A Recap of Day 1

Brayden started his day bright and early yesterday (Wednesday) at 3:30 a.m.  Since he's sharing a room with August and me, that also means I was up early too.  Fortunately, he was content to play quietly by himself for a long while so I could sleep a bit longer.  Don't be too impressed.  After blowing through a few books, he very sweetly requested to play games on my iPhone. I was glad to hand it over to him.

We all slept well and felt really good in the morning.  Breakfast was a wonderful variety of traditional Indonesian breakfast foods (spicy fried rice with sweet sausage and cucumbers) and some more familiar western foods as well (bread, jam, cheese, and various sweet breads which I couldn't really identify but happily ate anyway!).  Although this pic isn't the sharpest, you can see her sitting to Oma's left.  (Oma is in the middle.)

After breakfast, and figuring out the showers (Praise God we're staying in a home with actually showers in the bathrooms!), we headed to a surprise birthday party for a very precious friend of Oma's. We call her Tante Lien.  (More about the very confusing system of names later!) Although the pic below isn't the sharpest, you can see her sitting to Oma's left.  (Oma is in the middle.)  Tante Lien is technically Oma's aunt but is only 3 years older.  She was like a very dear big sister to Oma in their growing up years.

There were about 40 people there along with quite a spread of Indonesian foods, some familiar but many not so familiar to us.

The same can be said of those 40 people!

Although I recognized some of the faces from our visit 18 years ago, I was completely lost on their names.  I felt badly about that until I figured out that any westerner doesn't stand a chance at figuring out the names over here.  The challenge is that each person has an indonesian name and a generational title that precedes their name.  They also have names to identify positions in the family that the english language does not identify, i.e.   And if they also have an english name, that confusion is only compounded!  Here's an example.  Oma's indonesian name is Goat (pronounced Gwot) and her english name is Marina.  Most stick with their indonesian names so I'll do the same for this example.  If you are of the same generation as her, you might call her just Goat or you might call her "Cik Goat" (pronounced cheek Gwot) meaning smaller or younger "sister".  If you're in a generation younger than her, you might call her tante or your might call her oma.  So the proper names for August and me to use when addressing these folks are not the same names our children are to use when addressing them.  You can see why my eyes spin back in my head whenever I try to figure this out. Below are some "cheat sheets" August's dad made years and years ago (maybe even on our last visit here).  Unbelievably, August still had them in his file at home and brought them along. Even with it mapped out, when I get face to face with these folks I'm lost.  I just smile and hope I don't have to address them by name!  :)

Well, it's 7:00 in the morning here.  I've been up since 5:30 working on this post (the internet is slow here) and I've only gotten through half of day one!  But we're headed out of Surabaya to some smaller outlying town for the next couple of days.  It's not likely I'll be able to blog during that time.  So you'll have to wait until our return to hear about our supermarket experience (my friend Kelly will love this) and our restaurant outing for dinner last night.  So sorry!

Please pray for us as we travel over the next couple of days.  We'll be traveling by mini-van with a hired driver and the traffic laws here seem to be more "guidelines than actual rules", as Captain Barbossa ("Pirates of the Caribbean") would say!