congatulations to montenegro the world's newest country... check them out on wikipedia... i always wondered why they would choose to stay affiliated with serbia... i guess they did too.  ¶ 10:07 AM 0 comments

  merbabu I climbed mount merbabu this morning:

began at midnight
reached the top at 615am

missed my goal of getting there for sunrise, but it was still really awesome.

the view from the top is of many of central java's other volcanoes that poke above the cloud cover... most prominent of which is merapi - because it's only 8km away; and it's erupting a little bit.  ¶ 11:14 AM 0 comments

  tungurahua http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/18/ecuador.volcano.ap/index.html

I hiked in the direction of the summit of this volcano with Camilo in between freshman and sophomore years when preparing to climb a different mountain. it was about to erupt and cause mass evacuations back then, too. i still remember seeing the huge plume of smoke and thinking, "i really just tried to climb that thing?! i'm dumb."

on that note, climbing merbabu with agung in a couple days - a birthday present to myself. trying to reach the summit at sunrise on sunday... hopefully awesome pictures SAFELY taken of merapi to follow.

i'm still dumb.  ¶ 11:59 AM 0 comments

  ideas that run unchecked through my mind in the absence of enlish-speaking human contact pragmatic application of liberation theology, coopting the potential of a booming Lombok tourism industry to channel a portion of the resultant wealth towards ensuring high standards of health care and education are available to all of the island's residents, a full 25% of whom live on less than $1/day.

sensible? overreaching? herculean? awesome?

the previous idea, since scrapped, was to use start-up funds available from my former employer in aceh to expand access to insitutions of secondary education for indonesia's very poor. beginning in aceh and partnering with already established/entrenched local ngos working to sustain the primary education sector, the program would provide free (or nearly free) financing to gifted but destitute high school graduates... allowing them to extend their education (which otherwise would have been impossible due to indonesia's poorly developed education financing options). This work in Aceh would be a feasibility test whose success would be used as a springboard for expanding the program nationwide... in a movement involving national government buy-in, supplemental financing from america, and participation from financial aid offices of universities currently operating in more complex education financing environments.

i dropped the idea when further discussions with my friends out here in jogja revealed that there are some options for indonesia's smart but very poor already in place, including gov't funding and university specific funding.

would have been cool though - straight out of article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights... and providing incentives for poor persons to make strong commitments to their childrens education (because partner local ngos would make them aware of the very real possibility that good marks could lead to a free college education which would, ion turn, lead to greater earning potential... and a way out of structural oppression)  ¶ 2:25 AM 0 comments

  ideas that run unchecked through my mind in the absence of enlish-speaking human contact pragmatic application of liberation theology, coopting the potential of a booming Lombok tourism industry to channel a portion of the resultant wealth towards ensuring high standards of health care and education are available to all of the island's residents, a full 25% of whom live on less than $1/day.

sensible? overreaching? herculean? awesome?

the previous idea, since scrapped, was to use start-up funds available from my former employer in aceh to expand access to insitutions of secondary education for indonesia's very poor. beginning in aceh and partnering with already established/entrenched local ngos working to sustain the primary education sector, the program would provide free (or nearly free) financing to gifted but destitute high school graduates... allowing them to extend their education (which otherwise would have been impossible due to indonesia's poorly developed education financing options). This work in Aceh would be a feasibility test whose success would be used as a springboard for expanding the program nationwide... in a movement involving national government buy-in, supplemental financing from america, and participation from financial aid offices of universities currently operating in more complex education financing environments.

i dropped the idea when further discussions with my friends out here in jogja revealed that there are some options for indonesia's smart but very poor already in place, including gov't funding and university specific funding.

would have been cool though - straight out of article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights... and providing incentives for poor persons to make strong commitments to their childrens education (because partner local ngos would make them aware of the very real possibility that good marks could lead to a free college education which would, ion turn, lead to greater earning potential... and a way out of structural oppression)  ¶ 2:25 AM 0 comments

  photos from merapi trip pictures from my trip to merapi last weekend. as far as i can tell, i got to about 1.5 km as the bird flies from the crater. things of note: yes, riding on the back of somebody else's motorbike is kinda homoerotic (notice that agung did not appreciate being man-stradled for hours at a time). the helmet you see me wearing in the en route picture broke in the little accident we had. the island of java has the most densely populated rural sector of any place in the world... there's a whole lot of people that live on this mountain... crap this isn't working. enjoy these for now... i'll share the rest when i get access to a better internet connection   ¶ 7:25 AM 0 comments

  about 30 mins ago, i was sitting with some of the jogja dudes savoring a drink (es cappucino is watered down coffee with condensed milk and humongous chunks of ice), we were chilling at a restaurant that overlooks one of 3 rivers that runs north/south through jogja, i saw 2 dudes descend the steep stairs to the river, piss in the river, remove their shoes, wade across the river downstream from where they pissed.

gross.  ¶ 12:02 PM 0 comments

  plan for tomorrow http://travelmax.statravel.co.uk/sisp/index.htm?fx=event&event_id=28166

The Waisak Festival at Borobudur.

It looks like it'll probably be a huge tourist trap, but I'm going anyhow because it's still apparently the collest day (night) of the year to go to Borobudur... and I seriously doubt I'll ever again have this perfect of an opportunity to go.  ¶ 1:31 AM 0 comments

  jalan jalan students here don't seem to do much... in fact, the kids i've been hanging out with don't really do anything. they just hang out at different places every night. they call it jalan jalan  ¶ 11:31 AM 0 comments

  birthday stuff if anybody cares and anybody wants to send me something, my birthday is coming up soon. to help you out a little, i've put together a little list of what i want:

-books (good contemporary novels, good classic literature, maybe some hemingway, maybe an anthology of sen essays, maybe even a book explaining the nuts and bolts of educational loan mechanisms and how theyu're value/cost is determined)
-music (you'll have to ask me if your choice is ok, unless you're brave/know me extremely well)

ok, well if you want to send me something, please email me and i'll figure out my mail address and send it to you privately.  ¶ 10:51 PM 0 comments

  bloggers: a culture of sociopathy? Living in a place where to communicate I must modify my English at all times really has this blog going gangbusters. All of a sudden, without an alternative outlet for my pent up desire for self-expression, I'm writing on this thing all the time.

it really makes me wonder about other bloggers, though. I feel like I have an excuse because I'm living in a city of 2,000,000 people but I know exactly 0000001 person with whom i can have a pure, highbrow american english conversation - and he only comes into town once or twice a week. Most bloggers live in their own country, though!!! What is going on with their lives that they have to turn to a medium that doesn't really respond as a major form of communication??

ok ok ok, i know that's a flawed argument and i don't need you (anybody) to point out the obvious sticking points to me. what i would like, though, is for somebody out there to distill my core question and help me answer it.

i'll even help begin the process...

manoah's core question: what is the blogger's motivation to blog so much rather than utilize other, seemingly more efficient means of self-expression (like talking)?

manoah's problem: without having an immediately more appropriate answer to this question, i worry that the answer might be that bloggers who post to their blog a lot choose to blog because they are incabable (for whatever reason) of properly communicating in using more mainstreamed modes in the societies in which they live. i worry this may be sign of possible sociopathy.

(all of this meandering conjecture is spawned from the temporary sociopathy (or temporarily heightened levels of sociopathy) that i'm currently experiencing)

ok, somebody help me think this through.

also somebody please keep me entertained - i'm bored and i'm making dumb posts to my blog.

also, please notice that the name has changed... again.  ¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments

  cnn quote - darfur "Currently, 7,000 peacekeepers from the African Union are trying to maintain order in the nearly 1,000 camps for internally displaced refugees."

that's really lame. it's unbelievable to me that the atrocities occurring in that country have been allowed to go on for this long. in my opinion, the worst thing to happen for Darfurians and other victims of state-sponsored violence in southern and western sudan was hurricane katrina. it really seemed to eschew the international disaster spotlight and allow the GoS to avoid this process of escalating intervention - and therefore keep killing lots of people - for many months longer than is excusable.  ¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments

  Google Earth: New Selo, DIY, Indonesia i spent all of today on a spur-of-the-moment adventure of sorts.

the moment, though, was last night. i realized that i've been hypng this damn volcano so much because i'm really excited about it and i want to see lava and partially-consumed animal remains an the whole 9 yards... i've also been developing an unhealthy personal mantra that goes something like: "what the fuck, why not? i am supposed to be adventuring" (it's sort of an unspoken mantra, but that's the gist of it)

up to this point i've been using the mantra for silly things like eating nasty-looking 'probably not' chicken, taking a crap while watching a roach crawl around the bathroom, or having four drinks too many when partying in the middle of a city of 10 million people whose language i don't speak and forgetting how to get home.

dumb mantra + erupting volcano + awe-struck indonesian university students (poor kids think americans are cool) = 12 hour trip to Mount Merapi.

for those who don't know, Mount Merapi is erupting right now, and has been for the last two days.

[ok, i'm going to take a step back because i just remembered i vital piece of the narrative but i don't like editing: what really started this Merapi travel bug was dinner friday night with my friend nat (frisbee, studying indonesian with the actual purpose of studying bird communities in rural kalimantan) where he described what's going on right now with the volcano. Apparently volcanoes are divided into 4 categories. Merapi was just upgraded from a 2 to a 3. Along with revealing this upgrade, Nat also told me about a damage map that supposedly exists. This map breaks down the region surrounding Merapi into four sectors, delineated by expected damage resulting from an eruption. sector 1 is what i like to call 'the kill zone' - it lies in the direct path of both debris and lava flow. levels of danger decrease in some logical pattern from there. anyhow, Nat said there's a village that's close to the mountain in a kind of scary way that is in a little bubble of zone 2. it's in this bubble because it's actually surrounded by areas designated 'kill zone' (personal nomenclature). the village is behind some little hill that means no direct hits from explosions and lava would flow around it on both sides.]

last night i excitedly related that story to the indonesian college dudes i've been hanging out with. to my surprise, they new exactly what i was talking about. further, when i got even more excited and said "i want to go there, who's going with me" (meaning who will take me, please somebody take me), one of them actually said yes. over the course of the night, this evolved into me getting up there far enough to take a lava bath. i completely expected this to scare the committment out of the kid (agung), but he stuck to his guns. on a side note, i did make it through the two big trees blindfolded. in jogjakarta tradition this means that i get a wish - any wish - to come true (and it's cooler than i make it sound). they asked, i told them...

... agung met me at my kost at 930 to go volcano climbing. after a trip to the other side of jogja to get a digital camera and some brunch (soto pigeon) we were off. he took the long route, which made me think he was trying to divert me to lesser adventures, but he stuck to his guns - at least on the driving part.

riding for hours on the back of a motorbike is not fun at all, by the way. i've got so much more respect for che now that i've tried doing it myself. i spent about 7 hours today scared shitless of falling off the back of that bike.

it didn't help that agung lost control on a muddy patch of road early on and we both hit the pavement. nothing bad, just bumps and bruises, but - like i just said - "scared shitless of falling off the back of that bike."

we stopped for a break about halfway up. I thought it was just a break, it turned out there were some awesome waterfalls that only the locals (agung is a local) know about. took some cool pictures, had fun walking around, got back on the bike and headed up the saddle.

I say saddle because Selo is actually located between two volcanoes, it's right in between Merbabu and Merapi. no crashes or falling off bikes on this section of the drive, but it did take us through the kill zone (i admit that sounds a lot cooler than it actually was). ok, blah blah blah... we got to the trailhead, it was two pm, we began our ascent.

here comes the anticlimax.

agung is a chain smoker and he can't handle cold climate and he apparently wasn't as ready to die as i was. there was thick cloud cover - which was lame. we hiked for about 40 minutes, which was about as long as i could push it before agung's lungs started to hurt enough for his will to fail. the really unfortunate thing about indonesians (biased stereotyping to follow) is that they're really too polite to actually say "no i want to stop now." us stopping involved agung talking more and more about his lungs and asking about possibly turning around at the saddle and then asking if the weather instruments we'd just passed could signify the saddle and then agreeing to hike for fifteen more minutes and then wanting to stop for ten minutes to take some pictures.

anyhow, i don't actually have hiking boots with me and i had a guide who i figured was going to follow me until i either turned around or rudely told him that i was going to push on.

ok we turned around in the middle of a cloud bank nowhere near the lava and i was mad at agung and i was mad at myself, but it was probably the smart move. we got back to the parking lot before 330. torrential rain and agung getting incorrect directions from a villager led to lots of unhappy tropical thunderstorm motorcycle adventuring. i kept envisioning death by motorcycle. there was about an hour or so of the ride where i couldn't even open my eyes because i couldn't find a way to keep the rain from landing directly in them.

ate some dinner when the rain stopped... chilled with agung's folks for a while... got back to jogja late evening.

day begins: 945am
day ends: 1030pm

my butt hurts and i'm disappointed about not coming closer to death-by-lava, but i overall had an excellent time and an excellent adventure. major props to agung for needlessly volunteering to be my full-day chauffer.

i'll post the pictures when i get them.  ¶ 10:35 AM 0 comments

  quasi-facts --> low quality analysis i've been mulling over the desire to post insights into indonesian culture for a while. on one hand, i've got a bunch. on the other hand, a lot of them are probably incorrect. as an example, the epiphany i reached today:

quasi-fact #1 -- all indonesians are amazingly skinny
quasi-fact #2 -- all indonesians eat a whole lot of food
quasi-fact #3 -- most food i see eaten by indonesian comes from street vendors
...
quasi-grounded assumption #1 -- these street vendors definitely do not strive to achieve high standards of cleanliness (or really any 'standards' of cleanliness)
...
low quality analysis/epiphany -- indonesians stay so skinny because an unbelievably high number of them must have tapeworms!

this is the sort of stuff that comes to mind... but it's the sort of stuff i can't really post except in jest. it's just mean. right?  ¶ 10:26 AM 0 comments

  Jogjakarta Hello to the 5 people who read this blog!

I'm on an exasperatingly slow internet connection in Jogjakarta right now, so please excuse me for giving you the following task:

go to google earth, look up "mount merapi," then zoom out or in until you can appreciate how close it is to jogjakarta. next, go to google and read about how it is about to blow up any day now.

of course, jogja is supposed to be safe, but i'm going to witness my first live volcanic eruption! awesome! maybe i can get RI to let me start a volcano relief program.

I've come out to Jogja because it's Indonesia's main university town and consequently also the hub of Bahasa Indonesia courses for English speakers. I'll be here for 3 weeks trying to develop a basic understanding of the language which i can hopefully build on my own later on.

While here i'm staying in a kost, which is a boarding house for university students... no ac... no flush toilet... mosquitoes... roaches. BUT, rp.300,000 for the entire month. So the price is very right. also, i've find a couple of cool warungs where i can get an awesome dinner for somewhere between rp5000 and rp8000 (nasi goreng, sate ayam)... i love indonesian food.

anyhow, the idea behind coming out here is that everybody i know in Jakarta speaks english to me, so this way i can focus on my studies... and the idea behind living in a kost is that i'll have more to discuss with a 22yr old student than a 52yr old mother of 4. we'll see.

i want to go to lombok and climb to the peak of the volcano... i'm waiting for mike george to come first, though...

and i'm going to WORLDS... indonesia is sending a frisbee team to Perth in November for WORLDS, and ii've been invited to go... awesome! ok, that's about all i've got... send me questions because i am bored.  ¶ 2:07 AM 0 comments