A Long Weekend

This is Indonesian Independence Day. It’s a national holiday, and I have the day off. The kids had to get up early for ceremonies at their schools, but then they were able to come home after that and take the rest of the day off. This is my only long weekend for the term so I’m intent on enjoying it. The only school work that I have for the weekend is grading some social studies exams, and setting up a hardware database for the merger of the international and national schools in January. Other than that I plan on enjoying myself, relaxing, playing with the puppies, and doing some cement work on the house.

Another Anniversary

This is also my 18th anniversary of living in Indonesia (I do have the four years that I lived in Pakistan during this 18 years, but the family was still here, and I thought of Bali as home so…). When I left San Francisco for Indonesia, I never thought that I was leaving for good; the move was pretty much a change of scenery for a year to clear my head and then get back to life in the Bay Area. I had everything I owned stored and fully expected to pick up where I left off. But, here I am 18 years, four kids, three houses, and a wife later. My life is one of those strange hybrids that you find over in Asia of the Western guy married to the Asian girl along with their kids and quite often some of her relatives somewhere around. I know guys who live basically an American life with their Asian wife in Asia; then I’ve met a few who have pretty much gone native, and then there’s the ones like me. I tend to by located on the gone native end of the continuum although just a little way over. Food is basically a fusion of the east and the west; entertainment is more or less the same – I like traditional dance and music here, but I also like Western movies and tv, and I read a lot which sets me off from most Indonesians that I know. Hmm…

Baseball

I’ve been a St. Louis Cardinals fan my whole life. As a kid, I also rooted for the Red Sox (Ted Williams was still playing then along with Jackie Jensen) and the Yankees (it was the era of the great Yankee teams of the 50s and early 60s with Mantle and Ford and Berra and Howard). For most of the last 18 years, I haven’t had much of a chance to follow baseball, but the last four years here in Sumbawa I’ve been able to watch games on the weekend on ESPN. As I’ve noted before most of the games are Yankee games so I’ve decided to make the Yankees my second team since they’re really the only team that I get to watch regularly, and I hate just watching baseball without supporting a team so I’m now a Yankee fan (St. Louis as well). And for my first day as a Yankee fan? They lost to the Tigers.

Ceremonies and getting things done in Paradise

Living in Paradise. It ain’t that easy. Why? Because it takes forever to do small things that tourists think are easy everyday things to do. One example: I wanted the box on the wall that I plug the phone in to, to be changed so that I could have the phone and the computer plugged in at the same time. No one knew what I meant even though I thought that I explained it fairly clearly. I found the little box today down in the south of Bali in the first store that I entered. I can do the installation myself, but the whole issue of purchasing it has taken six months (well I’ve been gone for six months so maybe it’s only taken me a month.

It’s called wasting time in Paradise. I asked for some mosquito curtains and there’s a person that makes good ones, but she’s off to ceremonies. I forget about it and expect that when she returns in a few days she’ll give me a call or my wife will call her. Six months down the road, we still don’t have them because she forgot to call my wife and my wife forgot to call her because …there are always ceremonies, regardless of religion in Bali there are always ceremonies. The Hindus have theirs, the Muslims have theirs, the Buddhists have theirs, the Christians have theirs. When you add them all up, the island seems to be on holiday or preparing for a holiday almost all the time