Leaving Surabaya

There was such a flurry of activity when we left Surabaya and I'm just now getting it into my blog - but I'm dating it back so that it will be in chronological order, before the Mentawai blogs.

First, we arranged for the movers to come and pack everything in our house. This is a service that the school paid for, and boy was it nice. All we did was sit and watch, and they wrapped and boxed everything. In fact, they did such a thorough job that they packed a few things that weren't ours!

After that, we took a trip that we'd been meaning to take for a very long time - to Mt. Bromo, the famous volcanic crater just outside of Surabaya. We got a group together and drove up in the middle of the night to catch sunrise at the crater. It was lots of fun, though exhausting after being up all night and then hiking up the stairs to the crater (and then riding horses around).

Then my classes finished up. My Korean Moms English class finished the book they were reading about an adopted Korean girl in America and we had some delicious food to celebrate. Then my flute students had a little concert in my then-empty living room. Our batik class met a final time in the garage to finish our T-shirts and decide on background colors. Then we said our goodbyes. To do this, we decided we had better visit all the people that we'd become friends with. We had to visit everyone so that nobody would feel left out. For days we drove around the city making sure to visit every family. We had to stay long enough to say goodbye, and often we had to say goodbye to all the neighbors, too! Several of our friends were nice enough to drive around with us to help with directions and translating. It was so sad to say goodbye, and everyone asked when we would come back... It's hard to explain that there's a chance we might never be back, though I certainly hope that some day we can.

We attended our last Nineteen-Day Feast (the Baha'i community gets together on the first of every Baha'i month) and we had to say our final goodbyes to our wonderful community. We took tons of pictures, and everyone said they would miss us. It was a good opportunity to reflect on our first Feast with the community, in which we were regarded kindly, but as strangers, and where the Feast was just plain boring - this final Feast was a loving atmosphere and a friend of ours led singing at the end.

As we finished packing we distributed our remaining household items among friends, and learned about a very interesting Indonesian tradition: when someone moves away, everyone gives them gifts - kenang-kenangan, gifts of remembrance. So we had to re-pack all over again to make sure we could bring all our gifts home! Several of our American friends had going-away dinners and parties, and we had our own little get-together as we zipped our bags a final time and made sure everything was out of our enormous house.

We first left for Malaysia to drop our things at a friend's house, then took a real vacation in Lombok before heading to Mentawai. Lombok was an excellent transition - we did nothing but lay, walk, ride, and swim at the beach for 4 days, processing our time in Surabaya and mentally preparing for our month of travels that would take us all the way to Haifa.