Updates since the last blog:

On Saturday we went to the market. While in some ways a typical Asian market, this one was particularly fun because we had a local guide, Min (a man), who's great. It was mostly a food market, though it also had some other stuff (junk), and Min led us in a lot of sampling. My favorites included some fried falafal-like things that were Indian, peanut pancakes (crepe with butter and peanuts), and fresh pineapple. I also found another new fruit (langan?) that I am allergic to. Other than that we saw a ton of fresh vegetables, many of them new to me, as well as some jellyfish and interesting forms of meat. All told we spent over an hour there and I greatly enjoyed it.

While waiting to move on to dinner, I also got to hear from Min more about Habitat in general; highlights included learning that they are not exclusively Christian in the sense if the recipients are Muslim, as Eddie and Katie are, they receive a Koran (instead of a bible) with the keys to the house. Interesting, and in my opinion appropriate. Later that night we also went out as a group for the first time - tons of fun. It's interesting hanging out with people of such different ages - makes for a neat dynamic.

Sunday morning began with a 7:30am pilates session (Andrea, one of the BCG Stanford grads, is an instructor back home and several of us were interested in trying her class, so we rented out the hotel conference room for an hour). It was ridiculously hard - so much so that I really couldn't do much of it and didn't even really get a workout because I spent most of the time in a failure state. Nonetheless, it was fun, and it was a great prequel to the next event: the spa. I got a 1-hour massage and then some stim on the left side of my neck to try to adjust the chronic sleep-induced ache that has returned.

That afternoon we went to the rainforest wold music festival, which was awesome. I had low expectations going into it, and it turned out to be very cool. The afternoon started out with 2 workshops; I chose feuding fiddles and an introduction to Afghani music, which I thought I was going to hate and ended up really liking. They had a drummer that was unbelievable (and drums that were unbelieveable). One was sort of a tom tom with a little iron plate in the middle that allowed the player to make about 15 different sounds, and he had incredibly fast hands.

We took a 2-hour break to eat some good ethnic food, and then that night there was a big concert with 11 bands from all over the world - local to kick it off, then Afghanistan, Poland, UK, Vietnam, Tuva (which I deduced and have since confirmed is near Mongolia), Kuala Lumpur, Italy, South America and Madegascar. Each group played for between 15 and 60 minutes each, and it was really interesting. The Vietnamese group had some crazy instruments including clapping their hands in front of pipes (like you can do on your mouth). (The woman actually started out by playing a song on her mouth (something we all knew so we could see it was working)). They also had some ... weird ones - hard to describe, but cool. The polish band ("Shannon") is also worth looking up - almost Dave Matthews like, but different (same same but different!). The fiddler was great though - had seen him in the afternoon workshop too. We left the concert at about 12:30 and then bussed back for an hour.

Monday we got started late because we were up late the night before, but still made good progress, and today we finished up our work on the house! Eric, our foreman, said we did well - were ahead of schedule (and hopefully made a house that won't fall down). We finished all the brickwork except for a tricky spot in what will be the ceiling of the bathroom, and plastered several of the walls (turns out plastering is my favorite task). We're in the process of assembling pictures, so I will have some soon, but suffice it to say that we build a house! Pretty cool.

Tonight we have our local farewell dinner with the affiliate and then tomorrow we leave for the country to visit a long house hill tribe for 2 days. Then Friday we depart! It's gone quite quickly (I seem to say that about every location) but has been a great time (also say that about every location). Again as usual though, I am really looking forward to the next stage too!

written by  GoBlue on July 17, 2007 from Kuching, Malaysia
from the travel blog: Joc's Journeys
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All the music festival stuff sounds very cool. Did they have any instruments for sale? ;) Congrats on the house -- a big accomplishment! (btw... my parents still check the blog everyday. they love it! keep it coming.)

written by  Jennie on July 17, 2007

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