Children

Farmer

In Batak culture, the women are the ones who work hard on the farm while the men usually just sit around and drink coffee. We had a chance to visit this 82 year old lady who still farms, despite the fact her husband has passed away more than 8 years ago. She grows oranges, corn, potatoes, and various types of cabbage.

Here she was drying corn in the sunshine with her orange grove in the distance.

Here granddaughter was helping, with counting kernels in appears.

One friend remarked, "Wow, look at her bloody gums!" The red is actually not blood, but the result her chewing on something called "daun sirih", a type of leaf believed to have medicinal benefits, as well as being mildly addictive. Batak village women chew on a rolled up ball of these leaves, often adding tobacco and other types of leaves, to "keep them calm and relaxed." Apparently it has similar effects as nicotine. Don't think I'll suggest my future wife use it.

Lake Toba

My travels recently took me to beautiful Lake Toba. Here's a glimpse:

"Lake Toba (Indonesian: Danau Toba) is a lake and supervolcano, 62.5 miles long and 20 miles wide, and 1,666 ft at its deepest point. Located in the middle of the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra with a surface elevation of about 2,953 ft, it is the largest volcanic lake in the world. In addition, it is the site of a supervolcanic eruption that occurred 74,000 years ago, a massive climate-changing event. The eruption is believed to have a VEI intensity of 8. This eruption, believed to have been the largest anywhere on Earth in the last 25 million years, may have had catastrophic consequences globally; some anthropologists and archaeologists believe that it killed most humans then alive, creating a population bottleneck in Central Eastern Africa and India that affected the genetic inheritance of all humans today." (according to Wikipedia)

This picture was taken from an island in the middle of Lake Toba. That's right, we were on an island in a lake that is on an island in the ocean.

Exciting

My blogging frequency had greatly decreased since returning to America. To be honest, the U.S. of A. just isn't as exciting as life overseas. But there has been a little excitement. Here are some snapshots of that excitement.During a trip to Seattle we played in an ultimate frisbee tournament in the snow, walking away with muddied white T-shirts to display our excitement. (Ok, so I actually just dove on the ground at the very end to make it look like I played hard.)Indonesian food in America!... at 10 times the price, but 100% as delicious, and exciting.The original Starbucks... so exciting that we didn't even order any coffee.

Whoa, too much excitement.

But we came back down.

Watching the best pitcher in baseball was exiting, although the expression on Grienke's face as he walks of the field after striking out the side displays the excitement of someone who just finished counting blades of grass between home plate and pitiching rubber.

Wiffleball in the snow was exciting. We even got a snowcone at the end of the game.

Frontyard baseball is exciting, especially when it serves to work up a bigger appetite for the consumption of Mama Call's pizza.

Hanging out with friend is exciting, especially the kind of friends who wear boots with their shorts and walk bearfooted on gravel driveways.

Roadtrip to Chicago

When friends call up and want to take a roadtrip, how can you not accept? Pak Johan (L of photo) and Pak Chairy (R of photo), two Indonesian friends who have lived in Kansas City since January, offered to pay for all my gas and food if I'd drive them to Chicago. How can you refuse an offer like that? The steel rainbow in St. Louis was our first destination, as well as the Mississippi River across the street (see first photo).Pak Johan and Pak Chairy had some business to take care of at the Indonesian Consulate. I tried to vote in the Indonesian elections (read red and white sign), but two years in a country doesn't qualify you for voting rights. Walking around the Windy City, we had to guard ourselves against "masuk angin," an Indonesian disease that literally translates "enter wind." Americans tend to be resistant.Giordano's Pizza, a famous Chicago pizza place, was great -even better than fried rice.

Even "boring stretches" of the road were interesting to my two Indonesian friends. They snapped pictures continuously, amazed by such incredible scenery and long, straight, smooth roads. It didn't seem all that photo-worthy to me... but that's probably what they thought when I was taking pictures of rice paddies in their country.

No American experience is complete without a trip to Famous Dave's for some BBQ, corn-bread biscuits, corn on the cob, and potatoes. Too bad Famous Dave's hasn't made it to Indonesia yet...

Friends and Good Food

Friends and food - they just seem to go together. These friends from Vietnam and Myanmar treated me well, serving delicious dishes from their home countries. Not exactly a steak and fries with a shake, but if I had a choice between that and this, I might chose this.

I miss those days of sitting around and talking as if there wasn't anything else in the world more important.

Team Fishing

When walking through an Indonesian coastal village, I came across this odd site. Were the villagers taking a break, playing a good ole' friendly competition of tug of war? Nope. They were actually working hard, fishing together for their livelihood.
The word "fishing" has always conjured up pictures of rods and reels, jigs and plugs, bobbers and swivels, hooks and sinkers, and a stringer full of largemouth bass. But not so in Indonesia. While they do have that style of fishing, commercial fishermen usually use nets. In one style of net-fishing, a boat is used to drag a net out from the coast. A rope runs from the net the shore. Once the net is in place, the "fishermen" start pulling the rope. They pull and pull and pull, steadily leaning and stepping backward, as the back "puller" moves toward the front periodically.
A rope-person coils the rope as it comes in. After an hour or two of pulling, the net finally nears the shore.

Hear you can start to see the size of the net as it circles out toward the boat.

As the net is brought in, the fish are dumped into a large basket that is dragged up farther on shore.

Fishermen (actually fisherwomen) pick through the catch, sorting the fish by type.

The squid from the catch are separated out and weighed.

Other types of fish are sorted out and sold as well.

Profits are divided between those fishermen who participated. Each day the nets are sent out and pulled in 2-4 times. And after hours of tugging every day, tug-of-war is probably not among a fisherman's hobbies. Neither is fishing.