Tuesday: More Meetings

This morning I went down to breakfast at 7:00am. After taking some Nyquil I slept great and woke about at about 6:00am. I promised I would take a picture of these beautiful juices. They thought I was crazy but it is such a beautiful rainbow of colors. I had my usual american breakfast of coffee, juice, eggs, toast but today I tried a few indonesia dishes. One was noodles with eggs, carrots and cabbage. The other was fried rice. It is so weird (to me) to eat these foods at breakfast. I'm hoping at some time I become a little more adventurous and have the Udon noodle soup for breakfast!

Orange, watermelon, honey dew, pineapple and cucumber juices.

View from the ILO offices on the 22nd floor.

We left at 8:00am for our meeting at 9am. We didn't want to be late and figured it would take 30 minutes to get there at the most. We were going to the same place as yesterday but we didn't really pay attention yesterday to where we went because we travelled with a person we work with who lives in Indonesia. We had an address from an invitation we received and we did not realize it had changed. So we went to the wrong building. When we got inside they didn't speak English so they found someone in the Ministry that did. She told us they have another building and we needed to take a taxi there (our taxi driver left already). So she took us to the street hailed a taxi and she gave hime directions. She was so NICE and KIND! Finally we arrived to the right building 45 minutes later and 25 minutes late! But as it turned out everyone was slow today and the meeting had not even started. I was to present first so it was a bit of a stress but the presentation went fine. My presentation had to be translated into Bahasa Indonesia (which is the local language) and that was interesting. The meeting went fairly well and after my presentation I didn't feel like I wanted to hide under a rock and never come out.

We had about 8 minutes to eat lunch before we raced off to another meeting. This time we (directionally challenged) got to take the ILO car to the ILO offices so we didn't get lost. Again, the presentation went fairly well (no hiding) and the meeting was really worth while and interesting. I was sure if yesterday's meeting was worth us attending but today I thought was interesting and great.

View of housing area out of ILO 22nd floor offices.

After we left the ILO we walked down the street lined with trees (vertical line of trees) to our hotel. It was an interesting walk through a neighborhood. There was lots of little food stands. I'm extremely skeptical about the food in these stands so I have never had anything. There was also lots of garbage every where, dirt and dust. Some of the homes on these streets were actually pretty beautiful thought with stained glass windows. While we were walking there was a call to prayer and people were walking, bicycling, and motorbiking to the mosque.

When we got back to the hotel, I went for a dip in the pool sorry for the night time picture. There were bats flying low to the water which kind of creeped me out so I didn't stay in the water too long. After that I went to the hot pool and then the sauna. I showered in the gym and came back up to my room and decided to stay in. I feel exhausted. So I order room service and am going to read, relax and watch Thomas Crowne Affair in bed. Tomorrow we have a breakfast meeting and then we have rented a car to travel to Bandung for a meeting.

You may not get a post from me tomorrow but let's see.

Love you!

A night time view of the pool.