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: