Aku punya teman-teman! (I have friends!)

As promised, I have some wedding photos for you. Last weekend, I went to the wedding of one of the other lecturers in the English department, Fitri. If you recall my experience of ending up on the university campus at the wrong day on my first visit to Solo...well, he was the one who came to pick me up and basically saved the day. He got married in a nearby village, so I went to the wedding with my host mom and host brother. I don't have traditional Javanese clothing, so I had to adapt my Balinese traditional clothing to look appropriate. I could still wear one of my sarongs and the pink kebaya (shirt) that I got in Bali. but the neckline on it is a little too showy for a Muslim wedding, so I borrowed a shawl from my host mom to wrap around myself. We only went to what I would think of as the reception, which basically involved eating and taking pictures and listening to speeches about the couple or passages from the Qur'an. Congrats to the newlyweds!

Me, Bu Endang (host mom), Groom, Bride, UMS lecturer, and Achev (host brother)

The bride and groom getting some pictures taken with family

Ok, so now to the real story-- I have friends! How did it happen, you ask? Well, last Monday I was walking to the intersection near campus to catch a bus home. A girl on a motorbike pulled up next to me and said "Miss, mau bonceng saya??" ("Can I give you a ride?). If that had happened to me in the U.S., or here under different circumstances, my first answer would most likely be HELL NO. Isn't one of our most important childhood lessons not to take rides from strangers? Well, I did and in this case it worked out well. She took me home that afternoon (oh, also she definitely thought I was also student there and we both had a laugh attack when she found out I am actually a lecturer) and we exchanged phone numbers. The next day, she asked if I wanted to come to her boarding house and meet her friends. And I've been going back almost every day since then...

It's not that I didn't have ANY friends before. I have been invited places by some of my students and have started to make some friends with upper-level English students (one of them brought me mangoes from her village this week!!). But, these are the first friends that I can just hang out with and that I feel like I can easily be myself around. I don't have to specifically invite them somewhere or come up with ideas of what to do. We can just sit together and laugh and have a good time. Also, I speak Indonesian with them, so that's a plus because it will force me to practice all the time. Everyone at the boarding house has been so nice and amazingly helpful to me. Every time I'm there, they all try to convince me to just spend the night, and they're always offering me snacks or a drink. It's a relief to feel that I am starting to fit in here and that I can possibly have some great and meaningful friendships.

I don't have any pictures of Dian, my motorbike friend yet, but today I hung out with her best friend Utri. She picked me up and took me to a nearby lake in a village full of rice fields. It was beautiful-- there were people fishing there, and lots of people who had just come to enjoy the scenery like us.

Eating some food at a warung nearby the lake:

Here I am near the rice fields:

Utri and Me:

Later we went to the mall together and she helped me go shopping for some cute clothes. I know she will be a good friend because she gave me very honest opinions about each item I was considering. She also couldn't believe that no shoe stores there carried my size, so we went on a quest for size 41 shoes. We actually did find a store that had a few shoes in my size, but they were all, in the words of Utri, "jelek" (ugly). Also, I know I need to take pictures of my new clothes but I'm feeling too lazy today. So I will just give y'all something to look forward to next time.

On Saturday night, I had a good time going with two of my students to see wayang orang-- traditional javanese theater. The costumes and dancing were all so interesting, but the story was a little difficult to get. You see, all of the talking is done in Javanese, which I cannot understand at all. They actually had an explanation of the story in Indonesian projected onto a screen during the performance, but unfortunately most of the vocabulary concerning war and mythical characters was lost on me. So after about two hours of it, all I could concentrate on was going to sleep. By the time it was over at 10 PM, I was so hungry but felt bad asking my students to take me to get food. So I came up with a solution: I invited them to a late dinner, my treat. Most places were already closed down, but we found a nasi liwet seller that was still open. Nasi liwet is a delicious traditional Solonese food that basically just involves some coconut rice, chicken, tofu, tempe, and egg. Just add some sambal and it's good to go! It was nice to pay only about $2 for 3 nasi liwet and 3 iced teas. I didn't even get home until 11, which is basically the equivalent of getting home at 2 or 3 AM in the states--definitely the latest I've stayed out so far in Solo.

The main character in the wayang orang that we saw (photo taken by one of my students):

Right now I'm looking for another good book to read. I just finished Little Bee by Chris Cleave and thought it was really well written.

I was sad that no one guessed what kind of infestation my bathroom was plagued with. Check out the picture from last time-- it's actually mosquito larvae. I was wondering what all these disgusting worms were doing in my bathwater. I finally asked my host mom what they were, and she told me that they're not worms, but mosquito larvae. Now I'm really careful about emptying and cleaning out the tub/water container in my bathroom every day so I'm not bathing in infested water. So far so good.