Category Archives: Life in IndonesiaThe combined middle and high school bands put on quite the performance this afternoon!
Mathcounts in Singapore got off to a bit of a rough start, as one of our students was turned away at the airport due to visa issues, then we had a flight cancellation, and finally a broken bus, the team finally made it and was raring to go. Late night studying and quick trips to Subway were all the rage for our kids.
Here’s the team in all their glory after today’s competition. Mathcounts can get rough…
Welcome back to Jakarta. Here’s how I’m spending the first day after vacation: watching a bunch of mechanics try to figure out what is wrong with the car. At least the guy from the Toyota shop makes house calls!
White Elephant party last night – I am now the proud owner of a set of bath salts and body lotions.
Had our Thanksgiving dinner yesterday – what a fantastic evening with a super group of people!
We headed downtown this morning for a session on Clean Up Jakarta day. A great bunch of teachers, administrators, parents, and kids took the time to positively impact our adopted home. We got good and sweaty doing some good for the city!
Photo credit to Alea for discovering our new favorite neighborhood street food stall (mie ayam = a very simple yet popular chicken noodle dish)
A group of us went downtown this weekend to visit the old Batavia boat docks in Jakarta. Led by a group of guys who have been there a number of times, we had the opportunity to visit and take pictures of places that few Westerners get to visit. I took too many photos to post at once, so here’s an album of some of the faces we saw along the way. Most of them are dock workers, more than happy to take a break for the cameras…
School’s back in session, and what better way to get things going than with the kids? Here they are, grades 11 and 9 – both in high school this year!!
Breck after the first night with his rent-a-baby, Michael. Welcome to parenthood, buddy!
At her final concert of the year tonight, Alea was presented with the Patrick S. Gimore award “for outstanding contributions to band.” Awesomely cool – we are so proud of all the hard work she puts in!
Happy St. Pat’s from our pool in sunny Jakarta and The Stutz Family’s Groovy Gecko Grill!
Pi Day teachers @ JIS (this is why St. Patrick’s always gets lost in the shuffle). Memorization contest at lunch – top finishers were 161, 252, and 468 digits of pi – by 6th and 7th graders!! Pretty crazy…
JIS Middle school production of a Shakespeare classic!
Not the real softball I’m coaching, but the fun softball we’re playing. Teachers face off against the girls’ varsity team on Tuesday nights, and it is a real hoot. Sometimes they win, sometimes we win, but it is always a lot of fun. Here’s a fun team picture at the end of one of our evenings!
Phew – thank goodness Alea and I got our emergency supply shopping done this afternoon, in case we have another flood day tomorrow. Black olives, coffee, baguette, Pringles (regular and seaweed flavor), plenty of meat to grill, and 5 cases of Anker. Bring on the monsoon, baby!!!
Our holiday season was festive and bright! We got the tree up and lights lit in November – the latest we’ve waited in a long time! The White Elephant was a huge success, and we had loads of fun getting everyone set for the holiday. Presents were opened on the 16th, and we are off in the morning for a 3-week adventure through Cambodia and Laos. Happy holidays to all!!
UN Day is always a fun opportunity to dress up (or down, depending on your taste for patriotic clothing). The best part about things is the PTA-hosted food bazaar, which is a hugely delicious smorgasbord from all over the world, with all the moms trying to outdo one another.
Here is a group shot of our USA contingent – and when you notice it, I just want to say I am NOT the one responsible for the Photoshop Fail in this picture!!
Just adding a wrapup of some stuff from around the house here, centered on Halloween.
We didn’t really do a full-on celebration, but we were still in the mood to carve. We got a couple of pumpkins, and made a scary face and a cat, but our real fun was in doing carrots! We spent an evening putting little faces on them and then posing them in front of candles for a neat little effect:
There was a middle school social that Dave and Breck attended. Breck got zombiefied with a bloody face, while Dave’s outfit got misplaced somewhere in cyberspace:
(The fine print reads “The Halloween costume you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Or Mr. Stutz might simply be too lame to have made one in the first place.)
We had our own scary cat on Saturday morning, as Linsea tried to get into the fish tank. We caught her red-handed (or laser-eyed, as the case might be):
Always an exciting time around the Stutz house…
Here are pictures from our recent trip to the island of Kalimantan (as it is known in Indonesia) or Borneo (as the rest of the world calls it. We had a fabulous 4 days/3 nights of living on a boat and exploring the back waterways of an enormous orangutan preserve.
The area was set aside in the early 70’s, thanks to the efforts of Birute Galdikas, one of Louis Leakey’s famed “Trimates” (or “Leakey’s Angels;” 3 female researchers that he worked with establishing long-term study centers for primates. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey are the other two). The efforts have focused both on studying the animals and discouraging poaching and land misuse.
We took way too many pictures, relaxed far too much, and just generally enjoyed ourselves more than we deserve. We’d posted these pictures previously on Facebook, but also wanted to make the gallery available here.
Enjoy!!
The first week is always a bit of a blur for teachers and kids and teachers, especially for all the “newbies.” Most of the first few events are designed to help get over some of the anxiety attendant with that rush of activity. For example, our first assembly at the middle school featured, for the second year in a row, a traditional welcoming Balinese dance. And, of course, for the second year in a row, I didn’t have a camera.
Luckily others did, and I was actually able to steal one from a fellow teacher and grab some shots from the back of the stage, looking out at the crowd of kids. Interestingly enough, even though I didn’t know it at the time, Breck is just visible beyond the dancer’s skirt (he’s in a red t-shirt).
As I noted when I first put this shot on Facebook, I love working at a place where the welcome-back-to-school assembly includes an exotic traditional dance. Very cool!
It is here, and we are off running. Here’s the schedule of events:
Whoo hoo! But at least we did have the chance to take our traditional “last day of school” picture. Check out how much the kids (and the morning glory!) have grown compared to our shot at the start of the year.
You can also see all their school year pictures here…
Good stuff, Maynerd!
