You can almost hear the grass growing…

The New Year also brought with it the beginning of the monsoon season. The ‘rainy’ (I fondly refer to it as ‘hurricaney’) season has brought more than just disasters to Indonesia…

It has a constant mouldy-humid stench on everything... because nothing ever COMPLETELY dries!

It has also increased the growth-rate of our lawn exponentially! We have been ‘letting it go’ for several reason… Aesthetically, I prefer the jungle theme we’ve created – it attracts all kinds of birds whose voices are much more pleasing to awaken to than the ambient street noise beyond; but more than this, there is part of me that is doing it out of defiance… we found out that the grass-cutting guy who cut our grass for us once more than quadrupled his charge, especially for us… (even after we invited him for lunch when he was done, and gave him ice tea while he worked – I’m pretty sure he doesn’t receive treatment like that anywhere else!) so we are refusing to give him any more business!

The neighbours may not be happy about it, but we wouldn’t know ... we don't know them... i think it's a medium-scale neighbourhood pretending to be upscale... so they're not into jungles, and most likely have a problem with the crazy white girls lawn… honestly, we've never even SEEN half the neighbours... they live behind TALL gates (which their ‘house-helpers’ open for them)... and they drive right up to their doorsteps, so the sun can only touch them for 1.4 seconds....



White = beautiful, you see!

You wouldn't believe all the whitening treatments, creams, scrubs, soaps, etc! (And although I haven’t seen them, Jonathan tells me that when he was here the big thing was the breast enlargement creams at all the checkouts (where you'd normally find the gum)!)