Something that is either a fruit cart or a strange bird starts beeping/calling every morning just about when the sun starts coming up. Because of this, my dreams always end with squeaking machinery.

I am teaching the alphabet on the back of a pumpkin harvest cart.
I am playing Sudoku and a garbage truck starts backing up onto my bare feet.
I am trying to explain comparative adjectives to a group full of apathetic teenagers, just a sea of dark eyes, in dreams, at least, and their whispers in bahasa Indonesia begin to hum, blur, into an alarm clock...

I don't have an alarm, but I don't need one. As it gets too hot to sleep, as birds/fruit carts start beeping, as churches fire up their choirs, as something that sounds like migrating geese, but isn't, starts honking, I roll over, and maybe Nick is opening the door, quietly, but still creaking a little, and Daniel and Lucia are out on the floor mat playing cards, speaking a mixture of German, Mandarin, English, and Indonesian, and Louise is carrying her mattress out onto the balcony to air out, and Rani, downstairs, is starting to crank up the Michael Jackson karaoke.

Nick is making breakfast. There are two choices for breakfast: scrambled eggs or oatmeal, both with sliced banana and papaya, and mango nectar. Sometimes, there is no running water. Sometimes, our gas tank will have run low, and someone will have to walk up the street and buy another one. Sometimes there is a note. Don't forget to pay Imelda. Imelda's the cleaning lady. The house is divided on whether we really need her or not, but everyone's friends with her by now, so we keep her.

I run outside, check if the sun has dried my laundry yet. Our whole downstairs balcony is strung with drying line, but only some of it is in the sun. Clothes fight each other. Lately, it has been raining at night and re-soaking everyone's clothes. What we need is five or more hours of uninterrupted sunlight, which isn't happening - not even close - which is good if you plan to be outside at all, but bad if you're out of underwear and have no more than one towel and your one good teaching outfit is dripping dirty water onto the ant colonies on the porch.

At 11:30, we start walking up the road to the main road to catch a taxi to school. Each taxi driver has decorated his own taxi, and we see taxis covered with hanging Jesuses (Jesi?) on crosses, along with posters of sad Jesuses with crowns of thorns, and taxis with pictures of sweating soccer players, and taxies with posters of Britney Spears, and taxis with posters of 13-year-old Japanese pop stars. One day, we climb into a taxi and it is bare except for a worn brown teddy bear perched on the dashboard.

At this point, my written day is catching up with my real day and I need to go across the street to school, but maybe the other half will come soon.

Oh, and Nick's blog - http://adventuresinpapua.blogspot.com - is more day-to-day details than mine, so if that's what you crave, head on over. He doesn't get distracted by details so much as I do, or have his writing style altered for the worse by bad Indonesian pop music playing in the fucking Internet cafes, like some people I could think of off the top of my head.

Yesterday, I had a day that would make mothers everywhere turn over in their graves, and... wait... my mother isn't dead and I'm mixing my idioms. What I mean to say is I had a day yesterday that would make mothers everywhere (and not just my mother, for whom my being in Papua at all is a horrifying prospect, but mothers everywhere) shit bricks.

We're invited up to Sentani, about an hour and a half away, by one of the Australian teachers, Louise, who (along with everyone else here) is notoriously vague, and in order to get there we have to take an indeterminate number of taxis, all of which quote wildly different prices and wildly different destinations as they wave their arms and try their best to speak English while we try our best to speak Indonesian. Unfortunately, the English they know is always oddly translated ('no problem' becomes 'no what-what', 'enjoying the day?' becomes 'walking-walking, ya?', etc.) and my Indonesian consists of numbers and 'where's the bathroom?' (Nick's consists of nothing - he hasn't bothered to learn).

We get there, though, at least halfway, to Abepura, and I'm carsick from hot and bad 90's music and clove cigarettes everywhere, so I ride up to Sentani on the back of Louise's motorcycle - helmetless, though I do have an old baseball cap to shield my non-helmeted head from the dumber ones among the cops. Flying at 60km around Lake Sentani (teeming with fresh, delicious fish, by the way) the cap flies off. 'Oh no!' I yell into Louise's helmet without thinking about how you're not supposed to yell 'Oh no!' at people driving motorcycles unless you really mean it, and she swerves, but regains control.
'What?!'
'I lost your cap!'
'Oh! Well... we'll get it on the way back, she says, just as another motorcycle roars up right next to us, the man in the front holding the cap. When it flew off, it must have flown right into his face. He tries to make a handoff at speed, but by frantically waving our hands, we communicate we want to pull over. Everyone here does the most reckless things driving, but because of that, oddly enough, everyone is an amazing driver.

Louise failed to mention that the 'little walk' up to the waterfall pond was actually a full on hour-long trek through thick, pathless, inclined jungle, so I'm wearing a skirt and flip flops, pushing big-enough-for-a-dog-to-sleep-on banana fronds and chest-high grass and spiky fluid-filled leaves aside. AND THEN WE GET LOST... because there are these two angry dogs barking at us from a small farmed field of cassava, where our path is, and we don't want to walk next to them even though a smiling grizzled old Papuan man is yelling sternly at them from across the field. And it's dusk. And every five minutes Louise says she knows where she is, but then directly afterwards, she takes it back, and a rock falls on my ankle, and it hurts.

Yes, it is worth it. Of course it is worth it. The gleam of Louise's motorcycle is obvious when we're close enough to it to nearly reach out and touch it, and on the way there's butterflies the size of birds and blue bugs with a very odd number of legs (14, maybe?) and the sheer mass of plant and insect life is like nothing I could have imagined before actually getting to see it. Things grow here. Mostly on things that aren't meant to have things growing on them. Like my towel, or our walls. Or a cut coconut. Even in the fridge, it was yellow in three days. Everything is gorging itself on the thick, humid air. I couldn't have picked a more polar opposite place to move to from Colorado.

What else made up the mother's nightmare? Oh yeah, riding back from our getting-lost-in-the-jungle experience three-to-a-motorcyle, holding my feet up off the flying pavement so that my arches cramped, using my arms not to hold on, but to hold Nick's legs up in the air. Going to a fish place where the cook opens a cooler full of fresh fish, lets you pick your particular victim. Drinking a pink coconut drink and staggering, full, onto a taxi which just might be going the right way, but maybe not... and on the way, stopping to shake hands with a drunk guy who, once encouraged, won't stop following us.

It's enough to make my mother's heart stop beating, so let's not tell her, okay? But here's the thing: I've been scared of many things in my tumultuous adolescence, and even into my twenties - closed-in places, vomiting, bad drug reactions, telling people I like that I like them, airplanes, illness (heart attacks in particular) - but I'm not scared here. Not like I was at home. It seems absurd. Why worry about how you will appear to groups of Indonesian teenagers when you're got a motorcycle exhaust burn on your leg that, in a tropical climate, you've got to clean every two hours or else it'll start growing plants of its own? Or, why worry about closed-in places when everyone is friendly enough that a New Guinean border guard taking charge and setting up a special detour on the city bus to your hotel for you is normal?

Sometimes things seem unrelated, but they aren't. They aren't.

I live in an alternate universe where one might, in the course of going about everyday business, hear a girl speaking Indonesian interspersed with cursed English in a German accent, or hear an Indonesian girl who speaks very very little English exclaim 'Booollsheet!' indigantly when she feels someone is lying. You might hear a class full of 10 year old Indonesian boys being taught the difference in pronunciation between the 'a' of 'can't' and the 'ah' of 'cahn't' by an Australian teacher who shoots us knowingly superior looks as he emphasizes the 'ah's', or a class full of 7 year old Indonesian girls being taught the alphabet by a teacher from Kentucky: 'ell imm inn oh pee'.

In this alternate universe, for 20000rp (2 dollars, roughly), you can get either a three pound yellowfin tuna or a tiny bag of M&M's. You can get anywhere within a five mile radius by cab for 2000rp (20 cents), but a dress still costs 350,000rp (35 dollars). You can get a bag of potstickers for 10000rp (you get the idea) but to get the little bottle of soy sauce to dip them in, you have to pay 3 times as much. A coconut hardly registers on the price scale. Neither do bananas, or papayas. I saw a girl at the market visibly suppress giggles as she sold a bunch of bananas to an unsuspecting blond for 5000rp (and no, that blond wasn't me - I know what you're thinking).

Tomorrow, Papua New Guinea! I hear they have hot water!! This merits lots of exclamation points!!!!!!!!! We're just going there overnight to process our work visa, but overnight is enough to take twenty hot showers, at the very least.

Sorry for the scatter. It might get better. It might get worse.

It's human nature to crave routine, and I suppose I can make the excuse that it's human nature to crave flush toilets, but a good debater could probably talk me down from that. I miss my cat, and sushi, of course, and the neighborly feeling of everyone speaking English, and even the daily incessant flow of internet information, even though that's what spoiled me. What do I do now to distract myself? I sleep. It's easy. It's hot, but not hot like you expect. You sweat, but it cools you. You breathe perfectly. What it feels like is exactly your own body temperature, and your body welcomes it. How can I explain it better? I can't.

On my east wall there is an unfinished mural of a red squid and a blue fish. The rest is done with pencil lines, and geckos trace them with their bellies when they wiggle up. My windows frame Papua New Guinea, which contains all the clouds in the world at any given moment, and throughout the day they advance, growing taller and grayer, until sunset at 5:30. They frame the bay, and two islands, and papaya trees and banana trees and cats, which I already think of exclusively as kucing, because it's such a perfect word for a cat, and dirt roads with chickens pecking their way along them and everyone on scooters and everyone singing gospel karaoke and everyone staring, staring, staring at me all the time. 'Mister, Mister!' they call at Nick and I, because women and men both are 'Mister'. The roosters here only crow at dawn, unlike any roosters I've heard before (or probably will ever hear). They leave out the last doodle-doo.

Yesterday we took first a taksi, and then a ojek (motorcycle taxi) down to a beach with black sands a few miles west of here. The ocean is fed with a smattering of tiny waterfalls and rivers rolling down from the village above, which is in turn scattered with traditional Papuan houses and children who, when you express curiosity or bemusement at a new fruit tree, climb it with sticks, bang the fruit out, and hand
it to you. Of course, you can't understand what they tell you it is, but you get home and crack it and it's (can you guess?) a cashew.

One river is filled with little waterfalls and we are taken to one where they've built a little dam out of rocks beneath. We stretch out in a shallow pool - 3 feet, maybe - and let the waterfall give us the shower that we can't take at home. (Showers at home consist of a bucket and a squeaky faucet.) All I can keep thinking is that if we were in the States there's no way you would ever be able to find a space in the waterfall pool.

We relax and we slowly get hungry and we pick our way down the river until it empties out at the ocean, where naked Papuan children run shrieking and barefoot across the rocks and their older relatives fish and dive. We have Tupperware stir-fry lunches of rice noodles, chicken, green beans, spinach, bean sprouts, garlic, and sea salt, and we sit next to the shore and let ourselves be knocked around by the waves.

In a way, it's paradise, and in another, I want to go home. I didn't know it until I knocked my head on the too-low ceiling, carrying some genmaicha up to my balcony, and burst into floods of completely irrational tears that lasted the better part of an hour. My dreams are a gumbo made with everything and everyone from home, but with Indonesian words thrown in as seasoning. I dreamed I was in the shower, bathing-suited, with every friend I have from home, and my mom was calling up the stairs 'Brownies are ready!' and, oh, brownies.

Wade, from Missouri, says he still dreams about biscuits and gravy, and he's been here two years. I expect I won't easily forget sushi. I expect I won't easily forget too much.

Expect infrequent updates.

I would be lucky if I were connecting with 28,800k at the moment - it took five minutes to come to this page - so. The rest of this sentence is unnecessary. It doesn't matter. I'm keeping two people - two people who don't speak my language, but who still took me around the city, lecturing cabdrivers and warung employees who tried to overcharge me because I'm white and blonde - waiting, and I shouldn't.

I'll write everything down on my computer and try to transfer it here later, but at the moment I'm not sure how I'll do it.

This is the day the 'travel blog' loses its quotes, for I have actually left the country (and arrived somewhere else other than daydreams about somewhere else). I'm writing from Taipei, Taiwan, and I'm sure the timestamp is wrong (it's Wednesday, 8/16 at 6:14 AM) and I'm sure that the tone is wrong as well, since I've gotten maybe six dubious hours of 'sleep' on the plane, and things kept happening. Like I woke up and blearily realized I was watching MI3 because my butt sat on the remote control while I was sleeping (my butt chose Tom Cruise - I now distrust my butt). Is that word mistrust, or distrust? I can't think. Everything looks like it has been sterilized with Scrubbing Bubbles. Don't they have dirt here? Don't people ever pick up dust from the street and track it places? Like airports, for example? Don't they ever miss the garbage cans when they throw away their 7503481298765 cans of Coke? Oh, wait.

There was nothing beautiful, though I expected there to be. But when I was expecting I forgot to remember that all airports everywhere are the same. Hold on, I have one.

Flying over the Pacific might have been breathtaking if it hadn't been night. As it was, you could look up and see stars and think you were in a spacecraft, which was disorienting, but not beautiful. This was beautiful: a half hour before we landed, maybe, after 11 hours of black and space and stars, I started seeing tiny lights on boats. And then, before I was able to see the water that the boats floated on, I started seeing this orange glow spreading unevenly, like giant starfish, over something ripply, but it didn't look like water - it looked like the desert. The kind of desert that moves faster than a 747. The sun. As we hit (one of) the eastern shores of the Pacific, the desert caught up with the plane and I saw that it was water, and that it was the sunrise.

My mind, my fingers, my metaphors, are writing like they just smoked a bowl of exhaustion (see?) but there it was; it was more than enough. Being somewhere unfamiliar enough that you don't recognize the ocean.

Once again, words fail me.

Not written words, as those always come, somehow, but verbalizations, the pesky, brain-bypassing kind, the kind that pour out of my mouth indiscriminately when I am full of nervous energy and/or am hiding what I really want to communicate.

If I were to spend an entire, ideal day with someone, I would choose something exhilarating and exhausting in the morning, followed by food, and then napping sporadically and lazily together throughout the afternoon. I love napping with friends. People, even. I love how people look through my eyelashes, sideways and sleepy. The quiet warmth of them. But maybe there's something else that I love, too, and it's that napping together is a buffer against word-vomit. It's a way of spending an afternoon in quiet proximity without feeling the need to splatter all over everything with oddly placed tangential anecdotes. I am very good at oddly placed tangential anecdotes. But there is a lot more to be said for well-placed silence.

Something I've been trying to divert lately by anecdote-splattering is saying goodbye to everyone. I think that if I just keep talking, I won't have to leave. They won't have to leave.

I blabbered on and on about the transience of CU email addresses when Chell and Brendan dropped me off at my house for the last time. When Andrew left for Madison, I talked about how we were both from the Midwest and that we had the same home base. I pointed out the place in the neighbor's yard where hard-boiled eggs were thrown as Dan was standing on the porch, getting ready to go to work. This is stupid. This is all so stupid. As it's happening, my brain is going 'shut up shut up now just shut up you're ruining it you're acting so bizarre' but it's too late. And once they're gone my brain is going 'all you wanted to say is that you're going to miss them because that's all you mean with all your drivel so just say it' but it is also, then, too late.

Moon Unit will start having her leashed walks around her new home tomorrow. Whenever I tell her she's going to have a new mommy, she bites me. She knows how I feel about it, that I feel like I'm a neglectful parent, dropping everything and taking off for the furthest tropical island when, in stopping by the shelter and having my fingers bitten at through the bars, I'd taken on a responsibility that can't (or at least shouldn't) be shrugged off in two years.

Her papers read 'Larinda'. It was unanimous among all of us: who would, upon seeing a four month old calico kitten, think 'Larinda! Of course! That's it!'? In large letters across the top was written 'BITER'. Her stomach was shaved from a two-day-old spaying. "She may be a little lethargic," said the employee who was carrying a writhing, snapping 'Larinda' into the visiting room. She set the kitten down and the kitten immediately rolled over and became a furry machine with eighteen sharp, slashing points. This one, I immediately thought. This one for sure.

She is in my abandoned Mac box right now, staring at me balefully, which is the only way she's been staring at me since I've been treating her like I'm not going to see her for a year. She doesn't like to be touched, but she likes to be in the same room with people. She likes doling out pieces of her territory to those she deems fit.

I had a fun two-hour long adventure at the bank today that culminated, oddly enough, in my bank teller calling up my health insurance company on the phone to change the account information they had on file for me while I sat across from him with my legs splayed out in a pose of defiance, feeling like he was my mother.

Sometimes I find myself absentmindedly scratching my nose or my cheek or my forehead, which is innocuous enough, but then someone comes out to shake my hand and suddenly I view myself completely differently: did I look like I was picking my nose or picking a zit? Should I shake his hand? Which is ruder, shaking someone's hand after you look like you've been picking your nose, even if you haven't been, or refusing a handshake that someone is offering, even if to your now warped mind it looks like they're offering it grudgingly?

This is how my meeting with the bank teller began, and it turned out I had a series of impossible questions that flummoxed him and made him stutter out conflicting answers paired with quick episodes of popping around the corner to ask questions of other tellers, and when he was telling me something, he would lean forward and steeple his index fingers and look deeply into my face: I am trustworthy. I am trustworthy. Well, no, you are creepy.

Well, no, he was nervous, as I found out later when, you know how sometimes being in a frustrating, impossible situation with a stranger brings the two of you closer? Especially when it involves corporate idiocy and bureacratic mumbo-jumbo to grumble about together? Especially if, over the course of this frustrating situation, someone's Windows XP crashes/gives the blue screen of death/gives incomprehensible error messages?

Here is the human condition: the human condition is being made to feel powerless by machines we have created and choose to use.

As it got more and more complicated and ridiculous, we caught each other grinning tiny grins of amazement. He knew that I was thinking that he was incompetent at first and instead of getting more nervous, he said, "I was like, 'she's thinking that I don't know what I'm doing and it's just...'"

That, saying it, always works better than pretending we can't read body language. Now you've said it, and I can say that I was thinking that, but I'm not thinking it anymore. Let's always talk about what is happening right now, as we talk about it (what's happening right now, as we talk about it, what's happening...). Right now I am typing in a brown box with a black rubber band around my wrist thinking that this entry has descended into madness for my five or so readers. I am thinking that it sounds like I am trying to make a banal event in my day into something deep and meaningful, which was not my intent, except to make the blanket statement that sometimes frustrating situations make temporary friends out of strangers, even initially hostile strangers, but I already said that, didn't I? I was also trying to say that I like it when people acknowledge the underlying obviousness in conversations that are (up until that point) pregnant with obvious awkwardness. Let's do that from now on, okay?

I'll start: this is getting awkward.

I feel like some kind of bizarre, updated, less war-torn, Indonesian version of The Things They Carried (if you haven't read it, read it: it's by Tim O'Brien).

First year EFL teacher Hannah Enenbach carried a large black duffel bag which had had her full name sewn into it, red on white, by her mother in 1994, right before Hannah attended Interlochen Arts Camp for four weeks. The duffel bag which accommodated ten-year-old Hannah's four-week long camp needs in a stuffed and bulging fashion now accommodated twenty-two-year-old Hannah's year-long international teaching needs in a sagging, empty-looking fashion. With everything packed, Hannah, if she chose, could easily still fit her best friend, Camille; her cat, Moon Unit; her oversized subwoofer, and fifty squeezetubes of SPF-50 sunscreen inside without a problem. Camille, though, preferred to keep her life here, and as for Moon Unit, if she could talk, she would certainly voice her objections against being quarantined for six months. (The SPF-50 sunscreen might just have been tossed in.)

She carried cool yet modest, colorful yet subdued clothes, 14 outfits in all. One old, ugly, leaky raincoat that she would no doubt regret in the middle of monsoon season. One pair of jeans, ripped in the butt, that her lover swore he would patch, but hadn't yet. One Wild Oats sweatshirt, acting as the protector of all things cold ("cold" now being code for "under 80F"). One cranky laptop computer, prematurely set to Indonesian time and weather. Forty skeins of bracelet thread. Three journals. Hannah, while totally okay with tossing clothes, papers, tweezers, pencils, sunglasses, etc. all over the floor of her living space, was (how might I put this politely) anal as hell about journals. There was a song journal. A writing/ideas journal. And an odds-and-ends journal that might have hangman games scattered everywhere, or scribbles from pens reluctant to let go of their ink, or a drawing of a man with gigantic ears. There had been thoughts about an Indonesian-English phrasebook journal, her fourth journal in all, but even Hannah realized that this would be carrying it a bit far.

She carried mosquito repellent for both skin and clothes. She carried 8 bottles of Doxycycline, sworn enemy of malaria. (She decidedly did NOT carry Lariam, sworn enemy of both malaria and human sanity.) She carried garlic tablets. All of which were funny because since Hannah was a little girl, mosquitoes have disliked the taste of her blood. She carried a syringe kit, a vaccination certification passbook, electrolyte drink mix packets, and a healthy sense of outrage towards anybody who tried to push paranoid health-related kits, medicines, packets or preventative sprays upon her ever again.

She carried two tiny wood briefcases containing artists' pastels, but no pad of paper. Why? She is sick of going to the damn store and asking for more damn stuff when she already has so much damn stuff that it's a full-time job simply to sell all of it.

She carried a desire for adventure coupled with a wish to sleep through the entire plane ride. She carried the phrases 'good morning', 'good afternoon', 'good night', and 'I don't speak Indonesian' in Indonesian in the very front of her brain, ready to randomly spew at the slightest nudge. She carried a mental picture of the teachers house that looked suspiciously like a Mexican hostel in Puerto Vallarta, a mental picture of the school that looked suspiciously like the one in the pamphlet for Surabaya, a mental picture of the coastline that looked suspiciously like the coastline of Nayarit. She carried a sense of distrust in her own imagination.