Maybe in Oz

Last weekend we took advantage of the Tuesday Australia Day holiday to spend a long weekend with our friends in Bright.  We made the four hour drive from Melbourne on Friday night and had a spectacular sunset view through the trees. Saturday morning Phil and Glenda went for a bike ride in preparation for their big 200 km ride the following day.  Meanwhile, John and I went for a walk along the Ovens River.  It was a beautiful walk through the canyon and the scenery was peaceful and spectacular.
We spent the rest of the day relaxing, something we don't do nearly often enough at home.  Sunday morning Phil and Glenda started their Alpine Classic 200 km bike ride at 4 am.  They road up Mt Buffalo and Falls Creek, making for a long day of climbing peaks.  
Maybe and I met Phil at 8 am when he passed through Bright and helped him fuel up for the rest of the ride.
Glenda finished at 3 pm and Phil finished a couple hours later.  Maybe thought it was an exhausting day, between the naps in the s…

My second day in Jakarta was nice and boring.  Work meetings all day, and my throat was really sore so I went to bed pretty much right after work.  Thursday started out pretty much the same way - more sore throats.  The hotel had a giant variety of breakfast food from all over Asia, so I had a nice spicy bowl of chicken broth to clear up my throat.  The curries, stir fries, noodles, and soups are usually a bit much for me for breakfast, I'm definitely more used to an easy bowl of cereal or some bacon and eggs.

We went into the office for some more meeting but then things got interesting entirely too quickly.

It was about 11 am, we were in the middle of a meeting and an admin walked in and called the meeting leader out.  He came back in a few minutes later and told us there were some bombings nearby and since the office manager was out he was in charge of making sure everyone was accounted for and ok.  We all started looking online and found just short stories online indicating that …

I spent this past week in Jakarta for a work trip.  I figured my recent trip to Bali was probably a basic introduction to the culture there, but knowing that just the city of Jakarta has roughly the same population as the entire country of Australia meant it would be on a very different scale.  I knew that I should probably leave my jewellery at home, that the hotel we were staying at had metal detectors, and that an extra level of caution and awareness would be required on this trip.  But pretty much anything I thought I knew was useless because the trip became so completely unexpected that none of that even mattered.

We arrived Monday evening to the busy Jakarta airport, and right away I felt the humidity and smelled that hard to describe but distinct smell of Indonesia.  The sun was starting to set as our driver took us to the hotel, though you couldn't really see it through the solid layer of haze covering the sky.  The traffic was fine on the freeway, but once we exited I star…