A home stay.

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We left Sidney and flew to Singapore (7 hrs and 30 min) and from Singapore to Jakarta (1 hr 30 min) and had to spend the night in Jakarta (at the best hotel we've stayed in so far! US $50 for probably a 4 star hotel!) before we got on our flight to Pekanbaru early the next morning. The flight was so strange, there were only 3 women total on the whole flight of over 100 people I suppose! My uncle Bruce, dad's brother, was waiting at the airport to meet us in Pekanbaru (Sumatra). He had a car to take us from the airport into town and we did some shopping, he had to get some Christmas presents while in town as he lives in a Chevron camp out in the boonies of Sumatra where shopping is limited. After wandering the extremely hot and humid streets we went into the big air conditioned mall right as it opened. Complete with a KFC and a CFC (California Fried Chicken!) After some more shopping we went to another Chevron camp, Rumbai to catch our 3 hour bus to Duri, where my uncle lives. We were warned that the bus ride was kinda sketchy and the rule was to not look out the windshield because it was too scary. It wasn't that the roads were too poorly kept, but that they were super narrow and these huge logging trucks came through accompanied by hundreds of motorbikes and many small trucks that the bus driver frequently passed, it was scary. After about the first hour, we saw a logging truck that was completely tipped over on its side and all the logs spilled out to the side of the road! After about 2 and a half hours we were rear ended by a small truck! We barely felt it on our huge bus, but the truck's windshield was completely gone and the front all smashed in. He was following too close. This created much hullabaloo and delayed us another hour at least. We had to drive up to the police station and wait there for another bus from camp to pick us up! It was nuts. Of course a great experience none the less! Duri camp is really like a large town of about 6,000 people, but only about 5% of that are ex-pats. The neighborhoods look like any in American suburbia and all the ex-pats we met were really friendly and sweet, it was like being back in the US in a way. Our first night we tired out early from all the traveling and jet lag so I passed on the invitation to the Christmas ornament exchange party and we caught up with my uncle Bruce and his wife Deborah, and the kids Erica (13) and Carina (11).

Much of our second day there (and all of our time there) we relaxed and enjoyed the creature comforts of being in a home. Cushy couch, cold drinks, snacks, INTERNET!, and we didn't even leave the house until Bruce came home and showed us how he buys vegetables out of a van. (Mind you its really hot and humid out, and there are lots of mosquitoes)

On Friday night the girls were in a school play that I was really impressed with. All of the kids in the school participated in the holiday theme play. One of my favorites was the preschoolers dancing around like snowflakes. Erica played the guitar in the rock band which I was also really impressed with! (its like these kids have nothing to do but practice!! oh wait...) Carina had a part in the play as one of the reporters and had to dress up a little bit like the Singapore airlines flight attendant, but did a great job with her role. After the play we went to a fun wine tasting party hosted by the camp's doctor. Who coincidentally also has two clouded leopards in a cage in his yard. Someone from a nearby village was going through the camp trying to sell them as tiger cubs, and he bought them to save them from the illegal pet trade. He's now trying to find a place for them, like a zoo or animal sanctuary, but is having little luck. We got to see them at the party, and they really are incredible animals, beautiful. The party was fun, we met a lot of different people from the camp, everyone was asking us why we had come all the way out there, it was funny.

On Saturday I wasn't feeling well so we took it easy and went for a short walk in the bird and butterfly park (which had only a couple butterflies and we saw no birds) and in the afternoon Bruce and Deborah took us out furniture shopping in the nearby village. It was really neat to see all the great wooden furniture and wood carved decor. That night Deborah was hosting a party for a team of people she works with, of which were a bunch of people visiting from the states. It was a fun beer and pizza type of event with lots of drinking and chatting, the best was when Bruce made Lt. Blenders Margarita in a Bag, and then kept re-mixing interesting margarita-like concoctions in the same bag. We met some real interesting Chevron guys, one who had gotten his geology degree from CLU a few years before my dad was there, but funny none the less. We also met a fellow gaucho who'd gone to UCSB in the 70s. Aaron bonded with a Texan who's accent sounded like he was right out of a movie (what's that guy's name in anchor man who wears the cowboy hat?) It was a fun night.

Too bad we had to get up super early on Sunday morning, after such a late night, to participate in the annual rice delivery to the local village churches. The rice delivery was very well organized and there were 3 or 4 different trucks full of big bags of rice going to different villages. Our truck was sagging under the weight of all the rice until we had handed out enough of it to ease the load. Each church we went to was down a dusty one lane road, made of often crumbling concrete, but beautiful and rustic in its own way. One of the churches was completely filled with kids and many of them had groups of kids out front holding old bibles. Almost every time we stopped it attracted a small crowd while we unloaded the 15 bags of rice at each church. It always seemed like not enough. It was seriously hot out that morning and every time we had to get out of the car we squinted into the sun and wiped the sweat off our foreheads. Luckily we were giving a ride to one of Bruce and Deborah's friends who was an ex-flight attendant and gave us frozen towels a little over half way through the trip, what a savior! We gave candy to a lot of the kids and their big smiles were all the thanks we could have wanted. It was a really great experience and we really got to see how people out in the village lived.

The rest of the day we napped and went to yet another party where the cookies were spectacular. Half way through the party Bruce left for a mountain bike ride which ended in a weekly gathering called the beer garden. By the time that came around we were back at the house making Christmas ornaments out of sculpy and I decided to stay there with Carina instead of going to yet another party, its really all about family anyways! We had a relaxing rest of the evening and took it easy on Monday while everyone was at school and work.

Monday evening was one of the definite highlights of our stay, we ran the Hash. For those of you who don't know, there is an organization called the Hash House Harriers which originated in Kuala Lumpur when a bunch of British ex-pats working there decided to combine their drinking with silliness and exercise in a weekly gathering. Here is how it went down for us, when we got there we were told that anyone who runs 3 hashes gets a hash name, Bruce's is Strapadicktome (he is a Bilodeau) and some of the other funny ones were ChemicalErection, Jaws, and there was one that was something about kinky. On the hash you are only allowed to use the hash names or you might be punished at the end of the run. We all got onto a bus that took us deep into the village nearby and dropped us off on a dirt road in front of some dilapidated huts. There we all had to find the trail which is marked with shredded paper, if you are looking for it you call out "checking", and when you find it you call out "on paper!" or "on-on" its not always easy to find the paper, as it rains there everyday, and there is a lot of trash as well. So we run along the road until there is a turn and everyone splits up looking for the paper, a few times there will be "falsies" and you have gone down a path that ends in nothing or ends in a "check back" which you turn in at the end of the run and get to drink beers. So the whole thing is hilarious, imagine, a bunch of people in running clothes, about half of them white, all running through a little village yelling out these strange things and calling each other ridiculous names. We defiantly got many strange looks as we ran. By the end when you say "on-bus" when you see the bus and when you get there you break open the cooler and have a drink. The bus ride back to the hash house was entertaining due to my uncle singing a completely outrageous song that is too crass for me to even say what it was about. I think it might have been an old rugby song. When we got back to the hash house there was a long ceremony in which there was a lot of chugging drinks and accusing each other of different things, and ended with one of the guys being nominated to sit in a bucket of ice water. It was all quite silly, but seriously fun, and Aaron and I have decided to join one if there is one in Austin, and if not, we'll start one!
Tuesday was another day of relaxing at the house and I'd spent a lot of time playing that game with little marbles where you remove the center one and try to eliminate all the rest by jumping them, like checkers, until you have only one left. It seemed impossible and Aaron had gotten so frustrated with it he looked up the solution on the internet while I dutifully kept trying. He claims to have spent hours and hours of trying to solve it when he was younger, adding to his frustration. On Tuesday afternoon I finally figured it out and won! It was a moment of true happiness, I'd finally been released from the game and it was also great cause Aaron had given up without ever solving it, maybe I'm the genius here! That evening the girls played in their last softball game of the season and it ended up being real close at the end, making it exciting, and also fun cause Bruce was the first base umpire and defiantly made some tough calls, getting him much grumbling from the crowd. We had a real "American" time with beer and hot dogs to top off the softball game. That night in the middle of the night it rained so hard and thundered so loud that none of us got much sleep and their porch flooded!

Wednesday morning (Dec. 13th) we left their house even though we could have stayed there for days (maybe weeks) longer. Being there was like a vacation from our vacation, and it was awesome to have family time. We left to go to Kuala Lumpur on what was a long day of interesting and new travel.

Keep checking back, I'll add photos soon!

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Photos

bus crash
didn't look so good for the guy behind us!

the hoilday play
my cousins are way up in the back, but you get the point

me and erica
the guitarist in the rock band!!!

me and carina
I helped with hair and make-up

margarita in a bag
that's my uncle making a new batch

rice run
that truck was almost full to the brim with bags of rice!

running the hash
ifr you could only hear us all yelling "ON PAPER!"

Comments

[Sam]

You, Carina and Erica look so pretty! (Great job on Carina's make-up!). It's awesome that you guys got to visit with them. :) The Hash thing sounds like crazy fun, too! Bruce's hash name is very much something a Bilodeau would come up with! ;P