A happy and delighted Monday morning to you! This week is already shaping up to be pretty crazy and I’m excited. It always feels so good to sit down at my computer and blog after taking a two day break from blogging. (Woah, I sound like my world revolves around blogging…)

Today, folks, I’m going to give in to my nostalgic side and post pictures from this time last year. (Yes, it’s true: You can be nostalgic about things that happened so recently.) A year ago I was on a grand adventure where I flew to the other side of the world and surprised my best friend, lived with her family for a month, documented her engagement by taking pictures while hiding in the greenery, and made thousands of wonderful memories.

While in Indonesia I not only got to live in the future (it’s pretty amazing being eleven hours ahead of the world back home) I also got to eat some of the best food in the world. Mainly the fruit and rice. There were so many different kinds of fruit that I’d never even heard of before. How crazy is that? Convincing the five other girls I was living with to go fruit shopping in the pouring down rain was so much fun.

Our month consisted of hikes to waterfalls, eating at cute restaurants surrounded by rice fields, climbing up mountains, riding on the back of motor bikes and pick up trucks, hundreds of games of Rook, drinking coconut juice, and water fights.

I’m not sure when I’ve seen anything that compares to the beauty of mountains. From the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee to the Swiss Alps in Switzerland to the peaks in Durango, Colorado, to the Andes Mountains in Peru, to the mountain we climbed in Indonesia, the word fills me with a feeling of splendor and majesty. I’m so very, very thankful for the chance to have climbed the mountain not once, but twice.

The second time we climbed the mountain was in the dark, which added the the adventure and provided an experience unlike any I’ve ever had before. By the time we reached the top of the mountain we were all shivering and huddled together on the blankets we had brought and eating hot soup and watching in vain for the sunrise that was hidden by a thick covering of fog. (Two of my friends got engaged on the mountain top though, so it was well worth it.)

The first time we climbed the mountain though, the view was beyond amazing. We could climb down the side of the mountain a few feet and sit there, gazing at the world and feeling the peacefulness of the day seep into our souls.

We went with the children from an orphanage and sitting at the top of the mountain, basking in the deep sunshine and eating snacks while watching them joke and talk together made my heart happy.

 These five girls provided me with so many wonderful memories and I feel very blessed to have been able to spend a whole month living with them. Even more amazing is that I get to see and spend nearly every day with Sarah now, a gift I used to only dream about.

When we weren’t climbing mountains or exploring a green world, we had a delightful time in the kitchen: cooking, doing dishes and of course bobbing. I’m not sure how or when or why it started (let’s just chalk it up to my randomness), but bobbing in the dish water became an almost nightly event. We would seriously have a line of people waiting to take their turn. It was fun trying to find interesting things to bob with from cloves of garlic to little lemons. An egg was a challenge that ended with a near-disaster, but fun nonetheless.

I’m so very, very thankful I had the chance to go to Indonesia for a month. I’m even more thankful to now have Sarah as my neighbor and will forever be grateful for her getting married and moving so crazy-close. Plus, of course, I have to extend my gratitude to everyone who put up with the very random me for a whole month. (Ahem.)