the beach. It was really fun, but very hard on the shoulders.