I'll call this miscellaneous

In fact, this post covers five different topics. The first is a little more about the black and white necklace I fashioned at the bead house recently, the second topic is Ramadan/Idul Fitri, the third is some more traffic talk, fourth is a completed knitting project and fifth --more green drinks.

First topic? The necklace. I finally took a photo.

Ramadan/Idul Fitri: B hadn't yet experienced the Ramadan/Idul Fitri effect in grocery stores. A couple of things were not available at our regular grocery store so on the weekend while we were out we stopped at a different store. B got to see for himself the piles of cookie tins, boxes, gift packages and the towers of boxes of fruit flavored syrups. Here's just one huge stack of fruit flavored sugar syrups. I mentioned in another post that these are used to flavor water, poured over fruit, puddings, etc. and are frequently used in breaking daily fast during Ramadan. When you look closely, you can see that each box had hand-cut Islamic shapes. What a colorful work of art. It looked like they drew around a stencil and then cut out the shape using perhaps the same knife used to open the boxes. I also see from a hanging sign that they were heavily advertising Barbie dolls for gift giving at Idul Fitri.

Next: the traffic!  Over the weekend, B was reading texts on his phone and so was the motorcycle/scooter driver next to the car. Please notice I did not say in the next lane, I said, next to the car. There aren't really lanes here after all. The scooter driver was really right next to the car, inches separating us. There were more scooters in front of him and scooters behind him as well. When traffic has stopped, the scooters fill every blank space around the cars.

I have another traffic story. I had an appointment one day. It took about 40 minutes to get there and that was in normal traffic. The return trip was quite different. It took 1 1/2 hours to get back to the apartment.The location is less than 6 miles from the apartment. I snapped a couple of photos. Notice that in the middle of the traffic there is a guy hawking something. These vendors sell food, snacks, water, newspapers, toys, flowers, you name it. Notice also in this first photo the line of scooters between us and the railing ahead and the supposed empty space.

In the next photo, notice how the space has completely filled with scooters in seconds. Like I said, they do not wait behind the cars in the lane but go around the cars filling all of the available space.

At one point Pak Oky took a tiny cut through to go a different way. He actually tried an unsuccessful cut through and had to backtrack a bit but then found a true cut through. In this photo you can also detect we were crossing a speed bump. I caught the beads on the rear view mirror mid swing.

Penultamately: knitting. An acquaintance is expecting so I got a bootie pattern and knitted these for the baby. By the time the baby is born mom and dad will have left here so the baby will need something warm at their new location!

A friend suggested one could knock these off in an evening of dedicated knitting. I'm either slow or not very dedicated because it took me about a week to complete the pair.

We know you are all just waiting for the latest "green drink" update and we will not disappoint you. We found a couple of new green drinks to try- a frozen green apple mojito and a green apple soda. Both were excellent.