Monday, December 1, 2008

Two Pancake Day, and other stories

We stayed in Surabaya this past weekend. The girls decided to start Saturday off right with some homemade pancakes.
They were delicious. The girls then went back to sleep while I spent the next couple hours exploring the kampung, or neighborhood, near our house. I was looking for a large outdoor market, but I didn't find it. I did get quite a dose of pollution in my lungs, though. I don't think I'll do much more walking here in Surabaya.

That evening, we went to a party hosted by some new friends. The theme was to be inappropriate (for a Muslim country). Notice how two of the ladies don't have their shoulders covered. Scandalous!It was a fun event, and one of the hostesses made us more pancakes, which we consumed drunkenly at about 2 am. Any day featuring two different pancake meals is a good day. (As an aside, our roommate told us about something called Pancake Day, which they celebrate in England.)

We woke in the morning and headed to the restaurant at a nearby hotel for their all-you-can-eat Italian buffet with all-you-can-drink martini service.They had some very good Italian food, including wood-fired pizzas. I opted for a main course of squid ink risotto with grilled scallops. Rowan had the grilled sea bass on a bed of wilted spinach with garlic potatoes.

And the martinis actually were all-you-can-drink, even though they were a bit weak.The menu featured 26 flavors, one for each letter of the alphabet. I lost count of the number of martinis I had after awhile.

We then proceeded to a place for some karaoke. The karaoke isn't in a bar where you sing in front of strangers; instead, you rent out a private room with its own musical setup.
We rocked hard for a little while, went back to the original party house for some food, and called it a weekend.

***

Certain persons of a parental nature have requested some info about the teaching aspects of our lives here. While I've proclaimed some disillusionment before, the job is fun at times, depending on the particular group of students. These pictures are from one of my favorite classes, which has several older people in it, which balances perfectly with the kids.The students seem to learn best, and have more fun, when the class is interactive. Here, I am teaching the difference between adjectives and nouns (angry and anger, dangerous and danger, etc.) by laying words out on the floor. The students would then work to move the words into proper categories.Sometimes, though, the students in some classes don't listen. A lot of them actually are spoiled rich kids, and they don't behave. Today, I had an amusing situation where I was yelling at the students to stop yelling. At the time, however, I don't think anyone was amused.

But I do like teaching, and I'm starting to learn more tricks to deal with the problem kids.

***

As you may have noticed from the photo above, I got a haircut for the first time in nearly two years. I decided the career as a professional wrestler just wasn't going to work out.
So I plopped down my $4 at an Indonesian salon and got the hair chopped off.
The stylist gave me a trendy Indonesian-dude sort of haircut, which I decided within a day that I didn't like. So I had Rowan fix my hair with a tiny little pair of scissors. I am now quite happy with the results.

One of my favorite stories about the haircut takes place the day after I got it trimmed. I walked into one of my classes and started teaching. About five minutes later, one of the students raised her hand. "Are you Mr. Kevin?" she asked.

Apparently, she wasn't sure if I was the same person who had been teaching her before. And perhaps I wasn't, in some ways. I'm hoping that the loss of hair doesn't have any Samson-like consequences for me.

3 comments:

Next Flix said...

That "before" picture is AWESOME.

Kurd said...

In all honesty, I put up that photo because I thought you and my brother would get some amusement from it. Yes, it was awesome, in every sense of the word.

Anonymous said...

yeah, that hair was hard to handle. i would like to see a pic of the "trendy Indonesian-dude" hair, though