It’s just coming on 7p and I’m once again at the desk in the study of my flat. The flat which I will be moving from shortly due to some sort of sleep deprivation. One could point out that I could ‘go with the flow’ and get up when the hymns begin in the morning. Someone downstairs does that. It could just be that my flow doesn’t start going til around 6a. The alarm/hymns at 4.48a isn’t my cup of tea. I’m going to have another look next week at a place newly built.
Midterms are this week because next week will be the break for Idul Fitri aka the end of Ramadhan. I work at a state university, so I get the minimum number of days off. Other Fellows at Muslim institutions will no doubt be getting the week I got last year plus a little bit more. This is the time of the year that everyone goes ‘home’ and the day-long fasts will stop. I gave a midterm on Monday to around 50 students in my reading class. I’ve finished grading 3/4 of the tests and am putting off the rest until today or tomorrow because I’m working with some data that I collected from last year’s class. This data will or will not be used in forming a proposal for a conference in February. I’m still trying to figure out where the research fits into the theme of the conference, if at all. I’m just a lot more busier than I was last year at this time and it’s a good thing.
Last weekend, I took a long ride on the scooter with a couple chaps from work. They took me to Watu Pinabetengan, a stone monument. The folklore give this spot as a meeting point for the many ethnic groups in North Sulawesi and is the place in which they all agreed to unite in some way and call themselves, collectively, Minahasan. The monument is really a large boulder half-excavated and under a very nice peaked roof. The boulder bears some etchings that were made in the early days of people on the island. What I saw was a few series of straight lines, tick marks (in the American sense) and a stray rhomboid or two. There were also several places in which concrete filled up etched graffiti. I walked around it for a few minutes, feigning a deeper interest, and ended up with my eyes upon the underbelly of the roof. The bottom of the roof was cordoned off by chicken wire. A few birds were flitting about above the wire and a few bird carcasses were atop the wire. Birds that were not smart enough to find an exit. There were three of them.
Afterwards, we braved a little rain (it’s already the rainy season) and went to the house of the friend/guide we picked up before going to the rock. He forced rice, mystery meat, and vegetables on us. I scooped up a few spoonfuls of the vegetables and ate them. Then a plate of banana fritters came out of nowhere. If I had an Achilles heel for food, this would be it. The fritters ended up being the best tasting ones I’ve eaten in this country. Perhaps it was because they weren’t using the normal ‘pisang sepatu’ variety of banana. Translated by anyone that would mean ‘shoe banana.’ I tossed three down the hatch to sit with the three pork kebabs from lunch. The other guys had only a touch of food too since they ate healthy portions of bat and rat for lunch as well as a hefty amount of rice. We had to be polite.