Catching up on a couple things

First the biggest and most exciting news for me: my after-grant travels are setting up. I’ll work my way backwards: I moved my US return ticket back as far as I could to the end of August (28th). Which means I’ll have a little time on my own after mom leaves; she’ll be here from Jul 14 to Aug 16. I’ve spent a bunch of time setting up an itinerary for her and I. Usually I like to just have a rough outline, but since it is the tourist hi-season and we have a limited amount of time, pre-booking is a probably a good idea. Before mom arrives though, Steph is going to travel the Philippines and probably Thailand with me for the month of June! I’m also hoping to get Vietnam in before mom comes.
So far, I’ve booked my tickets to the Philippines; I fly out of Singapore on the 31st. AMINEF doesn’t care when exactly we end (between May 27-31) so I’ll probably leave the Pesantren on the 27th or 28th and go to Makassar for a night or two. AMINEF will buy my Makassar to Jakarta ticket and then I’ll fly on to Singapore (the first part of my return ticket). I’ll probably do all that on the 29th or 30th. If I go on the 29th I can see Singapore a little bit. The other news is that I found a hostel in Singapore that will hold my extra luggage for free. So now I don’t have to FedEx it back (big savings!), but I probably should use their hostel for more than a night, though they said I don’t have to.

Next topic: I’ve heard from a couple people that I sound negative on some of my blogs, and reading over some old ones, yeah I can see that. The reason for that is that the blog is my opportunity to vent a little bit, and besides, boring everyday life is not something people really want to read about; granted what I call boring and normal now is probably not so normal in the US. So I guess just know that I really do enjoy it here, but (and I’m paraphrasing this from Katie, she wrote it too well not to) I’m not a skilled enough writer to incorporate all the amazing and fun experiences I have with the day to day challenges and headaches; instead I just list them all in a big group.

NEXT! Coming back from Makassar on Monday night I realized I hadn’t properly described the road between Makassar and ParePare. I may have mentioned that the road was a little broken, but that doesn’t begin to do it justice, and this road plays a big part in my life here as any time I try to escape I have to navigate it. First you need to realize that this is THE road coming north from Makassar; there may be another road on the east coast of our peninsula, but by all accounts it’s even worse. To put it in a little perspective, this road has the importance of say I-5 running from Portland to Eugene.
To be fair, the main reason the road is so bad is that they are attempting to expand it from a normal Indo road to a 4 lane high way; I say attempting for a reason. Right now the drive from ParePare to Mak, which is less than 100 miles, takes a minimum of 4 hours, and those are not pleasant hours. Driving is really just a free for all. All of the drivers just guess which the best way to go is. They have to chose because there are multiple levels, a couple different lanes, and the fact that you of course don’t have any real traffic laws (want to drive down the wrong lane? Go for it!). It’s basically some twisted, perverted, crazy video game. The multiple levels come from the fact that they’re building the new road in about 100ft segments at a time and the new parts are raised about 1ft above the old road. The result is that you end up ramping (gravel, dirt, etc. meaning lots of potholes and not level at all) onto and off of the new segments. So you end up hauling ass on a nice new chunk of road as far as you can, slamming on the breaks so that you can turn of and tumble down the ramp to the old broken/potholed road. It’s an experience to say the least! Oh yeah gotta add that most of the time your stuffed in a SUV that has had an extra row of seats added so that there are routinely 11 people, and as many as 20, jammed in a car with all their bags and such.
One other thing that adds to the experience, and what I don’t understand, is the number of food stands along the road. In particular, there is this stretch of fruit stands selling a citrus fruit that is basically a big, sweeter grapefruit. I’ve gone down to Makassar a lot of times, and not ONCE have I seen someone stop there to buy these things, yet there are over 100 hundred stands each jam packed with nearly a hundred fruits a piece. I just don’t get it! The other entertainment to watch on the way down is the people just sitting along the side of road staring at nothing for (presumably) hours on end. As you can tell, I find this road terribly interesting (yes that is sarcasm dripping out of your computer screen).

Ok that’s enough for now. Hopefully I’ll get another one up before I head to Bali next weekend (22nd to 25th).