(last of the write-ups from our winter break trip this year!) A few kilometers from Borobudur is the much smaller Mendut temple. On the inside are three amazing statues of Buddha and 2 Bodhisattvas. The Buddha is over 3 meters tall and is exceptional as he sits western style with his feet on the floor [...]
Image from the New York Times article on the soccer riots – there’s Rob, right in the thick of things!!
This is an old post that I found in my “drafts” folder. It dates from way back in 2009, when I first joined Facebook. I wrote it in India, but never posted it. It is cute and still timely, and I figured that it deserves to see the light of day! So here goes: My [...]
(another installment – probably the second to last – of travel adventures and pictures from our just-completed winter break) Borobudur is Java’s largest Buddhist temple. Historians think it was constructed before Prambanan during a time when Hinduism and Buddhism co-existed peacefully on the island of Java. According to our LP, when viewed from the air, [...]
Breck shares his birthday with India’s Republic Day (so he always had a school holiday when we lived in Mumbai) and (as I learned yesterday) Australia Day. So happy birthday to all of them. He’s having a Guy Party this weekend – he made up invitations that invited friends to “explore their inner guyness” as [...]
(Susan’s descriptions of our travels through central Java continue from here, here, and here) Once, after a full day of exploring Yogya, fully restored, Susan and Alea decided to hop a Pedi-cab and go to the Sono-Budoyo museum to take in an evening wayang kulit performance. Wayang kulitare flat leather puppets managed by three sticks [...]
(still more info from our Winter Break trip – we’ve already spent time on the islands of Gili Trawangan snd Lombok getting certified to dive, spent some time in the city of Yogyakarta and visited the Hindu temple at Prambanan. This entry is from an afternoon while we were staying outside the Buddhist complex at [...]
(more info from our Winter Break trip – we’ve already spent time on the islands of Gili Trawangan snd Lombok getting certified to dive, and spent some time in the city of Yogyakarta. This is the recap of a day trip we took from Yogya to the Hindu temple complex at Prambanan) Prambanan is the [...]
(Susan’s travelogue about getting our diving certifications) This was our first ‘working vacation’; we wanted to get PADI Open Water diving certified. We went to Gili Trawangan, a small island off the coast of Lombok (east of Bali in the province of Nusa Tengara). We stayed at Dream Divers, one of more than 15 dive [...]
That’s pronounced “Joag Jakarta” by the way, with a long “O.” I’m not really sure why it is spelled that way, but that’s how the locals do it, so that’s the way it’s being blogged, darn it. After our New Year’s pool party adventure, we took a day to get our heads screwed on straight [...]
So our camera wasn’t used, but a few pictures do exist of our dinner party, fireworks show, and pool shenanigans. We had the Medina and Anderson families over, along with their kids visiting from college and jobs, and we rocked the house! Following the festivities, we took a day to recover, and then we were [...]
Just a quick post of some pictures from our underwater adventures. I borrowed an underwater camera from a colleague, but discovered on arrival in the islands that there was no memory card! Luckily, one of the diving instructors has a side business of taking photos for groups that he takes out, so on our last [...]
We’re back from our vacation on Lombok and the Gili Islands. We had an absolutely spectacular time learning how to scuba dive and just soaking in the sunlight on some of Indonesia’s deserted white sand beaches. While the lack of internet connectivity cost me any shot at a fantasy football championship, that was a small [...]
The Stutz family is very excited to be sending season’s greetings from a new part of the world (for us!). After four fabulous and rewarding years at the American School of Bombay, it was time to move on and explore another part of the planet. In mid-January, we accepted jobs in sunny Jakarta, Indonesia at [...]
Not the series, but literally the color of our wall. Susan and Alea decided to spice up the house and spent the afternoon painting last weekend. According to the powers that be, the color really “draws out the hue in our carpets and reflects the shade of our Buddhist painting.” Um, ok.
And the tree is up! We had a slacker evening for homework, so we decided to get this holiday show on the road. Judging by the cats’ reactions to the new living room denizen, we’ll have to wait a few days to put any decorations on it, but at least the first step has been [...]
Our cats hate the pool, but are still morbidly fascinated by it (sort of like Alea’s dedication to “Master Chef“). We tempted one of them out there the other night with our new cooler, which is pretty awesome in its own right (and cheaper to buy here than in the USA!). It is called the [...]
Waking up is tough, especially when the day starts as follows: Me: “Why is my coffee cup in the bathroom?” Susan: “I was using it to brush my teeth.” I don’t even know where to go from there (and it is only Tuesday).
Apparently we have to move all the way to the far east for Breck to be able to play baseball. There was nothing in Serbia, nothing in India (unless you count cricket), and we always got back too late/left too early in the summers to participate in the USA. But here in J-Town, there is [...]
My homeroom class was so excited about today’s date that they requested to stay an extra minute after class ended to watch the clock count down to the time noted. We all started cheering and applauding when the time hit 11:11, and eleven seconds later the crowd really went wild. I guess you could say [...]
Our school is moving towards a technology-rich environment, and many of our kids own the latest in digital tools. The pace of modern change, however, is such that there is no way any one person (or group of people) will be able to keep up with all the latest trends. One of our fellow teachers [...]
Our pretty little horny kitty came home from the vet today, minus her ovaries and plus a shaved belly. She sported the infamous plastic “Cone of Shame” (which is apparently officially known as an Elizabethan Collar) to keep her from licking her incision. Linsea and Dori hit it right off again, playing and wrestling (to [...]
We’ve posted a few pictures of the house’s exterior, but today’s entry shows off what the inside of our home looks like. It is MUCH bigger than our apartment in Mumbai, and so even with our shipment here there seems like plenty of room to add more. And boy, have we tried to do so… [...]
Not much going on in Jakarta, other than a middle school social, but WOW!! Did Breck ever go all out as an Orc Zombie:
Grocery shopping today, I passed the meat counter, and there was fried chicken for sale. I felt like a snack, and took the smallest packet available. When I opened it up, though, I was in for a surprise: It was a packaged portion of fried skin! I always get mocked at the in-laws’ Thanksgiving dinners, [...]
