Jakarta Race for Cancer

Sorry I've been slack in blogging lately - life is super crazy and still so!

Last week/weekend was a busy time for us, but also a wonderful one.
We had a preliminary skype video interview with a Head and his deputy for a perspective school for next year - it went very well. We have been asked for another one next week with the same school to chat to the curriculum guys.
The package would be great, the school sounds wonderful....but the country would perhaps not be our first choice. In fact, it wasn't even on our list. However, it's an exciting enough prospect to keep us interested. I will keep everyone in the dark for now, but albeit to say it is giving us confidence for further/future interviews. Anyway. I will keep you posted...

Saturday lunchtime, Annalise and Juliette were in their UN 'Heal the World' concert at the mall. Annalise was a Hawaiian Hula girl and danced the most beautiful Hawaiian dance. We videoed it so I will upload it to YouTube ASAP. Juliette was a cowgirl and did a line/hat dance. Very cute!
Straight after their concert, we taxied it down to the South/Central to stay in the Four Season's Hotel for the night. We decided to treat ourselves there, as Sunday morning, we were all taking part in the 'Jakarta Race' for cancer. It is a 5km and 10km run and all the proceeds go to a cause very close to our hearts.

Saturday night we went out with friends to 'The Backyard' Italian restaurant by the hotel - it was beautiful food although the bill took 45 minutes to come!

The race was fantastic fun. We got up at 5.45am and made our way to the starting line. We were doing the 5km race. It was so well organised - they'd closed the motorway for the 6000+ entrants to run which meant we were running on level ground (nice!) through central Jakarta main roads, amongst the high rise buildings which was quite cool.

Andrew had the girls in the double jogging pram and did the 5km alternatively running and pushing them and supervising them as they ran for 50 metres or so, got tired, sat back in the pram, had a snack or a drink and then ran again.
He let me run and I was so proud of myself. I ran 5km bang on 30 minutes (not superbly brilliant but better than I have done in a long time) and I then after I crossed the finishing line, I ran back about a kilometre and a half to Andrew and the girls to run with them, so I probably ran about 8km that morning in total. Yay for me!

The run was really quite surreal for me. I wore my ipod and listened to music all of the way which is always a great help for me, although about 5 minutes in, the ipod which was tucked into my pants, must have pressed on my tummy and so altered the settings and 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' by Greenday kept repeating over and over....it was only until it was on the 4th repeat I had to stop for a bit to try to change the settings so that I could listen to something different! But, the strange thing was that as it was repeating, I really felt like Mummy was with me (and she continued to stay with me the whole way)....I think it's probably because of the song and that I knew the particular cause that the proceeds were going to , but I really felt that sense of not being alone... (Yes, I know, there were 6000 other runners running alongside me, but I don't mean that!) I even, though I was sweating my pants off, felt really shivery and cold twice in the middle of the run - my hair on my arms stood on end and I felt very odd - I was warm, but cold and did feel quite strange. What was funnier was that the lyrics 'I walk alone, I walk alone' seemed so contradictory as I clearly felt like she was there!
Hard to explain. Maybe I'm losing it!

Anyway. The run was great fun, we had a HUGE breakfast afterwards with fellow friends and colleagues who had also run with us and then we spent the morning by the pool before we checked out at lunchtime and went home again.

Back to reality.