Starbucks and BK Lounge

Team picture with UPH basketball team after our international two sport soccer game.

Dear readers/followers:
To start our blog tonight, I wanted to wrap up our Friday night last night.

We had a devotional night at MYC which is in the dorms at the University. Girls and some guys from the dorms attend. It includes worship and a message. For Friday's night service, they did a special song since we were there which involved a little dancing and hand motions between the girls in dorms and our team! It was good interaction, lots of laughing at ourselves! The message was also very good. They had us go into groups of 5-6 people, so we intermixed with the other girls and guys. Some groups had people that only spoke Bahasa (the Indonesian language) which made things interesting but it was still great to hear from them. I think the best part of it was seeing others worship the same God in pretty much the same ways. I think a lot of us had this idea that it would be so different, but it's not. It was amazing. Below are pictures from our devotional night. As we mentioned earlier we think after every event doughnuts follow. Again, we aren't complaining, they're so good! They also had this banana wrapped in green sponge cake stuff that you topped with some creamy sugar dressing.. some girls weren't feeling it, others tried a taste, and very few ate it all! Overall, great devotional night with new friends!





The banana sponge cream dressing dessert!

After devotional, some of the girls along with the UPH basketball team went to Karaoke in the super mall. You pooled your monies (or Rupiah) together and bought a room for an hour. I guess it was a pretty crazy night with songs from Miley Cyrus, Black Eye'd Peas, Ciara, Indonesian music, Michael Jackson, Coldplay, etc etc. Both teams joined together in the name of off-key singing and un-rhythm dancing. The night ended with the "We are the Champions" song which seems appropriate for ending their "wild" night.

Group Picture!

Can you guess which song this is?

Now our adventures from Saturday!

We we're all so fried from Friday that we all slept super hard. Only a few of us woke up to the Call of Prayer at 4am. Breakfast was served at 8am which included scrambled eggs and rice.


Not too many people really ate breakfast. In fact, the blogger (myself) was the only person who finished my plate, I owned that breakfast! Tell me if this is too TMI, but some team members are starting to get sick.... So food isn't the most appealing to them... but we're persevering, pushing through the sickness.... that's enough about that!

We had a pretty free morning today. So in American fashion, we all headed to Starbucks at the supermall. The coffee helped some of the tired/sick people. Gave us a little jump in our step. Which was just in time for the crazy rain storm that hit today. Words can't describe the amount of rain that hits Indonesia. It's so different from Oregon rain. Huge drops of rain which then comes enormous puddles. Also, there is always thunder and lightning and the thunder here is ridiculous. I want to describe it as "Papa thunder" compared to Oregon's "baby thunder!" It's so loud and deep! We were leaving the mall when it started and we got swarmed by little boys holding umbrellas. They run after you with their umbrella and you take it to walk to your destination as they walk next to you. Then you pay them some Rupiah. Katie participated in it but only had about 3,000 Rupiah which we were told is a sufficient amount for them, they were very excited to receive that much (It's only pocket change in American dollars). Crazy nonetheless.

This was taken during the rain...you can't even tell.

We then ate lunch at noon which was spaghetti! However, the spaghetti was a bit sweeter than we're used to. The next few hours were a bit of a blur....it consisted of reading, sleeping, or journaling. We all get really good sleep at night, but I think with the heat and sun, we're all burnt out. However, it was good rest before our big game!!

We played a club team out of Jakarta. Women's soccer is not popular in Indonesia, so finding teams and players is difficult. We put on our extremely flattering gold jerseys and won the game 8-0 I think... It was a good game for us, everyone played great. The other team had some good players with good foot skills. However, we were clearly the dominant team, in skill and size. We took a group picture that will come later. They were really funny, laughing and having a good time the whole game. I think they called us stinky after the game (as a joke, our Indonesian friend Stella translated!). It's pretty fitting as we were all covered in sweat.

After the game, we hit the showers and headed to the BK Lounge in the mall. Dinner included chicken nuggets or whoppers with fries and Coke zero or Iced tea! I inhaled the nuggets and they tasted the same as they would in America.

We're blogging again in the Times bookstore. We're also hanging out with some of the University basketball team and our Indonesian friends. We've been learning some Bahasa (Indonesian language). We know kamar kecil (toilet) very well. Sepak bola (soccer), nama saya (My name is...), aku kepanasan (I'm hot), and much more are being learned (kinda). We're pretty novice Bahasa speakers, but we're learning.