The house....now 8 months on

There's a scene in the trailer for the upcoming Marvel superhero movie "Ant-Man" where the camera pans back from a dramatic train wreck, presumably involving our hero, to actually show the crash to be a child's 'Thomas the Tank Engine' set. It's very effective and evidently all a matter of perspective.

I had a similar feeling yesterday when Yohana and I went to check on the progress of the house. As those of you who've read the previous blog entries know, we bought the house from viewing plans and a model and it was interesting to get a better perspective.

When we bought the house we knew there was a small piece of land at the back of the house that we would eventually build on. The plans showed it as garden but it really isn't big enough to be that. The length of the house, hell the overall size isn't exactly what we needed, but the location and size of houses that we did want were outside our current budget so this was the compromise. Anyway, we knew that we'd eventually build onto the back but only really on seeing the show house did we truly realise the limited space we'd have to play with, especially in the kitchen area. So it was that Yohana and I started finding prices for the building of a small kitchen extension before the house itself is even finished.

First stop was the developers who are actually building the house and the rest of the cluster. It made sense as for one, they have architects and for two, they're in the middle of building the house! They were really helpful, especially considering that when we first bought the place they told us that small changes to the original design were impossible. Now they were happy to start knocking down walls and adding doors where previously a door couldn't be found. As it was a hypothetical situation we asked about a two story extension that would utilise the spare land at the back of the house. This would give us the extra space in the kitchen, a third upstairs bedroom, bringing the downstairs bedroom into the living room and adding a "maid room". Many families in Indonesia employ maids and whilst we don't have need for this facility ourselves, it would make the house more attractive if it comes to selling it in the future.

The developer came back within a few days to say that it would cost 30% of the original house purchase price. Considering it was giving nowhere near 30% extra size we thanked them for their offer and went away to rethink some stuff.

The culmination of the last few weeks of negotiation have been Yohana meeting with builders to discuss the work and negotiate the prices. The reason for Yohana doing all of this and not involving me in the meetings is trying to avoid 'Harga Bule' which loosely translated means 'westerner price' which sees everyone; contractors, retailers, street hawkers, inflate their prices when they see they're dealing with a westerner. The situation now is the contractor who is building the row of shops on the front of the cluster, as well as the cluster's communal swimming pool, is also building a one level extension to our kitchen and is working alongside the builders of the original developer from whom we bought the house in the first place. The added benefits are that the house will still meet the original December handover date, we won't have to start extending the kitchen after we've moved in, and the cost of the kitchen extension, including all tiling work, is 3% of the original house purchase price.

Pak Haji showing Yohana the kitchen extension while a guy makes what looks like a spear (seriously, it did)

To put the whole 'Harga Bule' thing into some sort of context, this was the first time I've been on-site in two months and while we were there we were offered many additional extras, some of which already come in the agreement! We did agree to a door which will lead to the space where a future maid room may be but which for now will be a small BBQ area and the upstairs above the kitchen extension will have to wait for a bit.

The difference between a house and a home is all about the people, the atmosphere and the decoration so we're now thinking a lot about that side of things (the decor, not the people) and anyone who follows me on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) can see some ideas of things we like.

Here are some more photos taken yesterday....

National Sport

Every country has a national sport. Well, most do anyway. Here's a quick quiz and see if you can get them right. I'll give you the country and you tell me the sport. Ready?

1. England

2. Wales

3. Scotland

4. Canada

5. Sri Lanka

6. Chile

7. India

You can find out how you did at the end of the post, and I'm guessing you're in for a surprise?

When I was at school all sports were considered 'fair game', as it were. The UK has been responsible for the creation of many sports and games; badminton, baseball, cricket, rugby, snooker, tennis, darts, football, table tennis, netball, golf, bowls, curling, and squash to name just a few and a cursory glance at some stats (I may have been gender or team specific) says that we're world number one in only 4 of that list.

The first secondary school I attended had a great attitude towards sport and games. If you were inclined and showed enough interest, the Physical Education Department would offer their help and resources to help you to do it. So it was that I got to play football, cricket, both codes of rugby, track and field athletics, basketball, volleyball and swimming. On top of this we were able to do lots of outward bound activities such as orienteering, hiking, sea surfing in kayaks, and mountain climbing, basically cause we had a great bunch of PE teachers. I will be eternally grateful to Chris Booth and John Hacking, the teachers, for their interest in us.

It was surprising that when I moved schools at 14, the new school only focused on cricket and football, even though in some ways it was in a better part of the country. I can only guess this was down to interest, or the lack of it, and the calibre of the PE dept.

Technically Indonesia doesn't have a national sport. Some may argue football or the martial art Pencak Silat, but in 1992 Indonesia won 5 medals at the Barcelona Olympics and since then it has been the de facto national sport. It could have been much, much different though as four years earlier Indonesia won it's first ever Olympic medal, a silver, in the archery competition.

Looking around, and especially teaching the youth of the country, one might be forgiven for thinking that electronic sports and games are king in. But when you look at how badminton can very quickly be set up and equipment not needing to cost the earth, it's easy to see the appeal.

Currently, football in Indonesia is in the doldrums. The professional football association is beset by problems relating from bad organisation to rumours of corruption and this has an effect on the teams and the fanatical supporters.

Indonesia is about to spend huge sums of money in building facilities for the 2019 Asian Games, including a velodrome complete with tennis courts. But many sports are elitist and expensive so I can't help wishing the focus was on getting to kids and giving them similar opportunities to those that I had.

I was lucky enough to meet some members of the current Indonesian men's badmnton team recently and I laughed at how even though we invented the sport Brits aren't very good at it when compared with Asians. They in turn joked that Indonesians are good because many don't work. Joking aside, if more people here were able to access the sports for free, rather than paying huge sums of money for facilities that will only be used by a ridiculously small proportion of the population, we might see a few more Indonesian world champions.

Quiz Answers 1. football, 2. rugby union, 3. golf, 4. la crosse and hockey, 5. volleyball, 6. rodeo, 7. hockey

sources:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatpicturegalleries/9438973/Sports-invented-by-the-British.html

The Underwater World of Jacques (Daron) Cousteau.....(transferred from my old "Ikyosan" blog from september 2009)

Indonesia is a land where the things that can kill you are nearly too numerous to mention. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, bombs, spiders small enough not to see, but poisonous enough to end your life, snakes, monitor lizards that can detach their jaws to swallow you whole and actual, real life dragons. So with this in mind I thought I’d head below the waters for a holiday.

Most of the other teachers at EF were heading for Bali or the Gili Islands for the Idul Fitri break (The end of Ramadan has a public holiday to celebrate the end of fasting) but I wasn’t really interested in going somewhere so touristy. What I wanted after 5 months teaching was a completely relaxing holiday away from the masses and the thought for this came from a conversation with two of the teachers, Jeff and Chloe.

Jeff and Chloe along with two departed teachers had been to an island called Pulau Weh off the North coast of Sumatra at Christmas and done their PADI Open Water Scuba Diver course. This to me seemed like a perfect idea. I’d seen the pictures and the island is pretty remote with the only people really going there to dive, so about 8 weeks ago I booked the ticket.

As it’s a national holiday and I’d left it until relatively the last minute, the air tickets were quite expensive at 2 million rupeah (£125) for the return. I reckon if I’d booked a few weeks earlier I’d have got it for half that. Anyway, three weeks before departure a new teacher arrived at EF. Lucy Hiscocks is from Bristol and is already qualified to Advanced Open Water level and once she knew I was diving asked if she could join me.

So it was that on the 19th September we had a taxi arrive to pick us up at the house for the journey to the airport. We were booked on the 9.05 flight from Jakarta on Java to Banda Aceh on Sumatra with a short stop in the Sumatran capital of Medan to pick up/drop off passengers before catching a connecting ferry to Pulau Weh island.

Arriving at the airport around 7.20 we discovered on entering the departure lounge that the flight was delayed for 2 hours and this quickly progressed to 7 hours! The culmination of this was that instead of arriving in Banda Aceh with sufficient time to catch the 4pm ferry to the island of Pulau Weh, we were now going to have to find a hotel in Banda and leave the following day. This was to prove relatively easy but the first 3 hotels we tried were full and you get that little “Mary and Joseph” feeling that you’re going to be spending the night in the open air. (I should point out that the Mary and Joseph analogy is used for effect, Lucy and I are neither a couple or pregnant with the next Messiah). Checking into the 100 rupeah a night twin bedded fourth hotel, we dumped the bags and headed out to grab some food and were delighted with the chicken sate with lontong and sauce.

The taxi that brought us the 45 minutes from the airport had charged us 70,000 (£4.50) and seemed pretty reasonable so we agreed to a pick up to the ferry terminal for 100,000 the following morning. This was immediately cancelled when we found the chancer was overcharging us by 60,000! And again so it was that a great guy called Evan picked us up and gave us his card for the return when we got back to Banda Aceh a week later. I must mention his business card which had a picture of a beautifully sleek Mercedes SLK on it. I can only assume this was his other car because the one he arrived to pick us up in was a battered old Toyota with ill fitting doors.

It took no more than 10 minutes to get to the ferryport and we’d left early due to differing reports on ferry sailing times. These ranged from the typically British sharp intake of breath followed by lots of head scratching and consultation of similarly perplexed people to the extremely knowing look with a firm “yes, 2, o’clock” reply.

I never really know what to make of responses to questions in foreign languages. All of the phrase books give you excellent language points for asking questions but the analysis of the response if you don’t truly understand the language is entirely open to interpretation. Let’s take the two scenarios above, firm response coupled with a positive facial response equals definite whereas perplexed, shrugging and checking with confederates equals not sure? I’m starting to think that both actually mean “what is he going on about?” And the firm reply and look means you just go away faster.

This thought process was encouraged when at 12 noon on arrival at the ferry terminal having been assured by Evan there was a 2pm sailing, the first chap we met assured us the ferry wasn’t sailing today and would we like to go back into Banda Aceh and stay at his friend’s hotel for the night and get the following morning crossing. This was starting to get annoying. There were maybe 20 or so other people in the terminal who showed no sign of wishing to stay at this chaps friend’s hotel but neither was there any real sign of positive commercialism either. No food stalls catering to the captive market. No ticket office selling ferry crossing tickets etc. So we did what most Brits do in a situation like this, we sat down and refused to accept the potential inevitability.

As we sat there we were joined by 4 Indonesian guys. Encouraged by the opportunity to practice their English and accepting free cigarettes we soon found out that there was indeed a sailing but not until 4pm so armed with an English – Indonesian dictionary, Lucy’s practical Bahasa notebook and a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Indonesia we spent the next hour and a half trying to discuss everything from the state of play in world economics to comical Indonesian swear words.

We were joined later by a modern day Robinson Crusoe and his girl Friday. Will and Mel were twenty-something dive instructors from Scarborough who worked 6 months of the year on Pulau Weh and 6 months at Perentian in Malaysia. They were a fantastic source of information and great company on the wait for the ferry, in fact on the ferry crossing too and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d already booked with Rubiah Tirta Dive School I’d probably have gone to Lumba Lumba Dive School with them. I do hope our paths cross again.

Finally arriving on Pulau Weh 33 hours after setting off we got a taxi with a family of 3 obnoxious Scots from Aberdeen. The saving grace of having them in the cab was that it saved us money. Sometimes I meet people I just don’t like and the bloke was a bore, the older of the two women was a complete space cadet and her younger sister was possibly a sandwich short of a picnic too. When it turned out the bloke and the older woman had worked for EF as teachers in China I nearly cried.

Jeff Eide, who had left EF at the end of his contract 2 weeks previously, had extended his tourist visa and headed straight for Pulau Weh. He met us off the taxi and helped us to get some accommodation straight away. I’d planned on accommodation costing us around 100,000 (£6) a night following advice from the Lonely Planet so to be told that the rusticly attractive bungalow overhanging the sea with it’s extremely comfortable–looking veranda hammock was going to be 40,000 (£2.50) between us was perfect. Jeff was trying to barter it down to 30,000 but I just didn’t have the heart.

To call it basic may be a bit of an understatement, the only interior furniture was a double bed shrouded in mosquito netting and a stand fan plus some strategically placed nails for hanging clothes on. The bungalow was attached to another next door occupied by a French guy and his son and both units shared a squat toilet and a bucket shower. I hope the description of squat toilet needs no further explanation but a bucket shower is just that, a big container of water and a bucket to tip the (cold) water over you. This would no doubt not be to everyone’s taste, but to me it was as close to ideal as I could have hoped for. Lucy sleeps in a sleeping bag liner (like a little cocoon) so the double bed posed no problems plus I have a girlfriend in Jakarta and Lucy’s tastes run normally to Aussies for some bewildering reason.

It’s also worth stating again that this is an island nearly totally dedicated to diving and with a little sightseeing thrown in. The beaches aren’t the long stretch of golden sands you find in Bali and Lombok, rather they’re small patches of sand and broken coral ideal for a walking entry to dive the area and according to Michael my dive instructor the island has hardly changed in 10 years. You won’t find posh villas and 5 star hotels and instead of Starbucks you get freshly made Aceh coffee and homemade doughnuts for 4,000 (25p) for one of each made by one of the village women. Personally I find it a double edged sword in that I hope it remains this way for many years to come.

Having dumped our bags in the bungalow we followed Jeff to the Rubiah Inn, the only place open in Rubiah due to the recent end of Ramadan, and met some of the Islands other tourists, Manuello and Guillermo from Spain, Christof and Wolfgang from Austria and a Swiss couple whose names unfortunately have escaped me. I had some Nasi Goreng with a huge piece of chicken and a can of beer and a can of coke and called it a night. The food was more expensive than in Jakarta but only just more and the beer at 20,000 represented the fact that we were in a strongly Muslim area where alcohol is actually illegal. Many more people would arrive over the next 24 hours both foreign and local tourists but these were the guys who greeted us.

I couldn’t believe how quickly I was relaxing, so much so that I woke at 6.30 the following morning and just lay in the hammock. There is something fundamentally right about being on this type of island and relaxing on this type of furniture. At 8 I headed to the dive site with Lucy to find out the scores on the doors with the dive course. Yudi the owner’s son and the man I’d been liasing with was nothing like I expected. A skinny bespectacled Indonesian bloke in his mid 20’s, he was reassuringly warm and friendly. I would start my course that very same day with Guillermo as my partner and dive buddy. Filling in the time before 1pm we had free use of the fins and snorkels so Jeff, Lucy and I snorkelled over to the nearby Rubiah Island marvelling at the clarity of the water and the fish. The coral in this area was devastated by the 2004 tsunami and Rubiah Tirta dive school have made it a mission to help rebuild the coral in this conservation area.
Michael the dive instructor is a 40 year old German guy who’s been coming to Pulau Weh for nearly 10 years and whilst I had no reference point for dive instructors found him to be funny, positive, informative, patient and encouraging, not exactly traits I associate with Germans I’ve met to this point. Both Guillermo and I had previously done introduction dives so had a rudimentary knowledge of the principles involved but the course was to be extremely thorough and day one saw us doing basic skills and any thoughts of staying close to the surface saw us doing a 35 minute Open water dive to 12 metres.

Every dive finishes back at the Dive Shop which is the communal centre of the area. All the divers gather around to drink tea and eat sugar puff biscuits courtesy of the shop whilst cleaning your gear of the accumulated salt water and setting up for the next days dive. This really is a great opportunity to flick through the reference books and identify the fish you see as well as share stories of your personal adventure and experiences. This particular day we saw giant clams, star fish, lion fish, sea slugs called nudibranches, pipefish, clown fish (the ones in Finding Nemo), featherstars and long spined sea urchins.

I can only relate learning to dive with learning to drive a car. The equipment is varied and some of the techniques are complicated. You need to get your head around basic physics, chemistry and biology as well as mathematical equations to know what’s happening to you. We would have to complete the course and 6 dives within 4 days as Guillermo was leaving on Friday and had to have time to rest before flying. Each day was a mixture of theory and practical concluding with the final exam on Friday that we both passed with flying colours. The feeling of both satisfaction and relief was tangible.

Days 3 and 4 saw us doing 2 dives each day and the two dives that we did on the morning of day 4, the Friday, were amazing. The last one in particular was at a dive site called Arus Paleh. This translates as The Bastard Current and it was easy to see why. As we approached the surface following our dive we had to have a safety stop at 6 metres to get rid of excess nitrogen. This entailed holding on for all we were worth to a rock in a current so strong it was not only dragging us away from our hand hold, it was even loosening the breathing regulator in our mouths! At one point the rock Guillermo was holding broke away in his hand and I think the poor guy was hyperventilating in his effort to get back.

Having completed the course I was a little disappointed not to have seen a reef shark. They are getting rarer due to being hunted for their fins which sell for excessive amounts on the black market, but I’d seen plenty of other things including turtles, rays and moray eels. I was given a good price for a tutor-less fun dive of 15 euros so signed up for one more dive which allowed me to go out with some of the more experienced people. Diving with and Indonesian dive buddy I’d been at around 22 metres, a little over my allowed depth when my buddy gave the signal for shark and there about 3 or 4 metres away was the receding body of a reef shark. The experience was both dramatic and rewarding and when I also saw a turtle pass within a couple of metres of me ensured I would return and immediately arrange a week in February or March to return for more.

The week has been one of the single most relaxing weeks I’ve ever had. Thoughts of days sat in a car on the M25 and arguing the toss with belligerent pub managers and even more sycophantic business managers seem so far away that I have to remind myself that I have only been doing this a few short months. Playing volleyball with a group of Germans, eating basic food in basic surroundings, learning new skills have all been great and even revising for tests didn’t detract in the slightest from the experience. I think a good indicator of any trip is the people you meet and the friendships you make and by that account this has been special.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the teaching but Pulau Weh has quickly found a place in my heart and I am already looking forward to coming back.