Whats the Hottest Club in Surabaya?

Ice Club.

The Ice Room at Ice Club. Note the Eiffel tower on the back left and I think the leaning tower of Pisa at the right front.

Last Friday some of the teachers from the school took David and I for a night on the town.

The night started out very Indonesian like. With a late pick up time of 2 hours after they initially said that they were going to be there.... I am not complaining, I was enjoying my Bintang on the patio of our place, but just merely pointing out that there is definitely a difference here when it comes to punctuality. I think the best thing to do is just let it slide.

Lenmarc. The mall of emptyness.

Anyways we went to this mall. "Lenmarc". Its supposed to be or WAS supposed to be one of the most luxurious or high end malls in the city. However something happened with the construction and it got delayed so a lot of the stores ended up negating on their contracts I think, from what I have gathered from teachers telling me. Anyways, this has left the mall with a very empty feeling. There are only a few stores in the entire huge mall that are open. Mostly furniture stores and a few random accessory stores. There are restaurants, of course and "Surabaya's hottest place for nightlife", Ice Club.

Why is it called "Ice Club" if it is so hot. Well, its because they have a giant freezer in the back that they have put ice sculptures in. And white couches and chairs. But I mostly think its because of the ice that its called Ice Club.

Customary picture taken by the waiter in Asian countries.

We went out to dinner first at this nifty place where you pre-pay at a central cash and then go around with your little card and order things from the different places. Kind of feels like you are at a fancy food court. I like the card idea thing though. Especially if you want to order from multiple places.

At ice club, the cover is ridiculous and so are the prices. More exspensive than Vicrtoria. 100,000 Rp cover. So thats about 11$ CAD and drink stared around 60,000 Rp for a beer. Nearly 7$ CAD. A bit ridiculous for Indonesia, but you are paying (literally because I am sure it costs a lot to keep that place cool) for the atmosphere. The DJ was sweet though.... kind of. But the cover band was sweeter. They had 3 singers, 1 guitat, 1 bass, 1 key board and 1 drummer. And they did top 40 tunes. I think my favorite might have been the Katie Perry Cover of ET that they did. Or maybe when they did Riannah ft. Eminem "Love the Way You Lie", and there was this Indonesian dude rapping and sounding pretty close to Eminem himself. That was awesome.

Where is Pacitan?

Pronounced "Pacheetan", it' s located in south west East Java.

View Larger Map

Its a really interesting little town, but we didn't stay in the town proper. We stayed on "Teleng Ria" the beach part of the town....

View from where we stayed out to the water at Teleng Ria

The journey -
We (David my roommate/the other intern and I) left promptly at 4pm from school and headed home to gather our things before heading to the bus station (Purabaya). We took a taxi there and arrived in plenty of time to find the bus that would take us directly to Pacitan...
David had got some intel from the internet that the journey would be about 4 hours long. No problem, really at 40,000 Rupiah ($4.50 CAD) that is quiet a deal for an air-conditioned bus. Anyways it actually took us about 6 hours, getting in to the town somewhere just after midnight aboard a bus that was jammed packed with people riding and other people selling things to you and other people playing music. Such is traveling in Indonesia though. We got there in once piece, but I was feeling pretty green around the gills after the last section of road.
At the bus station we were greeted by guys on motor bikes who took us to the hotels. Our first attempt was to Happy Bay Bungalows. Sorry Mom, I did something I thought I would never do.... ride a motor bike (well it was more of a scooter actually) without a helmet. Just goes to show you that even the favorite child can make poor decisions her mother would not approve of when feeling hungry, sleep deprived and car sick. After HHB we went to Harry's surf hostel. It was full, this was really to bad because it looked awesome. Then we ended up at "Grand Pacitan", the more resort-y place in the area. By this time it was around 1am and we decided to share an "economy room" for about 150,000 rupiah (16$) which might be exspensive in Indonesian standards but I really just wanted to sleep.

Day 1 -
Breakfast was delievered to our room at 8:00 am dull. (more like 8.15. I think I had ordered breakfast for 8am the night before, but I am not really sure.) Anyways after that we wandered towards the beach with the broken English/Bahasa directions given to us by the hotel staff. We made it eventually, encountering a young marching band playing in the streets and a midget who was collecting the fees for entry to the beach.

Happy Happy Bungalows Main building.

We found HHB again and found a room with a couple of beds and an actual shower. Bonus when you are planning on being all salty and sandy. Then we went to look for boards from Harry's. Ended up getting some old timers for 30,000 rupiah ($3.30) per day. nice. Take notes Tofino surf shops. And no need for wetsuits here. The water was a balmy 29'C.
After I insisted we have some food (which was darn good) we headed out to the breaks. What a great afternoon. It felt awesome to be in the water and splashing and paddling around and catching the occasional wave. The surf wasn't big but it was good enough for me. Felt really strong in the water (thanks Tony & the p90x gang for that).
We headed down the beach in the afternoon (about 2km) to check out the elusive "corner" waves by the alleged "river". After about 30 minds of waling we found it and I decided to have some beach time to relax while David went out into the water to rub elbows with the locals and try for some sick waves.

Room at HHB

After a while we headed back into "town"/where our bungalow was and had a refreshing shower and I downed a full "air minum besar" (1.5L of water). For dinner we went to this chill place next to our bungalows that had gazebo style tables. They were all like little huts with tables underneath. The sea breeze and 27'C evening made for a great atmosphere. Too bad we were like the only people there in a place that could easily hold at least 50. We had some grilled tuna and rice and veggies and juice. Good night.

Day 2 -
Got up early, had a great HHB breakfast of juice, eggs, toast, banana crepes and headed out to catch some early surf. Another great day in the water :) Caught some really fun waves and felt strong (once again thanks Tony). Also brought the camera out this day to take some photos. And of course had people request to take their photo with us.... Seriously. Do not want to be famous. It would be really annoying having people come up to you and want a picture with you all of the time. But maybe then you would be rich enough to have a private beach or island somewhere with no cameras and eager fans.... I digress.
After a great lunch, a shower and a hurried return of our boards we negotiated a helmeted motorbike ride back to the bus station. There we used the 1,000 rupiah bathroom, grabbed some snacks from the stalls and made our way onto the bus.
This bus was even better. Not. It was a 7 hour epic. At least the first bit with the really windy roads was in daylight so I didn't feel as sick, but maybe not as I got to see the craziness of the roads. We ended up getting home around 9.45 pm.

Got some sun this weekend. And really improved upon my watch tan. Something I have been working on for years. Hopefully bu August I will have perfected it.

Sunburnt and Squinty On the beach in Pacitan, Teleng Ria.

What was your favorite subject in school?

The results are in.... and not surprisingly, Recess and PE won, but by a narrow margin of one vote.

Social Studies	2 (22%)
Language Arts & Writing	1 (11%)
Science	2 (22%)
Math	1 (11%)
P. E. & Recess	3 (33%)

Votes so far: 9
Poll closed

What is Surabaya like?

So after being here for almost 2 months, I finally got to see more of Surabaya than Supermak, Darmo Permai Seletan (my neighbourhood) and the fitness centre. Jackie (the principal of the school) and Haries (her husband who also works in the administration part of the school) took us (David M., the new intern and I) for a drive around the city.

We started from our house around 10 am and had an action packed day. We drove through some Saturday traffic, typical of Surabaya. Haries and Jackie pointed out some interesting things about the city. There is a lot of Dutch colonial architecture around, but even more has been torn down for new developments before they started preserving buildings as heritage sites.

They told us about the zoo here. Apparently it has a really bad reputation. They have a hard time keeping animals alive because of the pollution in the city and the poor conditions in general. But the zoo also provides some of the only green space in the downtown area..... so what do you do? More on this to come if I make a trip to the zoo soon.

We also went to the port. I wasn't allowed to take pictures because there was a U.S. coast guard ship in the port and there was absolutely no cameras or filming allowed. God Bless America...

Then we checked out the Chinese area and the Arab area of town. Haries' father had an agriculture business in the Chinese area. He showed us his old shop and where he spent a lot of time playing as a child. I thought that was neat. We also stopped at the oldest mosque in surabaya. It is the burial site of one of their saints. Again no pictures, I felt weird about whipping out my camera here. We could really see too much there anyways because Jackie and I didn't have long sleeves, our hair covered or long pants on.....

So this building used to be the Canadian embassy building. Seems like they moved around a few times. It was also a building of a major Indonesian company who manufactures silverware among other things. I think the company starts with an M....


Okay. So then we went to a cigarette factory. I kept thinking Haries was saying "secret" factory, but that was just because of his accent. We went for lunch first at the cafe next door and then we toured around. The whole place smelled great. Like cloves. It reminded me of Christmas. This is a replica of the stand where the founder sold some goods to start out his business. The wife would stash the cash in the hallow bamboo and break it open when they needed money.... like a bamboo bank.


Haries insited on taking pictures of me :) This is a gian kiln where they would dry the tobacco and cloves if it was raining.

This is some furniture from their home. Kinda neat. They guy was a horse nut. He had a bunch of horses that raced and stuff. That's what all of the trophies are about.


This picture is for dad. Here are some old fashion bikes that were in the museum . Pretty spiffy looking.


They apparently had a marching band from 1991 till recently for the company. Many of the workers from the factories were also in this band. They won international competitions and everything.

This is me. Selling out and offering up some cancer sticks. All of the cigarettes from the factories in Indonesia are hand made. The minimum quota for a worker is around 300/hour.

Then we went to this big Buddhist temple on the sea shore. Tide was very out. That's David, Haries and Jackie looking out to sea.

Statue at the temple.
Again, there of course had to be a picture of me.

Giant Buddha statue. It was very big and very awesome.

Then we went to Tunjungan Plaza. This mall is effing big. 6 floors at least I think and everyone is massive!
Outside of the mall they were celebrating something by having a bunch of food stands around and some music and stuff.

This is Haries ordering us some traditional Indonesian food. It was just okay. not my fave.


Then on Sunday we went to the mountains to check out a potential area for a camping trip for the kids at school. But it was really raining hard on there so we didn't stick around. We went to this hotel and they had an awesome water slide octopus thing.

Then we went for a little walk down the street to find the famous barbecued corn. And we also found a lot of bananas too. There are so many varieties here. Its a good thing I love bananas. I am still trying to figure the varieties out. Apparently if there are black ants on them that means they are sweet.

Here is the guy barbecuing our corn.



This is David using his "method" to eat the corn!