Hooping it up!

This past weekend we had a fabulous weekend. This was largely do to a group we frequently mention on the blog, SELMA cafe. If you forget what that is check out our blog post about it here.
The weekend on started on Thursday night when I went to prep at SELMA. Prep is where you go to Jeff and Lisa's house to help the chef of the week dice, chop, and prepare the food for breakfast the next morning. You also get to enjoy a potluck dinner with the rest of the volunteers. Check out the meal I helped prep here.

The fun continued on Saturday when we went out to a hoop house build. This was the third build we have done. Check out the past ones here. This one was a beautiful (and unheard of) November day. We were wearing t-shirts! I will let Lisa's words and pictures speak for the rest of the day.

The weekend fun kept going on Sunday when we went to a benefit concert for SELMA preformed by Vienna Teng. Vienna is a wonderful singer, song writer, and song writer who now happens to be a first year in Arthur's program. It was in a small intimate setting and I fell in love with one of her songs, which you can check it out here. Once again I will let Lisa's words and pictures tell the rest of the story.

It was an amazing weekend and we have SELMA to thank for it.

Urban Gleaning

I think I posted last year about a coat rack that I made from used hooks and wood. I've made a few more items since then, all from used parts found at the Re-Use center, the woods in Ann Arbor, and yard sales.

Last year's coat rack.

A tree stump lamp, made with the help of Joe's woodshop and a deconstructed yard-sale lamp

My newest: a poster framed by an old window. Now when Courtney and I lie in bed we can pretend we're not in Michigan!

Lunch Share

My office does a lunch share. Once a week someone from the office cooks a vegetarian meal for the rest of the office (6 other people). This means that every Wednesday we come together to eat a delicious meal together. Today was my week. I made a polenta dish with mushrooms, sundried tomatoes, and kale (from our garden!). The recipe can be found here: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/2469. To top it off I made chocolate chip cookies and swung by the farmers market before lunch to pick up a bunch of carrots to go with hummus.

I even managed to bring the meal to work on my bike. I am really getting a hang of this biking to work thing!

Borneo

Borneo. Even just saying the name makes us think of dense jungles full of huge bird-eating spiders and wild monkeys that have never seen a tourist. So we decided to check it out, but we had no idea what to expect. Would the airport be a dirt landing strip? Would we have to bring all our own food? Would we get eaten by giant cockroaches?

Well, the reality isn’t quite like that. The cities in Borneo are pretty developed, and the infrastructure is better than most places in Africa. For example, there was a Starbucks in all three airports we went to in Borneo (that counts as infrastructure, right?).

We first flew into Miri, which is in east Malaysia. Miri is an oil boomtown, and the entire place is seemingly sponsored by Shell and Petronas, including the shiny new petroleum museum. There’s also a very strong Chinese influence in eastern Malaysian Borneo, which we saw in all 3 cities we visited.

From Miri we flew to Gunung Mulu national park, the site of Deer Cave, the largest cave passage in the world and star of the Caves episode of Planet Earth. It was cool. There are 2-3 million bats living there, and almost every night they leave the cave to go hunting, a process that takes almost an hour because there are so many of them.

After a few days in the rainforest of Gunung Mulu, we headed to Kota Kinabalu, up in the northern part of the island. From there we took a bus across Borneo to the Sulu sea, then drove 2 hours into what used to be jungle, but is now palm oil plantation. Unfortunately, about 50% of Malaysian Borneo has been deforested to grow palm oil trees.

But there was a wildlife reserve along the Kinabatangan river, where we spent 2 days cruising the river spotting Proboscus monkeys, lots of birds, and even a wild Orang-Utan. We got close to pygmy elephants, but only heard them. The wildlife and the river there are beautiful, though the proximity to palm plantations was a grim reminder of how endangered many of the species are.

Once we left the jungle, we finished up our honeymoon with an upgrade from our normal budget hotel and backpacker accommodations. We went to a small island 90 minutes off the coast of Borneo, and stayed in a hut at a beach resort for 2 nights before beginning the long journey home.

Check out some of the amazing photos from our time in Borneo.

Borneo

Bali

After the hectic pace of Java, we needed a bit of relaxation. Luckily, Bali was the perfect spot. Bali is beautiful, interesting, and definitely relaxing.

After spending one night in the beach town of Sanur, we waded out to a boat heading to Nusa Lembongan, a small island off of Bali's south coast. Nusa Lembongan has few cars and the pace of life is centered around the constant Hindu ceremonies and the tidal harvesting of the seaweed.

We stayed in a beach hut on the remote side of the island and rented a motor scooter to get around. One the scooter it takes about an hour to tour the whole island, so we had a lot of time to read or nap on the beach. It was a perfect spot to spend a few days.

Then we headed back to the bigger Bali, where we toured terraced rice paddies, visited the Hindu temples, and wandered the streets of the artist town of Ubud (of Eat, Pray, Love fame). Almost 90% Hindu, Balinese life is dominated by ceremonies and the homes and towns are all centered around temples. Even though the temples there are very old, they are still used almost daily, and we ran across many elaborate ceremonies involving entire communities.

We could have easily spent another week in Bali, but were getting pretty excited for our next destination: Borneo.

Check out some of our pictures from Bali.

Bali

Java

After a two day trip that took us through Germany and Thailand we landed in Jakarta, which is on the island of Java in the country of Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of some 20,000 islands and is well known for the wildlife in Sumatra and Borneo, rice paddies, temples, Bali, and the bombings in both Jakarta and Bali that targeted tourist locations. We went because it had a good mix of culture, beaches, and wildlife (and it wasn't the rainy season).

We spent two nights in the crazy, overcrowded, hot, dirty, and fascinating city of Jakarta. We saw a few things but mostly learned how many people you can pack into a very small space (NYC is nothing!) and how it might be easier to take a taxi across the street than to try to cross on your own.

Our next stop was Yogyakarta. To get there we took a train across Java. The train took 8 hours and we spent most of the time watching the mountains, volcanoes, rice paddies, and daily life go by outside our window. Yogyakarta is a good size city, if we hadn't been to Jakarta we would have thought it was a big city but in comparison it was calmer and smaller. The main reason we went to the city was see two temples. Within 45 minutes of the city is the world's largest Buddhist temple and South East Asia's largest Hindu temple. Both were beautiful and amazing feats of human engineering.

After three nights we were now off for our next adventure in Bali. Here are some pictures from our week on Java.

Java

Honeymoon

For the past month we have been on our honeymoon traveling through South East Asia. Four countries, 13 hotels, 12 flights, and six islands later we are home. We are going to post pictures in three groups, a post for each main island we went to. But here are some things we learned from our trip.

1. Java has more motor bikes that you have ever seen in your life (and the drivers are crazy!).
2. You are never far from a Starbucks or a KFC.
3. You have to bargain for everything.
4. Rice paddies are beautiful.
5. Everything is always an adventure, you never know what to expect.
6. Bali is famous for a reason, it is beautiful and fascinating.
7. Stick bugs are really cool.
8. South East Asia is really really really far away.
9. You can watch proboscis monkeys forever.
10. Planet Earth was right, Borneo is really cool.