Myazaki moment

One might assume that the life of a Peace Corps volunteer is always crazy and they would be 80% safe in that assumption. Mostly though, I feel like Bennedict Cumberbatch in the role of Sherlock: when I'm going, it's at full speed and when there's free time I don't know what to do with myself. 

Here are some anecdotes since my last post. Relating to the topic of free time, on Saturday I spent much of our afternoon off at a middle school talking with a student in Indo-lish while eating snacks a teacher provided us. To be clear, I was there to get wifi, but even in a tech-savy country where all the young people are on facebook or gaming all of the time, being social tops hiding behind your cellphone. 

It started to rain at some point after Hudan and I went behind our screens and the maternal teacher who fed us snacks had been outside in the courtyard for a while scraping out weeds from between the stones. I'm still surprised every time I see the school dynamic here. The principal, students and teachers all stick around after school  (at least at this middle school) and do various chores together like painting a door, sweeping and weeding the courtyard. The whole time I was there we listened to a radio station that played Madonna, Lincoln Park and Jay-Z. 

I finally took a picture of the sign over my village. I live about 5 houses up the street directly through the sign.

In trying to describe the cultural differences I've witnessed in the schools so far I refered to this sheet that PC gave us. It's a clean-cut overview of differences in cultural values. 

Makan pagi (breakfast): fried corn thing, nasi putih and stewed veggies. This is one of my favorite meals my ibu makes.

Minggu (Sunday):

At 8 Sarah's family picked me up to go to the beach, which I was told was two hours away. We stopped for smoke breaks, visits to friend's houses for watermellon and more smoke breaks and  I think, in general, we took the scenic route, which was fine by Sarah and I. A some point I stopped caring about time, which is my first success story of adapting to "rubber time" that I have to report. Among our stops was a fish market, where we picked up our raw lunch. 

Sarah and I didn't feel like we needed to know how we would work raw fish into our beach picnic. Several miles of bumpy road and terrifyingly steep hills later (I won't describe the seatbelt situation here) we emerged in Avalon, tropical paradise-style. The pictures don't do it justice. 

Goacina Sendang Biru in Malang, East Java (on their google map it showed up as Pantai Bajul Mati) 

We stopped at several more friends' houses on the way back, another beach at sunset and a bakso restaurant for dinner. The moral of the story is: our host families are awesome! 

Still working on uploading the rest pf the pics!