Spaghetti and Peteballs: We have arrived

Thursday, June 2, 2011

We have arrived

We arrived in Yogyakarta, Indonesia yesterday afternoon... after immediate elation from having survived nearly two days of travel (and losing 1 day of our lives to the international dateline), I really don't have much else to say about yesterday. We took a bike taxi into town peddled by a little old man with no front teeth, who I am pretty sure nearly died pushing us up the slight incline in the 32 degree (Celsius) heat and 80% humidity. He even went out of his way to point out the coffin shop on the side of the road to express his feelings with his limited English. Our trip into town was uneventful and we came back to our guest house after an hour. We were in bed by 6pm. Thank you jetlag.

Today on the other hand was quite exciting. We had to be up and ready by 5am for our sunrise trip to the Borobudur temple. 5am was no problem, we were wide awake by 3 and ready for the day ahead. Borobudur is a destination that has been on Pete's wishlist for quite some time because of the movie Baraka. It was just as beautiful as we expected in the early morning mist. However, the unexpected happened when I was snapping a photo of the landscape at the top of Borobudur. A woman tapped me on the shoulder and introduced herself to me. She was extremely friendly... an English teacher from West Java on a trip with her students. Beneath the chatter and the smalltalk lay her motive. A photo with yours truly. This seemed to spark a frenzy among all the other Indonesian tourists. As I looked around the circle of what seemed to be about 100 people, every single one of them had a camera or cell phone out snapping pictures, waiting their turn to stand by my side and say cheese. This continued for hours between Pete and I. Everywhere we went in the temple, a new crowd gathered as we smiled in the blazing sun. I don't know if anyone remembers my emails from India... we got what we thought was a lot of fanfare/picture taking there... but this has never been matched and it was totally unexpected. I guess a lot of the tourists come from small villages and maybe haven't seen a Westerner before.

Here are some pictures, I will post the rest on Facebook and add links later:

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What's in a Name

Why Spaghetti and Peteballs you ask? I will tell you. It was really Pete's older sister Sarah's ingenious discovery. But first a little bit of background dating back to our days in Korea. While we were teaching over there, Pete had a really fun group of boys in one of his classes. They always came up with little English phrases that poked fun at their own ability (or shall I say inability) to speak English. For example, when asked "how are you?" They would respond with "pineapple" because it reminded them of the common answer "fine". Apparently my name, Stefanie, also reminded them of the word spaghetti. So they walked around the school halls calling me Spaghetti Teecha. Well, it stuck. Pretty soon my own classes were calling me Spaghetti... which eventually followed me home to North America where I still hear it from time to time.

So just a few months ago, long after we had returned home from Hangul, Sarah was driving in her car... calls me laughing... and says she has come up with a nickname for both Pete and I. "Spaghetti and Peteballs". Clean simple humor. In fact, it is like one of those good old dad jokes... corny yet somehow funny. Get your mind out of the gutter.