Habitat for Humanity - Bali 2010!!! Part 2 'Week 1 in Bali'

SOOOOO On the second day, I woke up at 7 in the morning, without the help of an alarm clock, IN THE HOLIDAYS LOLWUT!!! I have no idea how I did this, but I continued to do this throughout the rest of the trip (except the last day, where we had to wake up at 5 to pack...). Breakfast was served at 7:30, and included a lot of random stuff... like toast, bacon, mie goreng, rice, water melon... bread :)

After breakfast, I had a shower.. just for the sake of it.. But we still had time left, so we turned on the tele and watched HBO (And English speaking Indo channel that showed English movies) Can't remember what was on though :\ When it was almost 8:30, the time when we had to meet up at reception, Song and I got our stuff ready, sun screen, camera, sun glasses... and headed for the reception (This pretty much happened everyday. Except after the first day, I started getting lazy and started using other people's sunscreen and insect repellent. ^^)
There were 2 build sites, namely, site 1, and site 2, so we had to split up everyone into 2 groups. The groups are as follows (I have no idea how they are evenly distributed, but I'm glad that I was in the group I was assigned)
Site 1: Montie
Eugene
Song
Leo
Myung Jee
Angie
Site 2: Bromwyn
Jake
Jenny
Huong
Miji
ME!
We went into random vans, and then all of us went to site 1, where we saw the home owners there, and looked around. Then we all went to site 2, where group 2 were supposed to work. After a brief intro, and tour of the place, site 1 people left for their site, and it was just site 2 peepz left.
I have no idea what went on after that, or what site 1 people did, but site 2 people went STRAIGHT to work.
We had a few jobs that day. Mixing cement with sand and water to make concrete was the first one we had to do. However not everyone was needed (Rejection), so Jake and Jenny did that. Jake became the mixing person for the rest of the trip :\
I ended up having to move rocks from the forest nearby in a wheelbarrow to the foundation of the house. Tiring as crap == I was literally dripping sweat while lifting rocks. But eventually I got some help from Huong :P And also, there were these 2 kids that came and helped us! They were like sooo cute! ^^
At 12, we had an hour lunch break. We ate Indo packed lunches, which was probably more than we expected. I can't really remember what we did during lunch on the first day... probably just bummed around (Eating took up only 10 minutes...)

For the rest of the afternoon, we just proceeded with our jobs, mixing, moving, bending wires... (omg... on the first day of work, I managed to create this long cut down my right forearm.... zzzzz). We also witnessed one of our Indo drivers climb up a coconut tree to get a coconut!! :O with no help from any tools or anything. PRO

When we got back to our hotel at around quarter to 4, we found that there wasn't that much to do... so we went swimming in the ocean!!!! The water was actually REALLY REALLY warm :O and quite nice as well. The seabed however was a bit icky and slimy, but that was all good.
Yeah.. and then we went swimming in the pool, and did nothing for like the next 2 hours.. The site 1 people came back from their work, and some of them joined us in the pool. I left early cos I was still kinda sick, and the water started to get cold (i.e. we just stood around doing nothing and yeah...)

I went back, took a shower, and watched TV until dinner time~~
For dinner that day, we went to the 'Cozy Resto', which was also where our lunches came from. There we had yet another Indo buffet. I ordered an 'Arak Attack', a lemon drink that turned out to be a little 'slutty'. The teachers never found out :P
We also had this dance performance thingy next to our table O.o.. so epic.. especially his facials :O
We went back to our hotels, and just did nothing for the rest of the night... We hadn't really split up into our small groups yet.. SOOOO... I went to bed like a good boy :D
On the second day, Huong was traded with Myung Jee! Which was pretty awesome cos she's super cool and buys heaps of food (and uses up all my iPod power ==). From this day forth, Myung Jee became a loyal member of Site 2.
The routines were similar. I.e. Get up, Breakfast, Shower, Go to work, Lunch, Bum around (I usually listened to my iPod, or someone else would steal my iPod and use up all my battery, while the others just sat around and meh), Get back to work, go back to hotel, and just meh.. But on the second day, I think that we all went to Mie Goreng (Yes that's right! REAL MIE GORENG IN INDO!!! LULZ).. and TBH.. instant Mie Goreng tastes better than the real stuff.. :\

That was Wednesday... On Thursday (Our last full working day for the first week), the same routine pretty much happened. The jobs at the site were different every time though. We now had to clean 1000 tiles, paint them with cement, and then paint them with red afterwards... I don't even think we got that done by the end of 2 weeks ==.. There were also other jobs like digging up dirt, and wheel-barreling them over to the house. It was lunch time, and then we went back to work.
But instead of going straight back to the hotel after work, we went to this Gitgit waterfall, which was AWESOME. When we got there, we change into our swim gear, and attempted to stand under the water fall, which was FAIL. The water fall wasn't that high, but the water still fell really REALLY hard, and just below was a huge rock, so the water his the rock and bounced off, hitting us, and it was PAINFUL!! But more like a massage but still :P great fun. But we only stayed for a while.. so back to the hotel we went

Btw... during this whole trip, Jake was overly obsessed with mocking/being sad to... meh nvm... It's quite interesting, but I don't think I should put it up here.. if you wanna know, then ask :\
Nothing much happened in the first week really :\... More stuff happened during the weekends and the second week, so stay tune!~

Habitat for Humanity - Bali 2010!!! part 1 'Leaving NZ, and arriving in Bali'

SOOO!!! Hey guys~~
I finally got around to writing these posts, which I should have written a while ago, but now that I've started, I feel the obligation to finish this account of one the most amazing trips I've had for a LONG time.
Part 1 - 'Leaving NZ and arriving in Bali'
Part 2 - 'Week 1 in Bali'
Part 3 - 'Weekend in Kuta'
Part 4 - 'Last week in Bali, and leaving for NZ'

On the morning that I was to leave (Plane flight was at around 11 at night), I woke up and felt like CRAP (probably because I pulled an overnighter the night before, on the day of Stage Challenge - Note to self, not a good idea). I had a pretty bad fever, a headache, and lost all the energy in my body. I could barely walk. My parents were so worried that they were like 'OMG. Don't go to Bali and just stay here in NZ'. Good thing I didn't take their advice. By the end of the night, I still had the fever, but my headache had gone away courtesy to countless Panadols and other random pills. I finished packing everything I needed (a lot more medication than I had anticipated), and off I was to the airport!

Even before I got inside the airport, I met up with Song outside, and if I recall correctly, Myung Jee was also outside and the drop off area, unloading her luggage. We lugged our stuff into the airport, hoping to meet up with everyone else. (Got to the airport at 8.. a bit early IMO but we had to for various reasons that should be familiar if you have asian parents) There I encountered a group of Japanese students who were going back to Japan for the holiday. We took some photos just for the sake of it, and then we finally saw our own group. The group going to India for ECC was also there.
We checked in, checked in our luggage, got our boarding passes, and went off to the boarding gate. We stayed at BK for quite a long time, because there was nothing to do, and everyone seemed a bit tired from... well it was like 11 so yeah.. Eugene got a bad piece of chicken in his tender crisp, so he got a refund, and some free fries :P

Finally it was time to get onto the plane to Singapore (We went from Auckland to Singapore, then Singapore to Bali. In other words, we wasted another extra, i'ono what, 5-7hours on the plane. But apparently there is no direct flight from Auckland to Bali sooo :\). I was sitting next to Mr Montogomerie, our 'supervisor', and Leo (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Leo also did the overnighter, and he also had a fever and headache and crap... what have we learnt? Don't do overnighters after stage challenge). And then was the long long LONG flight to Singapore. (Btw, I was wearing A LOT cos it was cold in NZ and I was sick.. sigh.. bad idea much?)

When we finally got to Singapore (the flight was delayed by 40minutes because they needed to switch 2 tires...), we had to go directly to our next boarding gate. And then it was another long long flight to Bali. After we got to Bali, we did a Visa on arrival! Which took a while. And also, the customs visa thingy also took a while. So we spent like 1 hour standing around, doing nothing.. in the heat (Bali airport isn't very well built. It's efficient, and does the job, but that's about it).

When we got out of the airport, we were greeted with a gush of hot air. Plus I was clothed for the winter... fail much? Our hosts for the trip can over and loaded our luggage into the van, welcomed us with flower necklaces, and then we were separated into separate vans with around 4 students in each of them. We went to the money exchange place, which had excellent air conditioning (exchange rate was like, pretty epic. We were all millionaires by the time we left the building :P), and then we were off to our hotel. (the car also had AC so it was all good :P)

The ride to the hotel was even more tedious than the plane ride. We wounded through mountains and almost everyone on the van got sick. Well, mostly it was just Eugene that got sick but anyways. We sang to try and pass the time, we tried everything we could. But the 3 hour ride was too much for us after the plane rides that brought us to Bali. But FINALLY, we got to our hotel, and boy was that feeling a feeling of liberation, freed from the entanglements of sitting in a contained space for over 20 hours. We were welcomed to the hotel with fresh fruit beverages, and then we were taken to our rooms, which were a LONG way down from the reception... It seemed to take years to get to our rooms, but we were finally there.

As soon as we went to our rooms (I was sharing a room with song), I raced for the showers. Hehe~~ After that, I just went exploring around the hotels. It had a swimming pool, a pool bar, a spa, a massage thingy, and right behind the pool was the beach!!!! ><
When dinner was over, we met up in a small hall, where we introduced ourselves, and the Indo hosts introduced themselves. We were shown a video, and a Powerpoint about our stay in Indo, giving us information about our host families and other info about Indo. After this, I went straight back to my room, and went to bed while everyone else was probably doing some crazzzzyyyy stuff (hey hey, I was sick and not feeling well. And it was like 9 in the evening) Oh yeah forgot to mention, at night, in the hallway outside our rooms, geckos and frogs and other various forms of wildlife would come out and.. yeah.. do stuff O.O