Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

I woke up early (7 am) this Saturday morning (with a bit of a hangover), and while I was making my coffee (a complicated process that involved changing out the water tank on our water cooler, plugging the coffee grinder into the transformer, grinding the coffee, unplugging the grinder, plugging in the coffee maker, getting water from the water cooler... sigh... but I digress) when I heard some yelling and general ruckus outside in front of our apartment...

Hark... what is that clamor?

I ran over to the window to investigate, only to see the apartment guards all lined up in military formation, participating in some sort of organized calisthenics. 

This was particularly amusing to me because, while these guards generally seem nice, they don't do much guarding, per se.  Mostly a lot of sitting around, punctuated by the occasional gate-lifting. Why they need to limber up to undertake these activities is beyond me.

In any case, this was pretty funny.  For over an hour, they stood in a line while their drill sergeant barked commands at them, instructing them to do the following exercises:

1) Turn to the left!

2) Turn to the right!

3) Face forward!

4) March in place!

5) Stand at ease!

6) Do a strange, militaristic, Indonesian version of "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"!

Toes and...

Knees and...

Hips and...

Shoulders and...

Head!

Priceless.

You may also notice that the second guard from the right is wearing a t-shirt with a giant anarchy symbol on it.  Hmmm.

Neighborhood Bike Tour

Ben just posted this cool video on Facebook that he took while tooling around on his bike in our neighborhood on the weekend (you can tell it's the weekend because there is no traffic).  He used his headcam- the same one he used for all of his great SCUBA diving videos.

Things to keep an eye out for in the video, in order of appearance:

1) Ben leaving our apartment building
2) Stray cats everywhere
3) Roadside food vendors everywhere
4) Push cart vendors
5) Motorbikes carrying 3+ people
6) The park where we attended some contentious soccer games (imagine that tiled area chock full of red-clad soccer fans)
7) One of the old-school, black-smoke-spewing buses that are everywhere in Jakarta
8) An overpass/pedestrian "flyover" (rickety metal walkways where you dodge fried tofu and sunglasses vendors)
9) the random empty field/shantytown by our house
10) Several three-wheeled, orange bajaj lined up on the street side (essentially lawnmower engines with an uncomfortable metal box on top)
11) One on the infamous open sewers to the right of the road
12) Our neighborhood plant store
13) The return to our apartment building (tolong belok ke kiri di sini!)

New Digs

As I said over at my other blog, Tim and I just moved into our new, more permanent digs here in Jakarta.  It's a nice apartment near some good restaurants, and Tim's company stores one of their cars in the garage, so Tim is able to grab a ride to work and back each day, which is highly convenient.

We still don't have most of our stuff yet, but there is a little bit of furniture in the apartment already.  None of our cooking gear has arrived yet, but we did purchase a grill for our back balcony this weekend, so we plan to do a lot of grilling over the next few weeks.  We're busy dealing with all of the little things... getting internet set up, buying all the essentials, finding some cool local-style furniture (daybed made out of an old Javanese carving, perhaps?).

Tim, building our grill in our new, empty living room.

Hazy view of some skyscrapers from our back balcony.

Durian tree in the yard next to us!  Hard to see in the photo, but if you look closely you can see the big old spiky things hanging down.