iluminación orgánica

On Saturday, Leah and I went to town to pick up a few things we needed for the week.  One of those things included a birthday present for a teacher that was having a party on Sunday.  Neither Leah nor I knew this teacher that well so we had some difficulty figuring out what we should give her, until we walked by a lady selling plants.  "We should get her a plant," I practically screamed when I saw the stand.  First, though, we needed to buy a pot.  So we went to Ada Baru and I found a clay pot that probably weighed about 10 pounds.  I went up to pay for it and found out that it only cost 50,000 rupiah (or about $5).  I was very excited until I watched the lady at the checkout counter come back with a much larger clay pot that looked exactly like the one I was buying and put it in the bag with the clay pot I chose (I guess they were a matched set).  Between the two pots, they probably weighted about 25 pounds and I had bought groceries adding on another 10 pounds.  This doesn't sound like too big of a deal except I had to carry this over a half mile before making it home completely exhausted.  Needless to say, the next morning my arms were rather sore.  It was definitely what we call here an "Indo" experience.

A cecuk (pronounced chechuk) is the Indonesian version of gecko.  So, if you ever hear me talk about the cecuks that live in our house, I'm talking about the geckos.  They live all over hour house in fact, in the cabinets, under the couches, on the walls, etc...  Anyway, the other morning one of my roommates calmly asked, "Is that a dead cecuk in the toaster?"  "Hmmm, looks like it."  To be a bit more precise it was a grilled cecuk.  The scary thing is, is that we have absolutely no idea when it died, or how many times we had eaten toast out of a toaster that was continually grilling it. 

I know it has been a long time since I wrote last and for that I apologize.  It has been rather busy around here, and I got very very sick this weekend.  I believe I've lost about five pounds in 3 days and still have very little interest in eating.  I hadn't thrown-up for 5 years until this last weekend.  I believe that I would be just fine if I didn't throw up for another five years.  I will say, I'm not sure that I will ever look at gado-gado (an indonesian salad dish) the same anymore.  I can't blame it on the gado-gado though.  It actually had little to do with the food, and more to do with my students sharing their terrible viruses and bacteria with me.  If I can get them to share little else, I do know that they readily will share that with me.  Even today, I am a weak, but much better.  I ended up sleeping all of Saturday and part of Sunday.

Yesterday, I got sooo sick.  Unfortunately, I was at the school teaching so, there wasn't much I could do but finish the day.  It was definitely miserable.  Some terrible stomach thing had been going around.  I ended up leaving my classroom unattended a couple of times to make a quick getaway to the bathroom.  The weird thing is, it didn't even last 24 hours.  That evening, I was fine.  It was very strange.  I still feel a little queasy once in a while, but nothing remotely similar to yesterday. (Brandon, it might be something similar to the cheese Nathan brought home to us.  I'm a little scared of dairy products right now.)

Last weekend Leah and I decided to take the public transportation alone (meaning no one came who knew exactly how to get there) to Munshol (not sure how to spell it).  They have this neat swimming spring there with fresh cool water.  It looks like a swimming pool but is spring fed and has little fish swimming around your feet.  If you’re still long enough, they will nibble on your legs.  So we ended up taking the wrong bus and went a very long way around.  It took an hour and 5 different busses (or things similar to busses) to get there.  It should have taken about 15 minutes.  Other than the part that we were lost in Indo, and could not speak the language, it was completely beautiful!  We were in a very rural area and could see so much of the beauty of Indo.  Luckily, everyone was very nice and could point us to the correct bus.  Once we arrived, we were extremely excited to finally be there!  The water felt wonderful and we had no problems getting home.