Leaving Gili Air

The last days, sad to leave, but happy to be heading home, and saying goodbyes amid promises to be back next year.

Littletree did her daily Bahasa Indonesia work over breakfast…

And we got to meet the freshly born twins, Nadiya and Nadira – the newest additions to the family we stay with on Gili Air (pictured being held by their grandmother and great grandmother.)

Littletree spent our last morning playing with Naiela, the little three-year-old girl who lives next door to us; Naiela absolutely adores Littletree, and taught her a bunch of nursery songs in Indonesian.

As a parting gift, Littletree decided to give her soccer ball to Naiela, seeing as proper soccer balls are at such a premium on Gili Air. A very valuable gift indeed!

Naiela was so happy, and Littletree too. Until finally, it was time for us to get on the boat back to Bali. The whole family came out to hug us goodbye, we shall miss them so much!

Happy St Patrick's Day

We had quite the night out, all in green (just for a change) at the local pub, surrounded by faeries and mermaids and draggons and frolicking elves. Put away a few Guinness, and danced a few jigs. I even took home the prize for best-dressed!

And true to tradition, we ended it all in drunken tears and fighting.
Perfect.

Purim Sameach

It's Purim again! The classic example of every Jewish holiday which boils down to: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!  Remember all the fun from last year?

Since Purim fell mid-week, we didn't doing anything much on the day, but tonight night we're all going out dancing at Glo Dance, and then Saturday Littletree is going to a kids dress-up party down the street and there will be a Rocky-Horror party at my place - we'll all get dressed up as our fave characters, eat a feast, drink a lot of caipirinhas, and watch the movie :)

Meanwhile, here's a gorgeous photo of Littletree (then aged 3) and Butterfly, after a full day at the Tel Aviv Purim street party, 2006.

Rain, rain, rain; Flood!

Just to add a little déjà vu from this time last year when all the world around me went under water, it’s been raining again. Wait, raining doesn’t really describe what’s going on – we’ve been in a torrential deluge – 420mm (16.5”) in the last two days! This is coming on top of a whole load of rain over the last week or two.

Yesterday, we got flood warnings, I drove out to visit my beloved Ocean, and already some low-lying areas were under water.

But the roads were mostly clear, and the bridges passable, so we weren’t too worried… until we woke up to find over 100mm (4”) had fallen overnight, and the roof was leaking terribly, and the roads were all impassable, with rapidly rising waters.

Then the crawlspace under the house filled up with water – it got to be about knee-deep before it started seeping through the cracks in the wall and flooding the flat downstairs where Wind and Coola live.

Rushing around with towels and buckets, and in-between dealing with a sick Littletree (who fortuitously came down with a case of gastro in the night), I managed to get down into the muck of the crawlspace and set up a garden hose to siphon water out. At some point the electricity cut out, but it’s back on now. I hope that, at least lasts!

Phew!

In the afternoon, the rain eased a little, and we donned wet-weather gear and went for a walk down the hill, only to find half of the village under water, and all of the roads impassable.

Here’s some scenes from the highway and the back road out of the village – this is actually the bridge over a normally very small creek that resides about ten metres under the bridge it is now totally over the top of. The main river that runs through the village was a massive torrent, about 6 metres over its banks!

Well, at least we’re mostly dry and we have enough food to last a few days. I hope everyone out there is staying dry and has plenty of wine stocked up!

Water Dragon

Happy New Year of the Water Dragon

There has been such a constant stream of so many beautiful people flowing through my house recently, with Wind and Coola living in the flat downstairs, and our good friends Belle and Anasho have been staying, since they are temporarily homeless, as well as frequent visits from an assortment of random hippies and my beloved Ocean.

As group of us got together yesterday for a sacred ceremony to honour the new moon and the start of the Chinese New Year.

We all wrote out pages of our intentions and manifestations for the coming year, I chopped some wood,

We lit a sacred fire, ringed with the surprise rose apples we found growing in the back of our rainforest.

Then we said some prayers and set our intentions before giving the pages to the fire

Then we sat around playing music and dancing and singing before having a yummy feast.

Awesome start to the year!

Create Mystery

Life has been very interesting lately – all sorts of wonderful and amazing things happening. New lessons, opening, expanding… increasing awareness and bliss.

Some of the lessons are challenging, but all are rewarding.

One of my good friends, Wind, and her unschooled daughter Coola moved in to the flat under our house, so there’s been a massive influx of people in and out of the house, lots of friends, and lots of love. And more unschooled kids hanging around :)

One day down in the village I finally ran into Hellena Post – it was so awesome to get to meet her and her crew, and see her fresh kidlet earthside.

Littletree connected immediately with Hellena’s daughter Tiger Lily, the two of them played with all the kids for ages.

While hanging out with Hellena, I noticed a flyer up on the wall that said “Are You Creating History Today?” Luckily, I had a black marker on hand to fix it:

ARE YOU CREATING MYSTERY TODAY?

Well? Are you?

Homemade Harvest

The past month has been such a frenzy of homemade awesomeness. Harvesting yummy veggies from our garden

Including cassava so we can make our own cassava chips (as well as so many amazing delicacies)

Amazing, delectable, organic, home made cherry liqueur, which tastes like an explosion of fluffy bliss bubbles in your brain

Hannukah Sufganiot

Homemade Bailey’s Irish Cream made from local, raw, organic cream, and served with my organic, raw macadamia and honey ice cream

Gingerbread yoni cookies made by my neighbour

And last, but not least, a local farm stall gave us a massive box of “seconds” tomatoes for only $2! What to do with such a tomatoey abundance?

Tomato Chutney!

In between the moments of madness, there’s been SO MUCH AWESOME!

I love eating locally, I love eating food that we grew ourselves, I love making from scratch all the things that even our grandmothers have forgotten how to make :)

¿Hablas español?

¡Hola! Littletree has been loving the homeschool Spanish-language group that started in our village :)

Since Spanish was essentially her first language (we were living in Central America when she first started talking and she spent the first 15 months of her life in Latin America, but it’s since fallen into disuse), she’s picking it up faster than the other kids, but it looks like they’re all having fun.

The teacher is from Spain, so it’s interesting to get the differences between the Spanish and the South American accents – apparently I have a funny Argentinean accent!

The kids have a great time, it’s very casual and “unschooly”.

They play a lot of games, like card games to learn numbers, playing with differently-coloured stones to learn colours…

And the classic Twister – colours and body parts!

Today we learned to sing “Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes”, played “Animal Families” to practice numbers and learn animals, and practiced basic small-talk. Then we sat together for lunch – a great way to learn food words :)

Loren–Who Walked This Path

Last week one of my friends needed people to be in his new music video, so I went along to help out.

I love this song, Loren used to come to the village life drawing classes  and play his music for us while we were drawing; it was awesome! So it was nice to come out and support him in making his art, and great to hang out with everyone down by the river :)

Check it out:

Who Walked this Path–Loren

Edited to add a link to Loren’s website: http://www.loren.com.au/loren.php

Capoeira Class

A capoeira group has started up in our village, which is super awesome! All three of us have been going, well Purple is in San Francisco at the moment, so just Littletree and I went this week.

It’s loads of fun, and I’m so glad to be getting back into training; I’ve been badly out of practice, so it’s great to have a proper mestre again to teach me.

I first started playing capoeira just after Littletree was born – I wanted to get fit again after being pregnant, and living in Brazil, it was the thing to do! Only being an attached parent, I could rarely put Littletree down, and she really loved the movement of capoeira… so i would train with her in one hand! I got really good at one-handed movements.

So she has the rhythm in her body since birth and she picks it up really easily. I remember when she was two and we’d play together on the beach in Tel Aviv. She’s also out of practice, but really loving the class!

She even showed everyone up getting in the roda against the mestre

Blue Room

When we arrived home from our recent trip, Littletree went into her room and announced “My room is a total disaster MESS!” I pointed out that her room was relatively tidy, just that she has an awful lot of stuff. Most of which she’s grown out of.

So she set to work, filling up 2 massive bags of junk stuff that was still perfectly good, but that she didn’t want or need any more. Clothes she’d grown out of, toys she doesn’t play with any more, and about a billion pink dresses (she absolutely will not, under any circumstances, wear anything pink or a dress, which is odd, because many wise people assured me that if I allow her to don a pink dress, she will surely grow up to be a brainless airhead hooker, completely oppressed by the dominant male patriarchy.)

She took all this stuff to sell at the village market on the weekend, and being the lazy industrious girl that she is, decided to not actually man her stall, but just leave all her wares lying out with an “honour box”. No one stole anything and she made $15.35 :)

Littletree announced that she doesn’t get to spend enough time with Purple, so she proposed a “daddy-daughter-day”. The premise being that the two of them would spend the whole day together doing fun, cool things.

They played card games, went for a walk together, had lunch at the cafe… and then Littletree decided to do something with her now totally bare room.

I came home to see this

Purple and Littletree making great use of the left over paint from our bathroom.

Littletree wants to re-create something like the kitchen we had when we lived in Tel Aviv – I painted it with a blue sky and sunflower scene

(Littletree aged 2)

And the finished product, a tidy, clean, fresh room!

Now I just have to paint the sunflowers!

Finding Friends

Littletree is feeling more settled in now, and talking less and less about wanting to go home – I bought her some food she is more familiar with, and she met a bunch of kids who live in the neighbourhood.

The local children are all excited to have a new, exotic friend to play with, especially as they can practice their English with Littletree

And they all have great fun playing and running around

and of course, playing with the kittens!

She’s still a bit homesick, but I think we’ll survive :)

Best Olive Oil Ever

The one thing I really love about Israel is my family here. They’re all very close, and most live in the same little cooperative village that Purple’s mother grew up in. I love that there’s a 75-year-old-tree on the street that she planted when she was little, and Purples brother, sister and some cousins all live within walking distance, all with their assorted children. Littletree LOVES playing with her cousins and having them so close.

And I love that the family all work together. The family grows olives for olive oil, Bird of Paradise flowers and mandarins. Everyone helps with what they can.

The last time we were here, Littletree and I went out with all the other kids to help picking olives. This time we helped bottle the olive oil.

The bottle tops have a shrink-wrapped cover on them – it’s really cool to watch the plastic shrink onto the bottle under hot water

Littletree and I helped put labels on the bottles

Which isn’t as easy as it looks

The finished product

The most delicious olive oil I ever had! mmmm

Purim!

Yesterday we celebrated Purim, the most fun religious holiday ever. Everyone dresses up, gets intoxicated, and celebrates. The classic example of “they tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat!”

So we all got dressed up in costume and went out to the village dance

Littletree went as a gypsy-girl, complete with accessories her Savta sent from Israel (along with a big box of candies for mishloach manot.)

And Purple looked awesome in a get-up of mostly my clothes, along with a wig from Littletree’s dress-up bag. He certainly turned a few heads at the dance!

Of course we had a fantastic time dancing the night away :)

Village Christmas

It’s that time of year again, and we went to the village Christmas picnic, which was really lovely

We hung out with our friends, and sang carols, and ate yummy food while the kids all ran around

“Santa” came on the village fire truck again, for those who remember last year, when Littletree was too polite and well-mannered to push, and therefore missed out on getting a treat from Father Christmas, this year she learned to push her way to the front and make herself known to the jolly red-suited fellow and emerged from the throng triumphant.

Not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but she did share her well-won booty with some other kids, because despite really wanting to get something from “Santa”, Littetree isn’t really all that into gratuitous candy consumption.

We ended the evening like just about every gathering in the village; with a bunch of friends jamming and making great music