Batik excursion

This week we went on my favorite excursion yet! 2nd to the rubber/coffee plantation which was very educational. Maybe because this is right up my alley of what I like. I love crafty, artsy, homemade stuff. I am not saying I was good at this at all, but I certainly enjoyed myself:) We went to a place that makes hand-made batik, which I hear is becoming more rare. We learned and saw the whole process and even made our own! I have a whole new appreciation for batik now. Batik is "a method (originally used in Java) of producing colored designs on textiles by dyeing them, having first applied wax to the parts to be left undyed."

This is a picture of some batik. Now that I know how it is made...crazy!

Stamping the wax design on the material.

All the different patterns of stamps hanging on the wall. (this was in the back of someone's house, btw.

Us girls getting ready to paint some wax on by hand.

Unfortunately Eden could not stay here for long because she wanted to "color" with the hot wax!

Harder than it looks!!

J's turn to stamp

Ta-da!

The ladies wanted a picture afterwards, the one was a little too excited to have her picture taken with us, as you can see her holding me very close, the picture does not do the situation justice!!

Ahhh, no more lady squeezing me:)

Our finished product! After we painted the wax design on by hand, we painted it and then washed the wax off. Different than I had envisioned, but fun!
J did not paint his:(

Just some pictures

Since I don't have time to post a blog, but have lots of pictures I haven't put up, I thought I would just do the easier thing and post some pictures. Eden is growing up so much! I will post older one's first.

Eden feeding the birds! She used to always do this at Grandma's house and when we got here she kept asking to feed the birds, so we got her some bird seed.

She wanted to have a towel on her head like mommy after her shower.

Eden and her friend, Shella at the local "warung" or store. Her first time riding one of these...oh boy!

Lounging at the pool:)

Taking an important call:)

One word...adorable!

Once again

"Hanging" out in front of our house

Cuddles...my very favorite! I will cry when she does not do this anymore!!!!!

Eden's bathtime outside

The terrential(sp?) downpour as soon as I pulled her out

Language learning thus far

It has been weeks since I started this blog, back before we lost our internet and now I have been too busy too finish it! I thought I would give a quick little blog on how language learning is coming along for us, since that is what we are here for! I don't know why, but I for some reason thought it would be a little easier! Haha, I don't feel like I will ever be able to speak this language! Comprehend it yea, maybe, probably, but speak it...it will be a miracle by God alone! So when it happens, IF it happens, I will give all the praise to God because I am feeling very inadequate! Which is good, I sometimes forget that too!

Here is a description I stole from my friend here who wrote about it:
We are currently in "Stage 1" of our Indonesian language and culture study. During Stage 1 (which is 10 weeks long), we are not studying in a formal classroom setting, but rather getting used to the language and culture through "purposefully experiencing" everyday life. On a typical weekday, we meet up with our fellow new-to-the-field co-workers in the morning & we all go out on an excursion together, accompanied by some of the staff guys and some wonderful Indonesian language helpers. We have visited all sorts of places - the main market, an animal market, a Javanese home, post office, sate restaurant, school, church, seamstress, motor bike and car repair shop, bus station, hospital, college campus, etc., etc. It is very interesting! At each location, we take pictures of everything we see to use later on during our individual tutor sessions. After our excursion, we prepare for our next language helper session. Our wonderful tutor, Mbak Jessica, comes to our house 4x/week to help us learn Indonesian. But she has been busy with college and sick with the chickenpox, so we have missed a few sessions and had to find some subs! We print out the pics we took at the excursion & she teaches us the Indonesian words for the objects in our photos by a process we call TPR (total physical response), and whatever else we have time to learn. Our 2-hr tutor sessions are always great fun and packed-full of language...by the time we are done with a session, our brain is literally hurting from all the new Indonesian data :) The rest of the day we spend "processing" (i.e. organizing, filing & practicing what we have learned that day), listening to our recordings of our tutor, hanging out with our neighbors, perhaps going into town or to the market for things, and just life! Like my friend said, it is never dull here!:) There is always something to do, or something that needs to be done.

We know a lot of nouns, adjectives and lots of other things, but the verbs are going to take some work and we won't get the grammar until we start MLAC (don't remember what that stands for, but it is the language learning program) at the International School. It is a little frustrating, especially since we arrived 3 weeks earlier than stage 1 started. We feel like it will be forever until we can speak in proper sentences, but we have heard that our organization does so well in classes because of this time. The program is strictly in Indonesian, so we have a big help in starting. It is all so well organized, we really appreciate it. We start classes at MLAC on October 15th and that will be 4 hours a day of class. Mixed emotions about starting, excited, but heard it is hard:)
Anyways, one of our very 1st sets of pics to learn was all the fruits and veggies you can get here. There were over 75 we learned! I decided to throw in some pics of things we have here at the market food-wise that you may not see in the U.S.

Tempe-I had mentioned this in an earlier post, it is a block of soybeans, fermented I have heard, but doesn't taste that way. Good source of protein!

different forms of tofu

there is some debate as to what this is in English, saffron, tamarind, any ideas??

I have heard this to be brown sugar, as well as palm sugar. My guess is it's palm sugar, but functions as their brown sugar.

This is a root that is actually quite tasty raw.


These are almost like little eyeballs when you peel them.





One of our 1st sessions with our language helper, Jessica!
It's like pre-school for us:)

At the market with Jessica

This is what Eden does while we are hard at work studying!:)
It must be nice that for a job, all you have to do is look cute!


I will try to put up some of the pictures from our excursions in the future!

Ok, I am going to try to leave all the silly little details out, I could write a book, but you already know this! Basically our whole 1st week here was people taking us shopping. We needed so much to set up house and let me just say, I wish there was a walmart here!!! Everything is in all different stores in all different places of town and takes so long to get a few things. So even though we went shopping everyday, we still didn't have everything we needed. I felt so bad for Eden because I felt like we were dragging her through the mud, poor thing was so tired and didn't get a real, proper nap at all that week. At "home" she would take two 2 hour naps, so this was rough for her:( We had to go when others could take us, so not much of an option, just thankful someone was helping us out!
How many people can you fir on a motor bike?!? These were our point people, the Abbott's, they were extremely helpful! Motorbikes is how everyone gets around, but we used the mission's van for a lot of shopping that week.
Just a cute picture of J and Eden with their helmets on


We also did not have to worry about meals that 1st week! We had meals at someone's house everyday and our "pembantu", aka: a house helper, made us the other meal of the day. This was a hard adjustment for me too, well, it was like bittersweet. We are required to have a house helper here, as westerners especially. It is very cultural to have a pembantu and it helps give Indonesian women a good job. I thought it sounded amazing to have someone come and clean my house, do my laundry and make a meal for me!! BUT, I felt like a slave driver…I was assured by so many that this is a good thing for so many reasons and I needed to focus on what I was here for and my family. OK! It has taken some getting used to having someone else in the house for several hours a day and not being able to communicate with her. But it has been awesome to have an Indonesian to learn from, build a relationship with and help me so that I can learn language, build relationships in the community and free up some time for me to play with Eden and not feel guilty. We have been being tutored at home until now and she is there to help keep Eden occupied so we can learn. It has been a huge blessing and I am so thankful to help provide a job for someone who otherwise would be struggling to make ends meet. I pray our relationship grows and by the end of this I have a good friend in her as well. I plan on learning many things from her, like shopping! Shopping was…a huge barrier for me. I would go to the store and wonder "what am i supposed to make with these ingredients?!?!?!" and "where is everything?!?!?"- they have lots of drinks, snacks, cookies, rice, sauces and… that's pretty much it! I plan on going with her to the more Indonesian markets and learning where she gets what and what she pays for what, etc. It was so nice to know we would have food even though I was unable to go and do this for my family. It took me several weeks to learn where to get what, what is available and what to do with it! It is encouraging to know I am not alone in this. Many of the women here say they barely cook because it is so hard to shop and cook, there are always leftovers and it is so cheap to buy a dinner off the side of the road for your whole family, so looks like I won't be cooking a whole lot, but I am excited, I have made a few things now! Reheating food took some getting used to too, no microwave, only old-fashioned skillet and oven reheating process, takes some more time and dirty's up some more dishes, but we have gotten used to that too, and I am sure it is better, as my dad says "microwaves genetically alter your food", lol! Well, we were trained for this, so now to put SOME of our simple living skills to practice.
One of the places we went to eat with some people. Eden has an obsession with stools, so it worked out well.
This is how they do take out a lot of times. They wrap the food in this brown paper that is lined with plastic 1st, and then wrap with newspapers and rubberband it together! The soup is in the bag.
This is Eden passed out from exhaustion! We called Grandma to tell her we arrived safely and she couldn't make it through the conversation! Poor baby!
This is one of our 1st meals made for us by our house helper...looks amazing! Soto Ayam, fried tempe with an amazing sweet and spicy soy sauce and watermelon (so excited they have watermelon here!). Soto ayam is like a chicken soup, very traditional Indonesian dish...and very good! Tempe is "fermented bean curd"! Haha, sounds so gross, but pretty good and very healthy, well, until they fry it! It is very popular here and is not always fried. Here is wikipedia's definition:"is made by a natural culturing and controlled fermentation process that binds soybeans into a cake form.", they say tempe is high in protein, fiber and other vitamins, the healthiest way to eat soybeans. A dream to have this lunch prepared for us!

Our oven. We were borrowing the smaller one temporarily, but ended up buying a bigger one because nothing really fit in the little one, not even the small pans I bought, much less a 9x13! Doesn't look like much of a size difference, but it is the world of difference! You put one of these bad boys on 1 of your 2 burners to heat it up.
Here are our burners! So far, it has not been as hard as I had imagined to cook with 2 burners, and one being for the oven. So far, it works! But like I said, I am no chef here. And that tea kettle is the only source of our hot water besides in the shower so far. So we boil water to do dishes, etc.


Also, I thought I was going to lose weight here, but it's not likely! There is so much junk food here and they fry everything! It may not be good old American junk food, but it works:) We do LOVE the food so far which is a huge plus! There are missionaries who are having a harder time with this and I am thankful we are enjoying the foods here. We have been very adventurous and open-minded with the food, more so than I thought we would be, and we haven't really gotten sick yet. I am just rejoicing in how the Lord has taken care of us…Eden hasn't even been sick at all and when we were in the states the last few months, she was getting sick all the time! I expected to have been violently ill by now, but we have all just had a COUPLE little diarrhea episodes (sorry, tmi-too much information for some:)), that's it! Our stomachs seem to like Indonesian food, even Eden. She will come in the kitchen and ask for rice, haha. It is a good thing we like rice, we eat it every single day.

I feel like I am missing some information or all over the place because I am so tired, so I will add any missed information on the next one! Can't think anymore:)

What's for dinner tonight?

I thought I would do a simple, funny one today. Warning, this content is not for the weak-stomached! I suppose it is not the best idea to show you these things so early on, I could lose a lot of readers doing this! Or maybe there are those of you who are curious (like me) to see such a thing! My dad would say I am gross, hehe! Maybe you should not read this before a mealtime, the pictures will NOT make you hungry, in fact, they may have the opposite affect...good for appetite control.:)We went to the Pasar or the market...great place, you can get lots of fruit and veggies there, but there are also some disturbing images. We found the section that has chicken, not like your average American grocery store I assure you. I am absolutely positive it would violate most health code inspections, if not all. Everything is supposedly fresh in the morning, but these chickens will sit out all day (heat, flies, motorcycle traffic within feet) not sure what is done with them if they are not sold that day, that's what makes me worry! Keep in mind as you see the chicken selection...it gets worse!

This is how all the chicken is lied out, on tables
Whole chickens
Headless chickens
All kinds of appetizing parts of the chickens
Chicken feet, not to be mistaken with the game!



The beef section is what about sent me over the edge and drove me closer than I have ever been to wanting to become a vegetarian here! The pictures are gross, but they are inadequate in giving you the full picture with the other sensories, such as the SMELL on a hot day (keep in mind, we were there at lunch time, they set up very early in the morning) and the feeling of walking on a sticky, nasty floor...I won't go into any more detail! I just about had a panic attack as I watched all these women handling the raw meat so carelessly and the unsanitary conditions! My friend told me that she went one time with her newborn baby and these ladies were wanting to hold him!!! NO WAY! I am so glad we did not have Eden with us for this excursion! It was a little much for me and I could not have gone in there with Eden running around! I also found it amusing that J was excited to find some meat for steaks...what?!?!?! This place made me want to never eat beef again! He was recommended to go early in the morning as it is fresher then. Part of the reason he was so excited was because he learned that steaks will be around the same price as any other part of the cow, they are not pricier here like back home.

So here is what I saw when I 1st walked in...
Cow stomach lining and intestines, I was told "it tastes good!"-no thank you, I am not Andrew Zimmern or that adventurous!!!
MMM, so many options
The possibilities are endless, really!
No words...
As we were leaving we found some other parts...there they were! I was looking for them, thought about buying one for the dog-KIDDING!

So as you read this and eat your hamburgers and steaks in America, be thankful and enjoy them for us!