Monkey/Journey to the West makes Olympics slightly less lame

Moving this way and that

Saturday afternoon saw the end of a crazy stretch of work so now I will pick up where I left off as a diligent blogger.

The busy period gave me a lot to report so I plan to post a few photos from the last few weeks over the next week and get up to date. Now I move into a new phase of busyness as my time in Aceh draws to a close (I'll be back in Australia next month). I have a lot of writing to do so I will be glued to my computer and therefore probably blogging as a form of procrastination.

Dates aren't fixed yet but I'll be home for a few weeks in September/October and then I'll be relocating to Bangkok to take up a six month contract (the picture to the left is just one I shamelessly stole from the web). This is great news and I should be falling off my chair with excitement but I'm a bit too tired, and I suspect my soul is too weary, to be excited yet. But I expect that I will go home and have a rest, attend to the other parts of my life for a little bit and then jump back in feeling refreshed. And if there is anywhere to go for a weary soul it's Thailand right?

I will be looking for accommodation with room for visitors as I've already had a few people signal their wish to visit, and in any given six month period a handful of friends and family visit Thailand anyway, so maybe people will like to stop in Bangkok and say hi. Again, no dates fixed yet, but I think I can flag the last half of January and a week or so in late March/April as times that I will be back in Aceh, so whether you're coming to visit Sarah or want a vacant apartment in Bangkok for a couple of weeks I hope these times suit.

Now, after a lovely hour of blogging and interneting on Monday morning, I will start work for the week. Just after I find something for breakfast.

1, 2, 3, 4 monsters walking cross the floor

Have you seen this yet?

Wenesday is the perfect day for the beach

After a week of inefficiency and time wasting I am trying to turn the productivity dial up to maximum force, so I will just post some pictures from a walk along the beach on Wednesday (a very rare and welcome UN-observed public holiday).

We found a fish. Marcus wanted to kiss it.














Then we found this thing....Any ideas on what this is? Anyone?










Then we rested and reflected on the spectacles we'd seen.

Portmanteau

My new favourite word is portmanteau. I think the word itself is pretty great but the meaning/s are also great.

A portmanteau is a suitcase with two compartments, and a portmanteau word is something like a contraction when two words are blended. The word was first used in this way by Lewis Carrol in Through the Looking Glass. I will let Wikipedia explain:

The usage of the word 'portmanteau' in this sense first appeared in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass (1871),^[1] in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky:^[9]

• "‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word"
• "‘Mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there's another portmanteau ... for you)".

Indonesians love portmanteau words. They make there way into formal language all the time. I think these examples might be contractions rather than portmanteau words, but I'd rather not be a stickler if being a stickler means excluding myself from using my new favourite word.

For example: partai politik (political party) becomes Parpol. And that's just the beginning. If a phrase cannot be made into an acronym (also a favourite in Indonesia) it will become a portmaneau word.

An example of something that is half way between an acronym and a portmanteau (can a linguist help me out here?):

Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Nasional becomes Bappenas. Efficient isn't it!

I think I will create a list of Indonesian portmanteau words. But first I will do some work...

chocolate and dengue

I don't mean to turn this into a chocolate blog (there are enough in the world already), but I, a gal who is neither here nor there about most chocolate, could not go another day without drawing the attention of my fellow Australians to the little gift from god called:
















Club Classic Mixed Berry.

I brought some chocolate back to Indonesia from Australia last month and gave most of it away as presents. I kept this block because I knew a day would come when chocolate would be needed. It was Friday last week when it happened. We were flat, bored and in need of a little adventure, so I gave the block to my colleagues Ani and Inda to try. It had been melted a billion times so it was a little bit weird, but it truly made my colleagues jealous that I could just waltz on into a regular supermarket and buy something this delicious!

When I went looking for a photo for this post I found a blog reviewing Club Classic Mixed Berry which said all kinds of delicious-sounding things about it. But I have nooooo desire at all to describe the texture of the chocolate and the chewy consistency of the berries. Just eat it and have your socks knocked off.

***
On a less tasty note, I've mentioned my house helper Kak Ani on this blog quite a few times because she is basically my Aceh mum (but this one doesn't get angry when I leave my clothes on the floor, she just picks them up for me and washes them...and irons them and puts them back in my cupboard). This morning she wasn't feeling well so we went to the doctor and found out she has dengue fever. Hopefully it won't get too serious (so far it's not that bad), in which case it's not a big deal, but she is really scared and sad because as she put it "I'm never sick!" (wow, she does sound like my mum)

The doctor's orders for dengue fever:

1. bed rest
2. drink lots of water
3. take panadol for fever

Everyone else's orders:

1. drink lots of guava juice
2. don't believe the blood tests because they always tell you that you've got something you don't
3. take panadol for fever
   

Fortunately none of these conflict so we can adhere to both Western medicine and village medicine without a problem. Phew.

Photography and Documentation Workshop

About two weeks ago we held training on photography and documentation for a group of women involved in one of our projects. The project has gone well so we're keen to document it as much as possible in the hope that other oganisations will replicate it. I'll be writing a paper on the whole process but we thought it would be far more fun to give the women involved cameras so they can take photos to reflect on their experiences with the project. We also asked them to write a few pages each on their experiences.

To support the women to do this we decided to have a one-day workshop. We brought in Dea, a wonderful and talented girl from Yogya to teach them the basics of photography and how to use their cameras (cheap film cameras, no bells and whistles). I gave them some ideas for writing about their experiences.

Here I am doing my presentation. My Bahasa Indonesia isn't good enough to be able to ad lib on the points I was making, so it was a pretty dull presentation. But I think my cute bubbles in a funnel helped matters.


















I also spent part of the day drawing the inner-exhibitionist out of this little girl. She started off rather shy...


















We're picking up the developed photos today. We will choose about 25 photos to display at the opening ceremony of the Balai Inong in two weeks time. I'm excited and nervous to see what the results are. Dea, who I mentioned earlier, did a similar project with kids from Yogya after the earthquake in 2006 and made a great book using the kids' photos. I hope we can do something similar here.