Singing in the Rain?

Here's a little collection of events across about a week's time - a week containing some pouring rains in the dry season, as well as karaoke session.


Shopping in Surabaya

After my acrobatics on the Balekambang beach, I needed to replace my camera. So I headed up to Surabaya in early October with Chris and John. My lovely student Rovien had helpfully provided the address of a couple of good camera shops and I was able to get exactly what I wanted at a good price: an updated version of my previous Sony camera which uses the same memory card and batteries. John bought a tripod and we wandered around town for a while - always interesting, and you can see a few photos here.

Pestilence, or at least bacterial illness
We ended up eating in the food court of the ITC mall. I got some delicious squid and broccoli at a Chinese place there. Although it tasted great, I was quite ill that night and the following day with classic food poisoning symptoms. (I won't go into the unpleasant details here. You're welcome.)

Fortunately, this time I knew about the magic of activated charcoal tablets and took them right away. It helped a lot and I was pretty well recovered within a day, although still a bit rumbly in the tummy for another few days.

I've resolved to be much more cautious about eating in mall food courts!


Singing A Sad Song
Some of the staff and teachers went for Karaoke together to wish goodbye and good luck to one of our staff members who left. Karaoke is always fun. In Indonesia, we get a private room for our groups, two microphones, and the ability to pass around the mouse and line up our own songs on the computer.

They've got songs in Indonesian and English, and they will bring refreshments to the room if you want.


Floods
That week, we had a couple days of heavy rain and our drainage system in Sidoarjo overloaded. Many streets were flooded. I went for a walk on Friday morning while it was still drizzling and discovered that it was really more of a wade. On Saturday morning, my housemate Bill and I went back out to observe and photograph. The waters had gone down a little but not much, and it was a great opportunity to try out my new camera.

We'd been told there was no beach in Sidoarjo but perhaps actually the tide was just out because this seemed quite a waterfront experience - Ha!

Happy Halloween to all who are reading this! I'm struggling to catch up with blogging my activities but I should soon be posting a few photos from my school's Halloween celebration, as well as sharing some more trips.