February fun!

Also during the Chinese New Year holiday, we single girls (+ Josh) hung out a lot, usually with food.

Here, we had Mediterranean food night at Lis and Elise's house.

(Josh, Leanne, (someone's visiting friend, whose name I forget), me, Lis, Fera, Elise, and Brittany, who lives with Leanne and is also new this year.)

Fera's birthday was over the CNY weekend, so we celebrated it one day, all day-long.

Here, we had breakfast on Lis' patio...

...and then Josh took a series of pictures of us girls with Fera.

This one's my favorite! :)

We expats got together on her birthday evening and had some fun.

(Diane, her son, Zeke, Lis, Fera, Elise's head, Josh, me, Tiwi (another teacher), and Scott)

February has been a great month, so far. We were blessed with, not only ONE 4-day weekend, but TWO 4-day weekends, on account of celebrating good old Mohammed's birthday!

For the second long weekend, we expats went back to Ocean Queen for a few days.
We had a blast, even though the ride there was long and nauseating. As soon as we got there, we jumped in the ocean, I slipped on a rock, and I promptly ruined my camera in the water. Therefore, the three photos here are donated by Josh and his awesome, expensive camera. (He's trying to persuade me to buy one, but they're too expensive and bulky for me...)

Sunset
*ahhh...*

A bunch of us played sand volleyball and severely bruised our forearms for the next week.
It was painful fun!

For all you doubters out there, HERE'S PROOF I really DID play volleyball! :-P


A few nights ago, at our weekly prayer and praise time, Kris and David (from last year) randomly surprised us with a visit! Their daughter and her family now live in eastern Indonesia, and they came on a whim to a conference in their daughter's area, and they wanted to say "hi" to us first. :)

Ladies' Nite!

Front: Lis, Shirley Anne, me, Chrissie
Back: Kris, Cara Grace, Becky, Elise, Fera

(No pic of David- oops!)

Anyways, that's the gist of my life over the last few weeks, aside from schoolwork, which I won't bore anyone with on here. School's keeping us all very busy, and once I get a new camera, I'll be sure to post more photos of my students on here, since I haven't really done much of that this year.

I'll need one verrrry soon, though, b/c I'm getting ready to go to Bali again with the 7th graders in a few weeks- pray for us! I had to yell at them in class on Friday because they were so excited that they weren't paying any attention to the teacher who was explaining the trip details. I made them write apology letters to him, so now we're all good. :-P They're very sweet kids, though, so we'll be fine.

I'm off to bed now. Good night! Selamat malam!

Chinese New Year fun...and some misc...

(It's been a month since I've updated this blog. Here I go...)

Joy left about a month ago. Before she left, we spent the night at a beautiful hotel close to the airport so that we wouldn't have to rush her to the airport the next morning.

Just for kicks, we ordered dinner room service, which was a ton of fun! We did this so that we could try to finish Season 5 of "Psych" on my laptop. (We fell asleep, though.)

*YUM!!*


A few weeks later, we celebrated an extended Chinese New Year holiday weekend. We had a Thursday and Friday off of school, which was WONDERFUL!

On the first night of our holiday, we expats went to the house of two new women teachers. They invited us all to paint canvases to decorate their house, so I painted a white elephant.

This is a cute pic of Becky.
(If don't remember her, she's Jared's wife, and they're Cara Grace's parents.)

She ended up painting an Arabic - looking design from her shirt, which ended up looking amazingly beautiful. (I didn't take finished product photos of either, though...oops!)

The next day was the actual Chinese New Year holiday.

Here I am with Fera, wearing a Chinese - looking shirt I'd brought from home.


We got together that evening at Jared and Becky's house for a bonfire and s'mores.

Meet Josh.

Josh just came to Sentul in January to teach 4th grade. He was born in Thailand, grew up in Minnesota, and did his student teaching on another part of Java. He has no problem hanging out with us girls, and we sometimes forget he's NOT female. :-P

Here's a cute pic of Lis with Cara...

...and another cute one of Cara with Leanne, another new teacher this year.

(We painted canvases for her house.)

After s'mores, we lit fireworks and then had prayer and praise time around the fire. We usually gather together on Thursdays for this time together.

Here are Becky, Chrissie and Shirley Anne leading us in song. :)