My New Friends

Here are some pics of my new friends here. I live with some of these guys and others are guys who I've just gotten to know through my roommates. I'm starting to really enjoy these guys. The first pic is of a game of intense RISK that we played Saturday evening. Although they'd never played it before (I brought it from the U.S.), the guys really got into it.

Yellow Rice Mountian

Who needs birthday cake when you have a mountain of yellow rice? The celebration of important events is often marked with the consumption of the traditional rice mountain. This was a birthday party, and by the way, we did have some chocolate ice-cream afterwards, so I was pretty content.

Anggrek (Orchids)

I recently visited an anggrek (Indonesian for "orchid") show. Pretty impressive. Although pictures don't do it justice, I thought I'd give you a small taste to wet your visual taste buds.

Protests

President Bush is coming to town. Well, not exactly to my new town, but to a town that's not to far away. He'll be here on Nov. 20th, and his coming is creating quite a stir. I still haven't met an Indonesian who thinks too highly of him, but I guess that's not too different than in the U.S. There have been several protests (like the one I saw above) and even a small bombing in Jakarta (no one got hurt). Interesting times.

Vietnamese Friend

The Light Came On

After my first night sleeping in the boarding house with my new Indonesian roommates, I realized something strange: They sleep with the lights on. This seemed so odd to me. Why would you leave the lights on all night long? Several things ran through my mind: its wasting electricity, the lightbulbs will burn out faster, its harder to go to sleep – it just didn’t make logical sense to me. After several weeks of pondering and asking my new friends, the light came on (figuratively that is). There is a perfectly good reason the lights are kept on at night: kecoa and tikus. Cockroaches (2-2.5 inches long) and mice/rats (I saw a dead one the street that seemed to be about the size of a football) inhabit many of the houses here, and they don’t like the light. So now I sleep more peacefully with the lights on, hoping that doing so will prevent me waking up with a cockroach on my nose.

Just another example that differences in culture are not necessarily right or wrong, they are merely the different ways that people have developed to cope and thrive in the environment where they live.

From My Front Porch Looking Out