so before i share with you the blog i intend to share i want to have a little rant. its about where i am and what i am doing. so i have been intending to post this for a week but trust my luck, i have no internet in my room so the process has been painstakingly slow. so i have decided to come and use the internet in dunkin' donuts. i am quite anti about dining in american cafes when i am in such a diverse cultural place but this place has the goods. but i must share with you my walk here. i decided to walk from work (i have started my placement by the way - will share more soon but probably in a week cos of my shitty internet) walking is a pretty normal occurrence back home, not here, the footpaths are TERRIBLE, crumbling, muddy and covered in motorbikes. and everyone thinks your a freak for walking, they all just stare, yeah probably cos I'm white but also because i am a nutter for walking. i think i almost fell over about five times. i did that nice little trip and then do a little skip to make it look purposeful. that was my rant. not sure why i needed to do that, but now i have it out of my system and i have stories to tell you.....

I often think the best times are the ones that you don’t prepare for. The most fun you will have is when you are least expecting it. Well that was certainly the case last weekend.
I had organized to go to Thousand Islands with a group of great people but after wild storms and torrential rain, a tropical island wasn’t looking very attractive so I was a pain in the behind and pulled out at the last minute. Completely unaware of what the weekend held, I went to my Bahasa Indonesian classes on Friday a little miserable. A windy, rainy beach would be better than a weekend alone in my kos. I think my down mood was noticeable because Ben piped up and mentioned there was one spare seat on the bus up to the tea plantations, score!
At last minute I rushed home, chucked some things in my bag and was on the bus with 11 others to Cianjur, a town South of Jakarta surrounded by rice fields and tea plantations.
It was a mission to get there. But four hours of winding through rollercoaster like back alleys and little farm streets landed us at our accommodation. Hmmm.… we were all a little shocked and slightly disappointed at the rooms, we were basically staying in some-ones house, surrounded by pictures of their family and their tacky bits and pieces. Looking back on it, it was actually pretty cool, but at the time we had dreamt of a hut surrounded by farmland next to a small village… little did we know what was in store.
The next day we went on our day trip to a ‘rural village’, we were all a little apprehensive as we felt like we were being lead into a tourist trap, visiting something made especially for westerners. But we were very wrong. We hiked into the village through rise fields and jungle, walking past people’s houses and seeing how the locals lived. It was beautiful. We stopped at one family’s house who cooked us the best meal I have had so far in Indonesia, they treated us like family, the sweet little old lady even asked me to stay.






i might add that i fell in love just a little bit. but i won't say anything else.

Walking home I got in touch with my natural side in bare feet and a banana leaf as an umbrella… mostly because I didn’t have any wet weather gear and my thongs were slipping all over the place. But I was ‘earthing’. Apparently ‘earthing’ gives you more energy because the toxins and vitamins in the soil are absorbed through your feet. Maybe I did have more energy… but after twenty minutes of mud between my toes I was longing for some boots, later i would be longing for my thongs because i somehow managed to lose them - you know when you see shoes on the side of the road and you wander how they got there? stupid people like me is how... anyway we were lucky to get picked up by a ute, we all assumed it was a random but later realized it was our ride all the way back… it was a wild ride through various villages. It would have been a bizarre site for the locals, a ute full of 12 white people laughing and screaming and yelling, through villages where not many foreigners go.
We stopped off at a waterfall in the middle of nowhere, it was incredible and the most intense shower I have ever had, yep, I went swimming in it. I think if I got any energy, it was probably from the swim rather than the barefoot walking.
On the ride home I was lucky to get a front seat, as much as I was enjoying the bouncing around in the rain, I was more than happy to be dry and comfortable. The ten others were not as happy and were extremely wet by the time we arrived. Exhausted, we had dinner at a bebek (duck) restaurant which to our disappointment was alcohol free so later on we stocked up at the supermarket and headed to our accommodation, this time we moved to the ‘Bamboo Hut’ which was legitimately true and quite beautiful, it was exactly what we had all envisioned. I woke up to some local women picking tea before heading back to JKT…



Oh my golly, i forgot to mention quite possibly the best bit of all. on sunday morning we were chilling in our bamboo hut sipping on some coffee and doing some bahasa indonesia homework when we got a phone call. "you have been invited to a wedding?" wha-wha-whaaaat?? yes, we had been invited to a wedding so OF COURSE, we went. and we were superstars. especially the boys. i think they could have each have had three new wives. where was my indonesian prince?? it was quite a bizarre experience but a totally unforgettable one, we felt pretty bad because we were dressed in what we had been wearing all weekend, remember we had been hiking in the rain and mud and they were all dressed in their finest. i mean who rocks up to a wedding half an hour after being invited? we do apparently. ha it was quite an experience. lucky i captured it otherwise you wouldn't believe me, would you?



Yeah it was a good weekend.