A Closer Look...

We are in our new town!  Woohoo!  What’s next?  Find a house!  What does that mean?  Well, believe it or not, we actually used Century 21 that just opened a branch here!  We looked at a few options with the agent.  Mostly, however, we just drove around neighborhoods looking for houses that looked empty!  Sometimes there is a “for rent” sign but not always.  Sometimes there is a number on the “for rent” sign, but not always.  Sometimes you just knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if the empty looking house is for rent.  Our first and second day we looked at or looked in about 25-30 houses!  No joke!  Most were too big, too small, wrong location, run down, water damaged etc.  But we did find some possibilities.  We are in the middle of negotiating with the landlord of a potential house (one of those that had no sign, just looked empty).  We had to wait a few days to let him check on some renovations.  What do you do while you wait?  Well, thankfully we have some friends already living here.  Yesterday we went to the zoo, the mall, and ended the day with Pizza Hut delivery.  That sounds like a normal summer day in America, right?  Well, read the “closer look” and see if you still agree!

A Closer Look

We went to the zoo!   Can you call it that?  It was a park in a pretty forest.  One part was a zoo, one was carnival type rides, there were picnic areas around, and a pond with paddle boats.  As for the zoo, I am not sure who came to see who.  Us foreigners looked at the animals and the national people looked at us (and took lots of pictures of us)!  The animals in the zoo were crocodiles (with a rickety “baby gate” to keep the onlookers protected!), sun bears, a cassowarie (did you know it can kill it’s prey with one kick of it’s foot?), a bored looking oranghutan (did you know that is an Indonesian word meaning “man of the forest?), some other monkeys including gibbons, eagles and hawks and a vulture, pigeons (who were being visited by identical wild pigeons who tried to get their attention from outside the cage!), a chicken (but perhaps he was just waiting to be fed to Mr. Crocodile), a snake, hamsters (in a zoo?),  guinea pigs, 3 cous cous (not to be confused with the Moroccan food) and some other birds.  The “zoo keeper” was this guy who smoked (puffing smoke into the animal cages, great) and kept agitating the animals to get them to “perform” for us.  So we had to keep moving to the next cage so that he’d leave the poor animals alone.   After being photographed more than the animals themselves (at one point, the troup master of a large group of girl scouts had to call them off with his megaphone to get them to quit posing for pictures with some from our group), we left and went to the mall. 

The kids had KFC but the adults opted for Japanese Fastfood across the hall.  I gave Aaron money to get them something to eat (come to think of it, I haven’t gotten my change back from him...).  Then one of the moms took all the kids back to their house while 4 of us ladies went to the grocery store.  We went to the seafood section and decided those animals had better living conditions than the zoo animals, even if their life span was shorter!  There was a huge aquarium of long, icky squirmy balut (eels, a delicacy here), there were other aquariums of live fish.  There was a bin full of huge crabs.  What would you do if you saw a bin of huge crabs in your grocery store?  Well, you’d probably do exactly what we did!  Whip out your camera and take pictures of yourselves holding them up by the strings that held their claws shut, of course!  We named that section of the store the petting zoo.  It was much more pleasant than the real one!  

Back at the house where the kids were, Joel found two hammocks that, when not hung, look like long nylon ropes.  They have hoops on each end.  And there was a second level in the house that had railing at the top.  Well, what do you do when you have a rope with a hoop on the end and a second-level rail?  Well, hang the rope down and swing on it of course.  And since there are two of them, why not have two rope swings?  Joel’s not the only one who thought it was a good idea.  By the end of the evening, most of us had tried it out .

Now for the pizza.  Pizza Hut delivers!  Our friend ordered 6 large cheese pizzas with pepperoni.  As a side note:  Pizza Hut does not have “Pepperoni Pizza,” but you can order “Cheese Pizza” and ask for pepperoni as an addition.  Same thing you say?  Well, if you ask for Pepperoni pizza they will tell you they don’t have it.  So don’t forget to just order cheese pizza and ask for pepperoni as an addition.  The lady even repeated this order to make sure she had it right.  But apparently she did not write it down and she forgot what the order was when she told the cook.  So half an hour later we got 6 large “potato and pepperoni” pizzas.  And for the pizza sauce on the “potato (large chunks) and pepperoni” pizza...generous amounts of Thousand Island dressing.  It was more like potato salad on a pizza crust.  I don’t even like Thousand Island dressing on salad.  Let’s just say the pizza was NOT a hit!  When we bowed to pray, the guy who was praying had trouble finding the right words to say to thank the Lord for 6 disgusting pizzas!!  But as he prayed, a friend of theirs showed up at the door with Indonesian food that she had cooked and brought over!  We’re saved!  Actually, we did eat some of the pizza.  It was stuffed crust, so at least the crust was yummy J

And that was our day!  But I didn’t even mention the crazy parking attendant, the roach that crawled under one ladies’ long dress (and the cat that followed the roach and caught it) or the fish spa at the mall.