Swimming with sun

Outrageous and totally suited to life here. What am I talking about? Savage Beach, a totally over the top movie with ninja's, big breasted women in bikinis with guns, Muscled up male actors, rubbish acting, superbly silly explosions and immediate forgetful dialogue. Still its making me chuckle.

Ah life on an island, wasn't that a book or something? anyway in other parts of the world, life on island would be somewhat different. Lets think Whicker Man and the like.

Being a rather personable person and I am still smiling warmly over that, thank you Simon I am compelled to write more about whats been going on.
Wow its hot, I need to get that one out, It is getting hotter and hotter with no break in the weather in sight. Sweating while swimming is always a weird feeling.

I have taken up swimming again and there is the word gym on the horizon, something I need to get back into as I have not been for 4 months. There is a need for mental stimulus and a physical need to burn some fat and some energy so sleeping will be easier and I wont feel as big. So I have been waking up and staggering into the swimming pool, swimming lengths for about 30 mins and then drip dry back to the apartment. It has felt fantastic as it allowed me to clear the head before work, feel my muscles ache and make me more tired in the evening. The trouble is, I dont know how long I can do it until boredom creeps up again. Swimming has to be the loneliest of activities. Luckily last week there was a man doing something to the concrete tiles around the pool to keep me company of sorts.
I wont stop its too nice. To say I have my own pool and often my own empty pool is too good not to have or use on a frequent basis. It's a shame my gf does not like swimming otherwise I would go more often.

Nothing to say about work as it was its usuall rag tag bundle of adventure, shock, laughter, disbelief and absurdity so thats that. From students who cant speak English wanting lessons to get them a total score of 550 to  5 year boys calling the teachers their parents and hugging them and not letting them go. OH and 5 year olds with their own Blackberries, that is something else.

Had a few scrapes on the bike as in being hit by other bikers. Why? Well I guess it is also important to be getting to anywhere as fast as possible to then saunter around. But knocked about I have been. Still with the invisible presence of the police cracking down throughout the last month on motorists I should have been safer. Still the absence of any police checks or anything in West Jakarta demonstrates the effectiveness and usefulness of this crackdown.

Still as I like to think, the duck closest to the wheel will always die a most disturbing death.

I managed to open a bank account on my own on Friday, well with a little help from the Premiership and Liverpool losing over night. It is so useful that Indonesians lke football as that helps you get things. Mind as expected it never went well. The computers crashed and so it took even longer than it should. No surprise there.

I also have been dabbling with travel agents and more flights around the archipelago. I got very cheap flights to Bali for the GF in August so that was good (Air Asia) and then started looking around for something in June.
June is expensive thats for sure. Lion and Air Asia are too pricey. So I looked at Sri Wijaya, Mandala and Batavia for flights. How confusing are their websites. You can look up flights and get prices but cant book you have to phone, then the price is different and oh thats just too confusing for me.

Still what I did discover is that like Bali there are still places that dont need deposits for rooms before you book and so I have lined up a lovely place by the sea for June. That is all for now. The photos after will tell you all. It looks amazing.

Saturday I did one of those damm heroic things and took a day off work. Taxied it to FX and met the gf for coffee and then to a travel agents to pay for my tickets with the very confusing Sri Wijaya air. No commission from them and the place was awfully posh. Still they never took debit cards so I had to go the ATM and get piles of cash to pay them. Aduh...............

From there we went book shopping at Pasar Festival and I came away with more used and old books to read, it feels great doing that. I will set up a book club in the school with books and encourage the others to bring in their books to swap and read so there is always something extra to read. Any books for anyone would be more than welcome.

From there back to Semmangi (yes I know its a a way ) to buy some birthday cards for my parents. A bit late but I have been working and card shops dont grow on trees you know. Sat in Gloria Jeans and filled them and then off to Aphrodites for an afternoon of drinking and chat with a fellow DoS. Buy 1 get 1 free heineken also helps the afternoon. After Food, Beer and lots of laughter, a curry was suggested so we jumped in a taxi to Queens Tandoori where the food was fantastic. That rounded off the night almost perfectly.
Sunday was spent in 2 ways, chasing ants around the apartment who found out I was going to kill them all and so were moving lock stock and barrel, so I followed them to their new home and after a little spray of death, everything stopped moving, the queen had died and ants no more. They will be back they dont give up. That is the 4th colony I have beaten in the last 8 months. Its amazing this building is still standing if there are this amount of ants here.
The afternoon was again in a mall buying a phone with the GF and trudging up and down the escalators in Ciputra.

Still, she got one and the crowning glory was watching the 'Battle of Britain' on Max afterwards. Awesome. I do like it when we stuff the germans.

I phoned my father on Saturday to wish him a happy birthday. Oh how living the other side of the world soon disappears when talking to my parents, its like I  have never been away.
Thank mum for not remembering me!!! and then thanks to Dad to tell me he was feeding the baby birds worms and not much else. That made made my weekend, it really did.

Role on June.......