Staff Gamelan Performance

Notice me squinting to see the music?!! I should have sat nearer the front, or worn my glasses...I am far too vain for my own good. We were all supposed to wear Batik, but I have real trouble finding anything that fits (or that is semi-tasteful....I am not a Batik lover.)
So I wore a silk Batik scarf!

Puncak Pass

This is where we're off to tomorrow straight after school - Puncak. For a weekend away at a lovely hotel to relax. We're going with friends Robyn & Craig, Ricky & Jane and their daughter Tyla, and our new colleagues this year, Dan & Mary and their 12 year old daughter, Maiti.

This week has been exhausting.

All week it has been UN & Multicultural week at school so events everyday. Tonight was a special UN day performance and staff played in the 'Gamelan Orchestra' and us Becks represented Australia in the fashion show.

Lots of photos to come, but I'll post just a few off the camera above for now of us staff playing on the Gamelan. It was fun, although not as easy as it looks! We'll have to wait for the official photos to come into school to show you us at the fashion show!

The Hula & Cowgirl

How cute are they?!! This is them waiting to start the show. The bottom left photo is of them with Juliette's teacher, Miss Nancy (she was Annalise's teacher last year.)

The hotel bath

The bath in our hotel room was so deep, Annalise spent an hour and a half on the Saturday night playing in it whilst Juliette had a nap - Annalise could swim in it! She was over the moon!

Jakarta Race for Cancer

Sorry I've been slack in blogging lately - life is super crazy and still so!

Last week/weekend was a busy time for us, but also a wonderful one.
We had a preliminary skype video interview with a Head and his deputy for a perspective school for next year - it went very well. We have been asked for another one next week with the same school to chat to the curriculum guys.
The package would be great, the school sounds wonderful....but the country would perhaps not be our first choice. In fact, it wasn't even on our list. However, it's an exciting enough prospect to keep us interested. I will keep everyone in the dark for now, but albeit to say it is giving us confidence for further/future interviews. Anyway. I will keep you posted...

Saturday lunchtime, Annalise and Juliette were in their UN 'Heal the World' concert at the mall. Annalise was a Hawaiian Hula girl and danced the most beautiful Hawaiian dance. We videoed it so I will upload it to YouTube ASAP. Juliette was a cowgirl and did a line/hat dance. Very cute!
Straight after their concert, we taxied it down to the South/Central to stay in the Four Season's Hotel for the night. We decided to treat ourselves there, as Sunday morning, we were all taking part in the 'Jakarta Race' for cancer. It is a 5km and 10km run and all the proceeds go to a cause very close to our hearts.

Saturday night we went out with friends to 'The Backyard' Italian restaurant by the hotel - it was beautiful food although the bill took 45 minutes to come!

The race was fantastic fun. We got up at 5.45am and made our way to the starting line. We were doing the 5km race. It was so well organised - they'd closed the motorway for the 6000+ entrants to run which meant we were running on level ground (nice!) through central Jakarta main roads, amongst the high rise buildings which was quite cool.

Andrew had the girls in the double jogging pram and did the 5km alternatively running and pushing them and supervising them as they ran for 50 metres or so, got tired, sat back in the pram, had a snack or a drink and then ran again.
He let me run and I was so proud of myself. I ran 5km bang on 30 minutes (not superbly brilliant but better than I have done in a long time) and I then after I crossed the finishing line, I ran back about a kilometre and a half to Andrew and the girls to run with them, so I probably ran about 8km that morning in total. Yay for me!

The run was really quite surreal for me. I wore my ipod and listened to music all of the way which is always a great help for me, although about 5 minutes in, the ipod which was tucked into my pants, must have pressed on my tummy and so altered the settings and 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' by Greenday kept repeating over and over....it was only until it was on the 4th repeat I had to stop for a bit to try to change the settings so that I could listen to something different! But, the strange thing was that as it was repeating, I really felt like Mummy was with me (and she continued to stay with me the whole way)....I think it's probably because of the song and that I knew the particular cause that the proceeds were going to , but I really felt that sense of not being alone... (Yes, I know, there were 6000 other runners running alongside me, but I don't mean that!) I even, though I was sweating my pants off, felt really shivery and cold twice in the middle of the run - my hair on my arms stood on end and I felt very odd - I was warm, but cold and did feel quite strange. What was funnier was that the lyrics 'I walk alone, I walk alone' seemed so contradictory as I clearly felt like she was there!
Hard to explain. Maybe I'm losing it!

Anyway. The run was great fun, we had a HUGE breakfast afterwards with fellow friends and colleagues who had also run with us and then we spent the morning by the pool before we checked out at lunchtime and went home again.

Back to reality.

We're All Fine!

Another earthquake hit tonight - only about 6.5 on the richter scale I think, but enough to shake us a bit at home. All four of us ran for the front doorway and braced ourselves through it.

The girls now know the earthquake drill - run under a table, hold onto the leg of it with one hand and with your head down, hold the back of your head with the other hand. They were a bit upset as when they tried to do this today, we made them come with us to the door instead....better to be together (I didn't even try to get under the coffee table which is where they were heading for!)

We are going to practice drills at home every so often, as we really have been having lots of quakes recently.

I do hope there isn't much damage from today's one...the poor people of Indonesia really can't take much more.

Raining Nudies

The girls received these umbrellas from a girl at school who was celebrating her birthday.
Indonesian birthday parties are a little different - if you are invited, you get a gift!
The girls have received some gorgeous things...last week, they got matching pink, terry towelling, Mickey Mouse bathrobes.
In the past, they have received things such as pink, carved wooden, Disney Princess stools with their names engraved in them and Disney backpacks!

When it was their birthdays last year, straight after Christmas, a month apart, their school friends (66 of them...oh, did I mention that you have to buy gifts for all the students in the school?!) were lucky enough to get party bags filled with candy and tacky plastic toys from us. They must think we're CHEAPSKATES!

No. We're just poor schoolteachers.

Dinner Party Fun

Last night, we were invited down to a friend's house for dinner. They live in very swish serviced apartments in Senayan City. Bill is from Louisiana (I think) and is married to a gorgeous lady, 'Bean' (I don't think that is how it's spelt but it is short for her Indonesian name which is long and unpronounceable!) They have two kids who go to NJIS and our girls always get on really well with them.
Bill, coming from Louisiana, cooks the BEST Cajun food - we stuffed ourselves silly with blackened chicken and traditional deep south beans and veggies, followed by peach cobbler! I ate farrrrr too much. Wine and beer were flowing and then he got out his single malt scotch and I was in heaven!
We got home at 2am.
Very naughty. Especially as both girls were still awake at this time too!
Andrew and bill solved many problems of the world!
Today we have done nothing.
Not surprising really!

Bubble Butt

Juliette asked Andrew to open some chewing gum that she 'found' in Mummy's bag. (rummaged through all the contents is actually the true story...I'm still finding trails of coins and receipts etc etc over the house!)

Andrew unwrapped it and then said to Juliette. "Ok. But only chew it. Don't ..."

"Swallow" replies Juliette ... this is a routine we go through all the time with her, as in the past, she has been known to swallow quite a number of pieces of gum 'by accident'.

"Why can't I swallow it, Daddy?"

"Because if you swallow it, it'll go into to your tummy and then get stuck inside your bottom. That's why."

"But, Daddy! If it was in my bottom, I could fart and it would blow up into a bubble and I could fly up into the sky!"

If I had my photoshop working, I would have drawn a HUGE bubble coming out from that cute little botTOM!

Think I might have to buy 'The Bubble Gum kid' book to read to my little girl with a wild imagination!

The Kitchen

It has been very humbling living in Indonesia.
Notice the live bird in the box at the back? Not sure if that is dinner or not.

The Build

Exhausting work, but notice the completed house in a couple of the photos? The foundations and the start of the walls were built by Andrew and our school kids and the other teams last year. They didn't think they'd get to see it in its finished state but the build today was in the same area so they went to look at it. Fantastic.

How Green are those paddies?

Another shot of some kids. But isn't the background beautiful?! The rice paddies are soooooo green. Brightness amongst bleakness.

Bakazi Habitat For Humanity

Andrew, along with his community service kids, spent the whole day today out in North Bakazi - about 3 hours drive away, working with the 'Habitat For Humanity' group, building houses for the poor.
He has loads of photos of them all working hard, lugging and laying bricks and , but I thought I'd post some of the pictures he took of the local kids and families. Beautiful. They still manage to smile even though life must be very tough for them.

Just Cause She's Cute!

I sometimes look at Annalise and think - "She looks so much older than 4..."
But then when she's sleeping or cuddling up to me in all her snuggly glory, I still see that chubby little bubba baby!

How Close?

My Wiggles-Crazed Daughter!

Other Bali Buys

A mask for Andrew - we're not quite sure which one it is. Maybe a 'Rangda'? It is made from teak and beautifully painted.
The drum is for me, but we have to keep it up high as we have a little two and a half year old who is obsessed with crayoning and color markering over anything she finds. Our remote controls for all our electronics are currently in various shades of blue and black and whenever we change channels we end up with coloured hands!!

The Red Bali Bowl

I think it's lovely. They have loads of these mosaic-style pottery & coloured ceramic/glass bowls - you can see them actually making them in their little street shops. All by hand. Wonderful.