Pictures

Hello everyone,

Finally we have internet!  We are quite excited about that!  Well, I am at least.  Ben can keep in touch with Skype and e-mail from work, so it’s probably not as exciting for him!  First thing I am going to do is post some photos for you all to see.  I’m sure you’re very curious what our house and new country look like.  I think if you click on the photos, they will come up bigger in a new window.  Enjoy!

This lovely photo was my dinner!  Our first night in the new country and this is what I got for dinner!  That’s chili sauce on it.  Indonesians serve it with everything–they like things spicy!

 Here are a  bunch of picutes of our house.  The first is the outside.  That’s Darmy, our maid, washing the windows.  She is very sweet and a great cleaner but speaks no English.  We’re both slowly learning to communicate with each other.  Labor is very cheap here.  Darmy is paid 350, 000 Rupiah a month–that’s about 40 US dollars.  What’s sad is that she is happy to work for this amount because if she worked for a non-white couple, they would pay her less.  The white westerners here are called boules.  There are about 15 of us in Bandar Lampung–a city of over a million people.  We get stared at everywhere we go.  I’ve even seen small children flee to their mothers just from the sight of me!  They’ve never seen a white person in their life! 

The ladder is for the repairmen to get to the roof to repair the leaks.  To the right is a fountain.  It’s lovely but leaks water or something because we always have to fill it!

 

Our kitchen.  Notice no dishwasher or standard oven.  The oven is the grey thing in the corner next to the sink–we had to buy it!

       

 Living Room:                             Dining Area:

                  

Our bedroom–no closets  

Here’s the washing machine.  You must hook up the hose to the sink to fill the left bin with water.  Put in detergent and turn on for desired length of time.  Place drain hose in hole in floor, and drain water.  Fill up bin again so that you can rinse the detergent and add fabric softener.  Drain again to hole in floor when done.  Next, take out clothes and carefully place in right bin for the spin cycle to get out excess water.  Careful of how you put in the clothes!  The spinner gets off balance easily and the machine will travel across the room!  To dry, carry clothes up the stairs to the roof to the drying rack.  Watch out for that wind though!  Clothes are easily knocked off and may need to be washed again if they land in dirty spots on roof!

 Here are some views from our house:

This is across the street from us.  They are building a fine looking home and I get to hear every bit of the hammering and sawing during the day.  Notice the fine scaffolding!

A view of our street:

View from roof when hanging up laundry on drying rack:

Here’s a view from our house when looking out the front window from the second story.  Hope that’s not a volcano ready to bust!

We have 4 bathrooms in our house.  We only use 2 and hopefully you can understand why!  The people here think western toiles are weird.  Apparently they enjoy squatting to pee and poop.  The “sink” on the right is how they bathe.  They use the red cup to poor water over themselves.  Don’t worry, there’s a drain in the floor!  Just be sure to spray with Vape (like Raid) so the roaches don’t come crawling out of the drain–that goes for every drain in the house!

We have many creatures in our home and this here is one of them.  We also have roaches, geckos, ants and a critter of some sort that likes to nibble on my potatos while I’m sleeping.  Hope it’s not those rats the size of cats that we see running around at night!

This is our driver Bambang.  We share him with another couple.  He is very nice and speaks English fairly well.  Ben is lucky and gets to leave the house everyday.  I go out once a week to do the grocery shopping and sometimes get lucky if we go out to dinner on a Friday or Saturday night.  You’ll notice they drive on the opposite side of the road from us.  We don’t dare drive around the city and we quickly found out why on the drive from the airport to the hotel–there are no rules here!  Yes, you SHOULD drive in a lane single file and pass only if you have enough passing room on a straight road.  Well, that doesn’t happen here.  People pull out of streets, even though there is oncoming traffic–and the other person just slows for them.  There is no road rage, which is good!  The cars share the roads with motorbikes (with 4 people on them at times:  toddler in front holding on the handle bars, dad behind driving, other toddler behind dad, and mom is on the back, to make sure the kids don’t fall off??) and baceks:  bicycles with carts in the front that serve as a cheaper form of a taxi.

     

 Here are a few shots from around town.  It is not a city like you’ve ever seen before, unless you’ve been to a third world country. 

        

 On one of our first days here, we had the luxury of having the driver drive us around town and show us around.  We even went to a “beach.”  It really is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen, but it’s so dirty!  Garbage was strewn all around and I’m pretty sure the water is used for bathing (humans and cattle), restroom, and who knows what is draining in to it!  Aren’t these kids great!  I couldn’t speak to them but they understood what to do when I held up my camera to take their picture! 

            

Finally, here’s a picture of Ben doing what he does best:  playing Tiger Woods on his Play Station!

 We hope you’ve enjoyed these photos.  If there’s anything you’d like us to take a picture of, let us know.  Otherwise we’ll update the site with new info every so often to tell some stories and share more pictures.  Being in a place like this makes you realize how good we’ve got it back in the US and we appreciate things so much more.  Like water and electricity!  If we want water any time of day, we need to make sure we kick on the water pump to fill the water tank–it doesn’t do it on it’s own!  Also, there are continual power outages here.  Power can go out any time of day or night, for 5 minutes or 5 hours!  Good thing Ben is here to build a power plant!

We appreciate any e-mails and photos from you too.  We miss you all very much and love to hear about things going on in your lives too.  Though I’ll be jealous to hear that you drive your car to the mall,  I’ll live vicariously through you!  So please, send those e-mails and photos! 

 Love,

Sarah and Ben

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