idul fitri and still no rain

Well, our trip to Banyuwangi was wonderful. For the first leg of our trip we traveled by train. We went to the super crowded train station and were entertained by an Asian-flavored Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band as we waited for our train.

The trip there was quite lovely, for several hours we rode through the countryside where there's not so many people, but there is a lot of rice. We got off the train and went to A's house in Banyuwangi city.
We spent the next day going to the beach and parasailing; we could see Bali the whole time! A's family was wonderful, except they didn't really speak the language that we study, so A spent a lot of time translating to English for us.

Saturday was Idul Fitri. It's like Christmas; there are special T.V. programs, everybody wears new clothes, there are special foods and everyone goes to grandma's house (and stops at everybody else's house on the way there). We spent about six hours going from house to house, we even got in an old van and drove out to a village to see a crazy lady that lives with a bunch of cats. Grandma's house was definitely the place to be that day. While we were there we listened to grandpa talk about his trip to Seattle back in the day and were stuffed full of mystery meat meatballs called bakso.
Saturday we drove back home, for the first part of the drive we had the ocean and Bali on our right and volcanoes on our left. Beautiful!

So, now we are back and it's hot. We sweat a lot, take lots of showers. Lots of cold showers. We are just waiting for the rains to come and cool off this place! Supposedly they will start soon, but thanks to global warming and Al Gore we are probably looking at few more weeks of heat. In fact, at this moment my computer is telling me that it is 81 degrees and raining right here where I live. I would have to disagree. There's mosquitoes swarming around some sweat soaked Hamptons and no rain in sight.