Shaking and shimmying with the ladies

For almost a year now once a month (at least) I have been getting together with a small group of ladies for a some wine and good conversation. It is hard to meet people in this city and "ladies' night" has turned out to be great. It is all word of mouth and while there is a small core group, each time we seem to end up with at least one new person at the table, which is really nice. It is definitely I a night I look forward to each month.

Friday night we had a Turkish inspired ladies night at our friend Joya's place. She just got back from a trip to Turkey and it was Maiko's last night in town; she needed a proper ladies send off! To keep with the theme, we hired a belly dancing teacher for a little lesson (after we had a couple glasses of wine of course!) We all shook and shimmied for about an hour with Christine, our fearless leader who was patient with our various struggles. You would NEVER know I was gymnast at any point in my life since Christine had to keep reminding me to turn on my "other left". Belly dancing for the record is not as easy as it looks.

And, maybe just to take the attention away from our bad moves, somehow Joya's wig collection came out. It was a blast and definitely a ladies' night to remember!

Everyone is on the go

It is a transitional lifestyle we have signed up for here and this past weekend we headed back to Pelabuhan Ratu, yet again, for a farewell weekend for Maiko and Chad.

Maiko is headed to DC to meet up with her husband Adam and they are being posted in Zambia with USAID. Chad is leaving us for a new posting in Ho Chi Minh City with the Canadian Embassy. We are already hatching a plan to visit both of them at some point. We were never ones for direct routes anyway, what is a little stop in Africa?

We had to send them off properly, so back to the beach house we went. There was the usual playing in the waves, lazing in the hammock and a huge fresh fish dinner from the fish market Saturday night. The highlight was the Sunday morning breakfast mango tasting - Chad brought 6 kinds of mangos, put them each in a bowl for sampling and we all picked our favorites. I love mango season and as it turns out, my expensive taste extends to mangoes since I chose by taste the priciest of the bunch. Howie is sticking by his "this is ripe and the cheapest" policy.

We lingered as long as we could on Sunday, not wanting to head back to Jakarta and while others toyed with "calling in sick" Monday, Howie and I sadly could not even consider an extra day. This is print week at HighEnd. Even with Howie bringing the laptop and defiling hammock time by mixing it with work, we have still been pulling nothing shorter than 12 hours days.

It has been a long week, but a good one that included one more native English speaker/managing editor on our staff. He has already lasted more than the last guy (3 days was not a hard record to break) so we are thrilled!

June Issue Hits the Stands!

Oops, the End in HighEnd Teen turned out to be the same color as the gray detail in the background, but is readable in some lights... maybe thinking we are "High Teen" will make us more desirable in some circles. This I am happy to report, however, was pretty much the only negative comment I have heard so far.As for HighEnd, you tell us - do you think Miss Indonesia is wearing too much make-up? Is the sash distracting? Again, in the grand scheme most people are pretty happy, so if too much make-up is the worst of it, we are thrilled.

Sailing Away

We just spent another weekend on the Cecelia Ann, the same boat we took to see the amazing Krakatoa back in November. This time we headed for Ujun Kulon - a marine national park off the west coast of Java.

Half the boat was surfers, so the plan was to spend half the daylight hours surfing and half snorkeling. There was also some snorkeling near the surf spots so after the wonder of watching the surfers wore off, there were cool fish to look at. In case you do not know anything about surfing, I learned there is a lot of waiting involved. The perfect wave does not come as often as one might think.

Howie chose to spend most of the surf time as the official surf photographer - flopping around in his mask and flippers and snapping the surfers (with someone else's waterproof camera) as they tried to avoid him. I snorkeled and although I really wanted to surf, there was a bit more reef than I was comfortable with so I will wait again until Bali where the only thing you need to avoid is other people...

We ended up sailing to Krakatoa again on the second day since from the surf spot you could hear the booms - it was just too tempting to those who had not seen it before. I have to admit, the first time was much more amazing for me, but sailing in after dark and eating dinner beside the bubbling and glowing volcano was pretty freaking cool.Overall it was a great weekend. We saw some amazing fish and beautiful reef and the luxury of the boat with good friends and good food was quite a pleasure.