A date, 2 missed photo ops and an adventure!

Josh took me on a date tonight. We went for dinner and then headed home for a movie. On the way home I saw two things I would have loved to have gotten photos of:

First: our rainy season seems to have taken a hiatus and we’re back to dry season again – dry enough to burn. We actually have ash bits floating in the air. As we were driving by the mosque on the way to the restaurant, Josh suddenly said, “It’s like Christmas!” Sure enough, the mosque, which was decorated for Ramadan with what we call Christmas lights, combined with the falling ash flakes illuminated in our headlights, looked like a light snow falling in winter! Go figure! It was probably 80 degrees out!

Second: Since we’ve been having all these problems with power outages, I guess there are problems for the small stores that are everywhere – as they can’t afford a generator to run power for them. Tonight as we were driving past the banana stand (cause we needed to buy some- but it was closed) I actually saw a small store with a girl behind the counter and a guy at the counter shopping with a flash light!!

Then there was another adventure on this date: The boys needed jump ropes for gym class later this week so we stopped at a sporting goods store (which also sells musical instruments including tambourines! Can you see the connection there??). Back at the car, Josh went to my door and was unlocking it for me when the keys slipped out of his hands. Unfortunately, he’d parked over a (ok, this is hard to explain but bear with me) ditch type trench with was part of the parking lot with a cover made of approx 2” wide bars of metal with at least an inch space between them. We were parked at least 6 feet from the edge. The keys easily slipped through the bars into water/mud/who-knows-what-sludge in the ditch below. Some guys who “help with the parking” (for money of course) were sitting around in the parking lot and saw what happened. They gathered around (which worried me a bit because frankly we can’t be mistaken for local people and since we have a vehicle, though old, it’s still better than what they’ve got - not that we had the keys or anything) and we talked about our dilemma. Josh had called our house helper to ask him to come bring the spare set of keys, but we still had to wait till he got there. Suddenly I had the idea that maybe these guys had fished keys out of there before and maybe they’d do it for us if we offered a reward. I whispered the idea to Josh, Josh offered the reward (Rp 50,000) and in a split second one of the 3 guys was taking off his shoes, socks, rolling up their pant legs and with a tiny flashlight, went down into the trench, UNDERNEATH the bridge-type thing, found and returned the keys. Unbelievable! (I think the other two guys were wishing they’d acted more quickly because the offer was quite generous!) We quickly paid the reward money and got out of there!

Life is never boring here!