Out and About and 'Tis the Season

Here's a shot of what I look at while waiting in front of our apartment building- at least on nice weather days. They seem to clean this thing completely every weekend. The bottom is filled with rocks and they take all of them out, clean them and then put them back. Big job.

We are in rainy season so we have a very nice selection of dark and stormy looking clouds on almost a daily basis. I love pretty clouds no matter what they bring with them.

During a particularly heavy rain, the street beneath our dining room window flooded.  I don't recall that happening before. Perhaps the roadway in that spot is sinking?

On one of B's recent trips to the plant site, several roads were flooded. His vehicle was re-routed. A team member took this photo as his car was being re-routed.

Shoes outside the apartment door, not ours but our neighbors. Typically Asian phenomenon. Off go the shoes!

Sometimes the car time is boring so I take pictures of traffic.

This situation is a pain. There are some new buildings going up pretty close to where we live. They are now installing electric cables and wastewater lines along Jl. Senopati. Every few yards they have holes in the road with little barriers. I haven't counted how many of these work holes there are but it is a mess.  They are removing the soil ( and they put it all in white plastic bags for safekeeping. Between the hole, the barrier and the sacks of soil this creates a HUGE bottleneck on the road.  It is a road I must travel when coming back to the apartment so I deal with this on a daily basis. This particular work site isn't into the road very far. Most of them interrupt an entire lane.

As I wrote this,  it was 40C (106 F) but let's talk about Christmas decorations!. Here are some shots from around town during Christmas 2016.

The atrium display at the mall near us has a StarWars themed tree due to the new movie. When I first looked at this I thought the tree was filled with gifts wrapped in white with white bows. B said I should take another look. Oops! They are StarWars spaceships.

 In this shot you can also see the red and green light sabers.

 At a different location, a winter wonderland theme was obvious.

 While taking these pictures, we noticed a couple we know sitting on Santa's lap! B shot a photo and texted it to them with the caption, "Busted!"  Here is an Indonesian band singing Christmas carols.

Here is a serious pet peeve of mine. This display included polar bears and penguins. Enough said!

At another spot with the same winter wonderland type theme, they repeated the same mistake.

 Polar bears and penguins together.

A friend sings with a local choir. They had a performance of holiday tunes and show tunes before the end of the year. Quite a few of my friends decided to attend the performance along with husbands in tow. Following the concert, 3 couples went to dinner! A very nice evening.

Company Family Days

You might remember the company family weekend that was held in the fall of 2014. There were only 21 employees with a total of ~70 family members. Roughly 2 years later, the number of employees has reached  85 and with families, the total number of people is about 352.B note: 148 attended. 


The first family weekend was appropriately labeled "satu" meaning one. This was "dua" meaning two. Easy, right? I'm not quite sure I see the connection but the theme of the weekend involved pirates along with the following tags: develop, unity, achievement (DUA).This was the backdrop for photos of the event if you chose to do it.

To reach the hotel, we drive through Cilegon. In the first photo you might notice rain on the windshield. 

By the time we reached the hotel it was no longer raining and there was a fabulous breeze. It was almost chilly (for here (B says it was 30C (86F))). Once there, the employees had a meeting so I had some time to shoot some video and stills of the ocean. It was so interesting. Very strong waves. I can still feel the breeze. Aaaahhhhh! And off in the distance you can see the island of Sangiang and then further away you can see the southern tip of Sumatra.

For those of you viewing this on a desktop or laptop, here is some video of the ocean.

After the employee meeting and snacks, the employees had a long team building session. The spouses             ( which were predominantly wives) had a craft and cooking session and there was a kids program for children. I know there were a few spouses of the male persuasion but I don't know where they went if they were at the hotel. It's possible the male spouses arrived in the evening.
In my group of ladies there were a few who spoke some English (and they were very helpful) but it was a decoupage project so it was pretty easy to follow along. I know words like "tipis" means thin (as in apply the glue thin) and varnish is nearly the same word in both languages as is decoupage. So, for my project I selected the smallest thing I could to make the project easier. We had a choice of paper dinner napkins for the picture. Most of the ladies chose a larger wooden piece and really went to town with pictures and even painting on more decoration.

As it turns out, I won a prize for technique. In the words of the teacher, because I focused on a smaller project I could concentrate on technique and she was impressed by my technique. There were 3 prizes. Each prize was a bamboo grass woven handbag. The kicker? Once we won the bags, we had to decorate them as well using decoupage. Here's my bag.

While the three "winners" decorated their prize the rest of the ladies enjoyed a cooking class. I don't remember what they learned how to make but it smelled good.


These instruments are called angklung. 

The angklung is a bamboo instrument native to West Java. There are bamboo tubes and a bamboo frame. Each tube is carved to create a single tone when being vibrated. I wrote about the angklung a long time ago when we were fortunate enough to catch a performance of an angklung group. (B note: there are 7 different notes. You know, do, re, mi, fa...)

After the crafty session and kids play time, the ladies and the children all had lessons in how to play the angklung. In the evening the group gave a performance. 

B got some video. If you can see the video ( on a desktop or laptop) it is worth watching a few times. Once to listen to the music. A second time to enjoy some of the children who shook the angklung the whole way through the song. Watch it a third time to keep an eye on the hands of this master conductor. Each note has a specific hand signal. While this piece was played slowly, later on he sped up the tempo. 

Much later in the evening, everyone was invited to learn how to play the instrument. At that point sometimes my note barely rattled once he was going to fast!
Another portion of the evening was dedicated to tube dancing. I don't know what else to call it. Couples were encased in a cloth "tube." The object was to dance inside the tube and when the music stopped, the couple had to fully cover their heads inside the fabric tube. It was pretty funny to watch. The volunteers were very good sports.

Pretty sunset that evening.

The hotel has been renovating and as part of the renovations they've redone the pool area. Night shot.

In this shot you can see why it is now an infinity pool. If you stand in the right spot it appears to blend into the ocean. Looks pretty nice! The outdoor gazebo is new as well. They've also redone the restaurant.

This pool photo was taken the next morning and as you can see the seas are much more calm. In exchange for the cool breezes, we got still, hot air!

After breakfast, the entire assembly was divided into smaller groups and we got a bus tour of the plant site under construction. I have no pictures. Photos were not allowed except in a couple of spots and the photos wouldn't have shown much. Let's just say they are definitely moving forward! The place is no longer just an empty plot of land.

After the tour and lunch we headed back to town. The trip out to the hotel on Friday morning took about 2 hours. The trip back to town took 3.5 hours. We had some great storm clouds to look at on the way home.

I'm including a couple of map shots so you can understand the location of the hotel, the plant site, etc. The red marker is the plant site. The hotel is located near the lower left corner of this image: the Hotel Mambruk Anyer. It's a 20-30 minute trip ( at a good time, on a good day) between the two locations.

You might find this image interesting as well. The red marker is the plant site. The hotel is just south of the plant site along the western coastline. Please take note of the name of the island off to the west: Krakatau! You might have heard of it.

Thanksgiving Day

Catching up on posting this:
My group of crafty ladies decided to celebrate American Thanksgiving on November 24. There are only a few Americans in my group so most of the group had never experienced an American Thanksgiving. One of our newer members from the US wanted to host the event. Everyone brought something. We had 2 turkeys but also dishes from Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Denmark, Brazil, The Netherlands, and Iran. I'm sure I'm forgetting a country or two. We had too many desserts: Red velvet cheesecake cake ( layer of cheesecake and layers of red velvet cake enrobed in a white chocolate ganache, pumpkin pie, pumpkin roll, a nut bread, chocolate mousse cake. I won't even begin to list the side dishes.

Our hostess set a lovely table (or rather 2 tables) as there were 16 of us at the lunch.

 Just a portion of the food

Folks at work were asking B what we were doing for Thanksgiving. He said I was having a fabulous meal and that he was probably having instant Mie noodles. Note: I brought him an array of leftovers for a nice meal as well. I even brought some dessert for him.

We got started on our celebrating at 9 am. Everyone delivered their items to the kitchen and then quite a few of us had a workshop in knitting socks "toe-up." Most of the ladies that knit had always knitted them top-down. After seeing several of us knitting "toe-up", Danielle was kind enough to teach a class. I have knitted a bunch of socks this way but there are always issues so a refresher was in order.

So much concentration...

 And helping others...

 I helped some of the ladies with the cast on. I have that solidly nailed down.

Sock update: Several of the ladies have finished 2 socks already! Mine are about a third completed.

There was a lot of eating and a lot of posing for photographs. Actually it was a 5-hour photoFEST. Here's the entire group after lunch!

This Thanksgiving celebration was also a chance for all of us to formally say goodbye to 3 of our members who are moving on: L TO R Joy, Penny and Stephanie. As has become tradition when members of long standing depart, we have all come together to create paper-pieced tiny squares which are then put into a pattern around a center embroidered piece by one of our members. The mini-quilts are then framed. Each one really gets personalized. You can see the one on the left is more pastels for example. We had to do these in a rush and after first call I actually made 10 of the squares. There are 2-3 in each of these and the rest went into the "extras" with blocks that arrived too late. We have a start on the next mini-quilt already. No one else is leaving that we know of in the near future.

One of these ladies left last weekend, one next weekend and the third will depart right after the first of the year. I will miss then all tremendously. Terrific ladies.

 There was a lot of fun and laughter on that day (check out the turkey hat!)

There was a lot of horsing around...

But there was also a lot of this...

 And a lot of this...