Bandung Home Tour Pt. 2

Jason and Laura's home in Bandung is a two-story house in a kampung.  By "kampung" standards, it's actually pretty nice.  It's a short 5-minute walk from the language school that Jason and Laura are both attending.  There is an English-speaking church fellowship that meets on Sundays in the building right next to the language school so that is also convenient for them.  You can walk about 8 minutes from their house and catch an "angkot" or a taxi to get to grocery stores or malls or the hospital or you can walk about a half hour to get to food vendors.
Yesterday I gave you a tour of the downstairs of the house.  Today I'll show you the upstairs.  First you must climb up a steep set of stairs from the downstairs level to get to the family sitting area.  There is also a door leading to the outside  from this room.  Right now the kids are using this area as a playroom for Mika and then, in the evenings, as her nursery.

The other room upstairs is the bedroom.  Normally this is Jason and Laura's bedroom but while I am visiting, it is my room.  There is one small wardrobe in the room, the bed, a stand next to the bed, and several lizards that like to come out at night and run around on the walls.

The only shower is off of this room.  You first have to start the pump which gets water running out of the hand-held shower head.  Then you flip a switch on the instant water heater and presto chango, the water heats up almost immediately.  The door is wooden on the outside facing into the bedroom but metal on the inside so you just have to hang the shower head up on the hook and shut the door and you are good to go shower.

There is also a water holding tank thing in the corner of this small shower area.  I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of that is but I'll tell you what I use it for.  There is a dipper by it and I usually brush my teeth, running water over my brush from my drinking water and then spit in the shower over the drain.  Then I use water from the dipper to rinse the spit away.  It's quite the complicated process to brush your teeth here.  As I might have mentioned earlier, there is no bathroom sink so you either brush your teeth in the kitchen sink or in the shower and you don't use the water from the faucet to brush because of possible health problems so you have to remember to use bottled water to rinse your brush with.

Yesterday afternoon we headed off to Jakarta in preparation for our trip off the island to go to Lombock.  I'll tell you all about our wild ride in my next post.