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.