Everyday life - 3 months in the land of not quite right

My posts have been a bit sporadic lately as we have been experiencing that wonderful thing that accompanies moves to different places, new bugs and viruses! Now granted, kids get sick everywhere, it's just the environment that makes for potentially more exciting times over here! We also been pretty busy sorting out preschool for Eamon and continuing our saga to find a permanent (well, for the next 3 years at least) home.

Our first three months in Jakarta has been, as anywhere, up and down. Encouragingly I think there are more ups on the whole. Some of the downs have been dealing with injury and illness - we've had several bouts of upset stomachs (except for Kieran who is pretty much constantly suffering due to being provided lunch each day at university), the usual run of colds as well as a ruptured tendon in Kieran's middle finger (tucking Eamon into bed at 5am - go figure!) and a couple of episodes of croup - scary in Australia, this is something I'd be happy not to experience again, particularly in a hotel in Lombok, several hours away from anywhere useful. Note to self - research nearest (semi-)decent hospitals before travelling outside Jakarta. Luckily when we're in Jakarta we have access to an Australian doctor and a fairly well-stocked clinic for useful things like prednisone.

Eamon ready for preschool

The biggest bane of our first three months has been finding a place to live. After losing 4 for 4 of the apartments we'd initially wanted to higher bidders, we decided to go for a house instead and quickly found a great place (plenty of room for visitors!). Unfortunately it needed a few repairs and modifications before we could move in and so the tedious process of negotiation, gaining approval, waiting for tenders and finally waiting for the actual work to be done began. Add in 2 weeks of general shutdown over Lebaran and our move-in date is looking to be our 4-month anniversary in Jakarta! Good thing we brought 12 suitcases with us!

The hotel we've been staying in has had a few interesting features. For the first six weeks, the washing machine had a disturbing tendency to produce electric shocks when taking the wet clothes out. I mentioned this to one expat:

ME: Our washing machine gives us small electric shocks when we take the wet clothes out
HER: Small electric shocks? Oh, that's fairly normal here
ME: So it's not dangerous then?
HER: Oh no, it's definitely dangerous

Rory - has grown two new teeth,
 learnt to crawl, pull-up and
cruise while in the hotel

When our pembantu finally got maintenance in, they quickly found the cause - the barrel was live. Since there is no ground on Indonesian plugs I guess this isn't that surprising, but it was certainly disturbing. We've also recently had a run of leaks from the ceiling in the kitchen, ensuite and bathroom. Luckily, maintenance have a remedy for this - they come in with a wet vacuum and dry the ceiling. Since no effort is made to actually fix the cause, the leak generally reappears the next day. We can be reassured that our leak is reasonably minor though as a large chunk of the hotel foyer was streaming water yesterday!

On the up side, we are getting more settled, even minus our own abode. Eamon is attending preschool four mornings a week and we now have help so Rory doesn't have to spend hours in the car each day. We've managed to buy a car and hire a driver, and Kieran is becoming increasingly competent at getting us around on Sundays. Both boys have swimming lessons once a week and there are several playgroups to attend. Even better, I'm starting to explore some of the more interesting markets and sights around the place.