Lopsided is the way of the walk

Yaddadadig! It's your boy Marcus again. Back on the block with some stories to tell. Gather around the camp fire...let's talk.

Soooo I finally got my camera out and have snapped some shots here and there. I want to share them with you. Will you let me? A word of warning though: this stupid blogger program has decided to tilt some of the pics. I don't know why and I don't care. If you really want to see the lopsided pictures you'll just have to d/l to your computer and rotate them yo self.

Anyway, let's start with a play-by-play of the exhibition. Above us here you can see the house that I live in. Palm trees + wooden planks. I live at the WFP Guest House. "Marcus!" Yes? "What does WFP stand for?" Why, it stands for the World Food Program. They run this little guesthouse, complete with a kitchen that serves 'bule' food. Bule = whitey. Oh yes, I represent hard.

Out the gate we have our friendly guards. I guess they are usually pretty strict on who gets to come and go out of the compound but now, during Ramadan, there's only enough energy to play dominos and hang out:

This Sunday I undertook my first major outing so far. Now, I know I look like the world's biggest geek in the below picture but that doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm excited about going on an adventure + I wanted grandpa to see me in front of a UN-car wearing a Mora IK t-shirt. Should I be blamed for that? Look at that face!!! How cute is that? I just woke up and I'm happy, so what?

The outing meant that we finally ventured a bit out of the known neighborhood I live in, which appears rather untouched by the tsunami, to parts of town I hadn't been to yet. It is a quite erie feeling to travel around Banda Aceh because remnants of destruction are everywhere (blown out buildings, collapsed bridges, twisted steel-beam skeletons, mountains of mud in places where you don't expect it) but it exists next to completely new buildings, roads and structures that are the result of the massive outpouring of humanitarian aid that followed the tsunami. 50,000 new homes in 2 years --- that's pretty impressive. It's a strange feeling to turn off from a dirt road with tons of traffic to a smaller road that leads to a tsunami-affected neighborhood, with almost no traffic but with an impeccably asphalted road.I've been looking at youtube footage of the tsunami hitting Aceh and it is unbelievable. Willy, our driver, described himself running from the water and said that it was like a black wall of sludge coming towards him. He heard a deep hum and saw trees and cars tumbling in the water like they were nothing. These two pictures give you a sense of the water's power. It is a generator boat, which use to lie a kilometer out at sea and generate electricity. It now sits in the middle of a neighborhood, 5 kilometers inland or so. There was a dude harassing me for cash when I got out to take pictures so they don't quite convey the size of this thing but it is really quite enormous.



Much of the countryside closer to the water looks like this picture here below. I hadn't thought of it but of course many of these old rice patties are now close to unusable. The saltwater from the tsunami has seaped down and contaminated the soil.


This was a house also some ways away from the water. It had a fishing boat on top of it as you can see here.

This is Matt (the intern) inspecting the boat's underbelly. Kind of gives you a sense of the size of the thing:


After our tsunami-tour we decided to go into the city and get something to snack on. We went to 'Peunayong' which is the busiest area of the city. It apparently means 'What's up Man?' (or, less likely, 'What's up Chinaman' -- the translation we got was a bit shakey) in some local dialect. All joking aside that is a cool ass name for a neighborhood. If you don't think so there's something wrong with you. What would you rather live in (based on name alone, now):
Sodermalm... or.... What's up man!

Medford..... or...

...

What's up man!

I think the answer is obvious.Anyway, this is what it looks like. This was in the afternoon on a Sunday so it wasn't exactly bustling. Plus, the street vendors weren't exactly out in full force since it is, again, Ramadan.

We still managed to get some stuff to snack on. This is typical Acehnese food for breaking the fast each day. Fried dough with various vegetables plopped in to it and a little green chili at the top. One of the dishes (Resol) is like a spongy springroll and the other one (I think it's called Gaddo Gaddo) is a round egg-based thing, like a small fried omelette. Not awesome but also not terrible. It's been pretty hard to try any other part of the cuisine since most restaurants are closed.I finished the day at the beach. If you've been to the region you probably know how blue the water is. So nice. We were the only people on the whole beach.


I opted against swimming:

That is all I will tell you for this installment. Hope you all keep it as real as you can. Give me some love in the comment section if you feel like it. In Swedish or English. Either way. I miss you all.