Its been awhile since my last post, and obviously a lot has happened.
The best was midproject. We are now about 30 days from leaving but we left town to reflect and celebrate almost 2 weeks ago when we were halfway through the project. We all travelled to Bandung, about 4-6 hrs away, depending on traffic. We all loved getting out of town for a bit. We were set up in a neibourhood of villas, each built for individual concepts, resulting in a field of very novel homes including castles, log cabins, N.American style, disney characters etc. Ours was rather plain by comparison, but we would all atleast have a mattress to sleep on.
A lot of the weekend was taken up by group bookkeeping. We had to assess where the group was, and had a comparison of different aspects of the two towns we lived in. While not all of it was interesting, and most of it was much lengthier than it needed to be, we got through it fairly quickly, and since we had control over what we were eating, we had what we wanted. Beside that, we got to enjoy all the material pleasures that aren't available to us in cikandang. We stopped at a couple malls,and got food we haven't been able to get while here. I had a burger for the first time in months, A&W is pretty constant everywhere. Most of the clothes were too expensive to make it worth buying much, but what we did buy, we enjoyed. I ate alot that weekend. We also had some day trips. On the saturday there was a partial solar eclipse in the area so we went to an observatory to see it. That didn't work out so well since it's still the rainy season and it was cloudy by the time it happened. But I got a glimpse of it before it finished so it was sort of worth it. After that we all went to pizza hut since everbody has been craving pizza for awhile. The next day we went out again to see a movie, which was a welcome change to the day of talking. Got to see avatar on the big screen. It was a movie with a similar message to what we have been trying to send to the people here, so it kind of resonated with us. Also it was pure escapisim, so we enjoyed for that reason also. All in all,I had a great time that weekend, we gt a lot done in the group and we had a great time seeing things in the city. Still don't like the smell or the traffic but it was good to get out of town.
When we got back I was sick unfortunatelly. I spent a couple days in bed with a fever and n urgent need to be near the bathroom, so that put a damper on the week. But after that I spent most of the weekwatching movies at a friends house. When we were in Bandung, most of us stocked up on videos and plan to have movie nights from here on out.
Last weekend we had our government checkup where they sent a few bigwigs to see what we've been doing and travel to Depok which has the other group. We set up all our english lessons, environment projects, work placements and they visited our host families before we gave them a short show. But of course they were late getting here so many things we planned had to be moved or canceled. But I found the whole day hilarious and we got to get out of town again. We haven't had a weekend off and in the town since the begining of the indonesian phase. Depok was the same as our visit, not really sure why were all there other than they wanted the white people to enjoy themselves on camera. They even invited a couple people from the 3rd group on another island to even out the depok group which has lost 3 canadians so far. I enjoyed a volleyball game they had us play and the waves on the ocean we were next to were huge and great fun though short.
The power has been going on and off recently,many times I've tried to usethe comptuer and it's either been very slow, or it shut off on me. Not sure why the sudden blackouts but there has been a lot of thunder storms recently, a sign of the rainy season coming to a close. Thats in my good books. It's hard to do stuff when it pours rain from 12 to dark. There are times when the streets are literally flooded. So I better sign off before I lose what I've written again. We have this weekend off which is a first in awhile, so I imagine in the quiet boredom I'll have time to write more.