Micky D's

Well I never thought I would say that I enjoyed eating 3 nights in a row at McDonald's for supper but I did.  Our family along with 2 other families had to venture to Jakarta for a couple days to renew our passports.  Yep it's been almost 60 days already in country and our temporary visas came due.  Couple of the big high lights beside eating at McDonald's was having A/C in the hotel rooms and for Julie best of all they were ant free.  As well the kids loved eating at McDonald and in all honesty I enjoyed it too.  The passport renewal procedure was pretty painless as we had an amazing MAF team there that help us go through the process.  We also navigated taxi rides, shopping malls, airports with using our new basic language skills and managed to accomplish our goals and return safely home.  Some of the surprises or down sides of  the trip was that we had four twin beds in two different rooms for our family so we were short a bed.  Julie was the hero and shared a bed with Jaclynn.  The city was crazy busy for this Canadian farm boy.  But I guess when you are in a city with possibly more people than all of Canada things will be busy and crowded.  I was glad to get back to Salatiga where life moves a little slower.

I wish we were better with the camera as we saw so much and took so little pictures sorry.

Okay this wasn't Jakarta but it was our first care package from home :)

One of our rooms in Jakarta.

View from our window.

Cattle hauler Indonesian style.

 Basicly it was a small pickup truck with some side rails and they tied the cattle in place.  Saw a couple that were a bit bigger and had four cows in those ones.  This one only had 2.

Enjoying Pizza Hut for Lunch.

On the scooter side of things I can hardly believe that in essentially 5 days of driving we put just over a 100kms on it already wow.  My feet are very thankful for the wheels.

New Found Freedom of Sorts

Well it finally worked out to buy a set of wheels.  When we set out from Canada we're hoping to manage without.  But we soon discovered that we were just to far away from somethings, mainly school.  To purchase a bike it's not quite as straight forward as back home either.  We still don't have the correct visa for the long term, which also means that we can't own property like vehicles, houses and the like.  So we got help from a good friend of MAF (local of Salatiga) that was willing to put the bike in his name for the time being.  I wish I thought of taking a picture of the odometer sooner but I didn't think of it till 10kms in, as we likely won't have another one is with only 1.3kms.  Currently we can't go to far from home as we don't have plates for it yet but we still managed to put 40+kms in a day and a half.  I think we should get some better gas mileage as well.  It only holds 3.6L from what I gathered from the owners manual which came in one language and it wasn't English :).  And with a liter of bensin ranging from $0.55-$0.70/liter roughly I'm thinking our gas budget will be a little lower here which will be nice.  Multipule trips will however be in order as 5 large Canadians just don't quite fit on a Vario like 5 Indonesians would.

Blessed From Above

This Sunday our entire family was blessed by attending an Indonesian church.  Greg and Jaclynn had gone to it a week before with some friends and really enjoyed it so Greg wanted to take the entire family this time.  Poor Isaac was very scarred and worried right before we left but by the end of the service he was smiling again.  It was a small church but wow can they sing and praise the Lord!  I didn't catch to many of the words but I sure felt the power of the Lord through the singing and the message.  I can't wait until I can sit through a whole sermon and understand what he is saying. My eyes were filled with tears as I got to listen to them sing a couple songs in Indonesian that I new as tunes from back home. It was so amazing to sit through that service and realized that God had provided another church for our family to attend.

Julie

Mt. Telomoyo Trip Pictures

Da Salatiga international biker gang a top Mt. Telomoyo.  This past Sunday morning bright and early well maybe not bright but certainly early (3:30 a.m.).  A group of expat men from Salatiga rode bikes or scooters up the mountain to view the beauty of the sun as it rose above the horizon. A great time was had by most I think, I know I enjoyed it.

  

On the way home we stopped at some rice fields for a break and some more picture taking.