Toothbrush contamination and Shaba Shabu dinner

First, a shout out to my great team member Shannon who set up a Flickr photo site for our team so we can start aggregating all of our photos.  Our blogs are a good documentary but there are too many interesting pictures to be able to post them all.  Check out our photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/cscindonesia5/

 I woke up with a full blown cold this morning (I pretty much knew I was getting one last night) but did get a good night's sleep last night, thankfully.  I figure I got it from my airplane marathon with the nasty recirculated air in the planes.  After taking some zinc and some other cold medicine I bought with me, I was good for the day......

...or so I thought.  The local water here is not fit to drink, so I've been using bottled water to brush my teeth.  When traveling to other countries that have non-potable water, I typically put a washcloth over the faucet so I don't accidentally forget the water is bad and try to use it.  In our hotel there are no washcloths though - so this morning I absentmindedly rinsed my toothbrush in the sink - ARGH!   I predicted this would happen at some point in my journey, but I didn't think I'd screw up only 8 days into a 50 day trip.  I did bring an extra toothbrush with me so I'll be fine.  With that said, I was really looking forward to using my fabulous electronic toothbrush from home, so after my little incident I decided to sanitize the head in boiling water.  I don't quite have the courage to use it tomorrow, so I think I'll wait until after our upcoming weekend trip, just in case I get sick from it.  I think I'll be fine though - fingers crossed.  Maybe a round 2 of sanitizing is in order.  I'm still kicking myself over this one!

 

Today was our second day meeting with our clients.  The tourism office had a prior commitment in the morning so asked that we meet them after lunch to start our work.  Daniel, Nicole & I were joined by YuanYuan today, as unfortunately her other project hit some administrative snags and was canceled last night.  We're really happy to have her a part of our sub-team.  The four of us met for the morning to start brainstorming questions we'd like answered and laying out a gameplan for the rest of the week.  Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate with us and we had to catch our taxi in the middle of a crazy monsoon - or to quote Daniel, "the worst rain I've ever seen - in my entire life!"  It makes you really feel for the becak (pedi-cab) drivers who are in the middle of a journey or the folks riding their scooters with a poncho on, with their back seat passenger trying to duck under the driver's poncho.

Our client meeting went well and we'll be headed back in the morning to continue working on honing our statement of work - to something that meets the needs of our client but that is also achievable in the 3.5 weeks we have left. 

 

For dinner, a few of us headed to a local restaurant that serves Shaba Shabu type of food - basically boiled broth to which you add all sorts of meats, vegetables, and dumplings.  It was really good, and we plan on taking more of the team back to the restaurant in the coming weeks.  It reminded me a lot of fondue but in this case you eat both the things you cook and the broth in a hearty soup.

The various additions you can buy to put in your broth.  Each tray is color coded which represents a specific price.

Our broth mixture cooking