I'm trying to break your heart

When they see a "bule" (foreigner), most kids in Praya will just call out "Hello Mister", regardless of whether you are a man or woman, incidentally. The "mister" part is often exclaimed in somewhat truculent manner, and though it is not meant as such, it can get quite annoying. These are not the sweet kids.

But there are many sweet kids. In fact, once you get to know them, they're all sweet. In my old neighboorhood, i helped the kids with their math or English homework sometimes. They were incredibly sweet kids, i even loved the kid of my old landlord, who was a bit of a fallout character himself. i don't know if it's school or the "bule" they liked, but they were always really enthusiastic about doing homework with me. They even knocked on my door on the 1st of January at 7 a.m. in the morning to get help with their homework. I was rolling around in bed trying to pretend i wasn't home, but they persisted until i opened the door.What incredible resolve and resolution for the new year!

In my current neighboorhood I haven't made friends with the kids yet. I haven't told them my name either or helped them with homework. i want to sleep in on the 1st of January. i figure if i don't get to know them, it'll be easier to say no. So til now anyways, to the kids, i'm still "Hello Mister", yes, in that truculent speech. (Note to all Praya teachers: don't teach the kids to say "Hello Mister" to bules, it's annoying.)
I do like to play pranks, and one of these days amybe, i'm gonna stop while i drive past them and tell them my real name is Sauron. Imagine, all tourists were henceforth greeted with "Hello Sauron". And i started the trend!

Some messed up sh*t

If you've ever had a sea urchin stuck in your finger, you too will become more careful in planning your swims according to tide charts. The spines of a seaurchin lodge themselves deeply in your flesh, even if you've just brushed them slightly. They are pretty hard to get out. I rubbed red onion juice over my pinkie because I couldn't surgically remove them without making a mess of my finger. The red onion eased the swelling.

I've seen many seaurchins before but this one happened a while back and I was a newbie so to speak. It was afternoon and I was swimming into shore with some waves and surf pushing me in, when I noticed with some consternation that I was swimming right over a bed of seaurchins. And just then it was too late already.

If you're in Kuta, don't follow the tourist guidebooks' advice on swimming schedules. A lot of tourist guidebooks will tell you that the best times to swim in Kuta bay, Tanjuan or Mawun are the morning hours til noon. They say that's when the water-level is up. Now that is non-sense. There can be low tides at any time of the day. It depends on the moon phase, the position of the sun and rotation of the earth, and the shape of the ocean floor. Most places around the world experience 2 high tides and 2 low tides a day (semidiurnal) or 1 high tide and 1 low tide a day (diurnal). These tides follow a schedule of about 6 hour shifts. But not exactly 6 hours.

See, the moon orbits the Earth at the same times as the Earth rotates on its axis, so it takes slightly more than a day—about 24 hours and 50 minutes—for the Moon to return to the same position in the sky. This is why semidiurnal and diurnal tides come in with a bit of delay, like 6 hours and some squeezed minutes or 12 hours and some minutes. During the course of a year, high and low tide will pass through every hour of the day. Saying that there is always low-tide in one place before noon all year round is rubbish.

That's the clue, especially in Kuta Lombok, it's really messed up here, but I can't tell you why. Magicseaweed, the trusted surfer website that most people here consult, also doesn't think there are static tides. However, they suggest that Kuta Lombok, unlike Kuta Bali or other places, goes through irregular tide shifts which are neither diurnal nor semidiurnal tides but "mixed tides", with sometimes 10 hour shifts and more! Based on my experience of swimming in Kuta, the tide predictions on Magicseaweed aren't spot-on for Kuta-Lombok exactly, so I look at tide charts for Bali too and concoct my own ideas of tides down here.

I talked to a dive operator and they didn't know why it was all so weird either. Don't trust the guidebooks. Don't trust anyone.

Which came first?

"Let's think of eggs. They have no legs.

Chicken come from eggs. Well, but they have legs.

Now eggs also come from chicken, here the plot thickens.

But eggs with legs, whence do they come from?

Oh what a conundrum!"

The other day I was sitting around with some kids. I asked the kids some elementary questions, like the one on the origin of the chicken. They went round in circles with their responses. First it was the egg. I asked them what laid the egg? Then they said it was the chicken, and so on. I wasn't trying to pull anyone's chain, but they got all irritated and stirred up. They did not think it was funny. I forbade myself to ever bring up again the chicken egg topic. It's a cultural thing.

Na zdraví!

My Czech friend Ales told me this Christmas that whenever he's in India he drinks a shot of hard liquor in the morning when he wakes up, and in the evening before he goes to bed. He says he's never had any gastric problems when in India, even eating the food at street kiosks. I've taken to heart his good suggestion and will gulp down a shot of Gin before and after my swims at Praya's murky swimming pool. My swimming sessions are now probably harder training for my liver than my arms.

Oh and Na zdraví! to my Czech friend Anna who got married this week.

There I was...

There I was... parading with my BAPPEDA office friends and thousands of Sasak at Nyale Festival this Wednesday in Kuta. Nyale takes place every year in February in commemoration of the Princess Mandalika who, a long time ago, when faced with a cohort of enamoured princes who all wanted to marry her, threw herself into the ocean off the rocks at Pantai Seger.

She thereby forestalled the possibility of war between the rivaling and potentially discontented parties, and ensured that she would be there for everyone and always... in the form of the waves that roll in and out of the beaches bringing in swarms of Nyale worms once a year. The Nyale worms are the corpses of little spaghetti-like oceanic creatures that, after spawning out at sea, get washed onto shore on 1 or 2 days a year. If you think about it, geo-biologically speaking, Nyale is really quite a remarkable event. A good Nyale harvest (the Sasak like to wade into the water at dusk and collect the worms) is also said to herald good agricultural harvests for the coming year.

Note the mascara on me.

We were all lined up and ready to stroll in procession But we had to wait two hours in the sun until the Vice-Buppati arrived. The costumes were very hot. When I saw the masquerade of small kids strolling through the finish-line some 3 hours later, I felt so sorry for them, they were so tired. Although we were all pretty tired due to the heat and long wait, the parade was actually really fun. There were even parashooters falling from the sky.

I grew up in the Rhineland, and the Nyale parade yesterday and the vibrant energy on the street reminded me a little bit of the "Karnevalszug". But yesterday, I couldn't help noticing comically, how we were more people in the parade than we had spectators.

Feisty ants

In that photo you see ants climbing around on an electric cord . The photo was taken minutes before they died. But I am manifestly still a vegetarian.

I am perfectly tolerant of the ant populations in my house, I regularly leave scraps of foods or dead cockroaches for them to feast on. And they are mostly tolerant of me. But this red worker ant population in the photo, they are feisty.

Basically these ants forgather on my extension cords. I don't know what's so special about the cords. The extension cords weren't sugar-coated by the manufacturer, not to my knowledge at least. Maybe they like live wires. Anyways, when I need to move the cord I nudge the ants gently away, but they won't have any of it and go all berserk on me.

Let me tell you about the time huge male ant populations invaded my bed. It happened weekly. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of it but you must believe me that it really happened. The sheer number of them was maddening. They were all male ones, and they were peaceful which was good. But they decided that my pillow was their front yard and a good place to loiter. They were climbing all over my naked back and shoulders.

I know ant colonies must reproduce. But do they have to do it so often? Do they have to do it in the evenings, behind my back, while I am reading a book or watching Lord of the Rings? Ants aren't nocturnal, couldn't they fornicate during the day while I'm at the office? Most of all, couldn't they do it some place else?

I don't know what Queen Ant actually looks like. But I know this tribe lives under my pillow, in the bamboo bed structure. She and the rest of her kin.

I have seen unusually big black clumsy ants around the house as well. They had wings but prefered to wander around. In fact, they were caravaning out one ant-hole in through another. They looked lost. An ant colony may have several queens or reproductives. I think that was them reproductives doing a random ant migration.

Gaddafi, Berlusconi, Mubarak and the BBC

I'm a big fan of the BBC. I catch the BBC broadcasts on short-wave radio as much as I can. It's my antenna into the world.

The BBC does serious and thorough news reporting.

But when it comes to sensationalism, the BBC has had its guilty share. Yes, the BBC just loves a good racy anecdote.

Year after year, the BBC reports on Colonel Gaddafi's official visit to Italy. The visits are only newsworthy because Gaddafi holds en-mass Islam conversion parties, to which flocks of Italian glamor models are bussed.

In November 2009, for example, while attending a UN food summit 200 Italian lovelies were invited. In July 2010, 500 models (!) were rounded up by an Italian model agency. He also invites said models on all-paid-for trips to Libya. Nobody knows how much success he actually has with the Islam conversion, but it obviously makes the headlines. And the BBC thinks it's a story the world can't get enough of.

I don't know if you knew, but Gaddafi will trust only a cohort of female soldiers to be his close bodyguards. In the picture above you see Berlusconi admiring one such. (And the old pope in the background waiting just next in line.)

There's no question that Gaddafi's counterpart, Berlusconi, is a buffoon too. The BBC is currently reporting on his sexual larks involving a 17 year old prostitute called “Ruby” and whether the evidence for the case amounts to enough to bring him to court.

Berlusconi's antics are many, and you wonder if and when the Italian public (the other half; not those who don't already) will have enough. But apparently for the BBC, Italy's political system is in such utter hopeless chaos, it doesn't see it fit to report on the screws that need to be set right for the economy or state. Instead, it's all about Ruby.

Ruby was arrested for theft once and held in a police department in Milan. When Berlusconi heard about it, he made a couple of phone-calls to important people and the police set Ruby free again. Berlusconi maintains his innocence and that he thought the girl was actually the daughter of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Which brings us to Mubarak and the protests in Egypt. At last, we have the news.