Traditional Home-stay 2

The next day was spent visiting more traditional villages, and a tired looking and worn hot pool.  The swim was a relaxing finish to a hot day.

Jan wished to experience and study the traditional village culture more deeply, so she booked a guide to take us for a home-stay in a village  on a side of a volcano. Our driver drove us and the guide up to the start of our hike and dropped us off.  We had a steep climb on the shoulder of the volcano in the hot sun to the village.  This was difficult for us old people.  Some of us were not to proud to accept the offer of a motorbike ride for a short distance.

During the day, most of the inhabitants were in the sea coast village working, and the children were at school.  This means that everyday they walk, or ride on motorbikes up and down the distance that we had just come.  On this particular day, there was a wedding of someone from the village, so a lot of the people did not come home until much later so they could celebrate the wedding.

We did find out that this particular village is a matriarchal society.  Some of the villages are patriarchal societies.

Games they play:  The first--two children sitting opposite each other place a rubber band each on the table or bench, and blow the rubber bands towards each other. The person who blows his/her band  over top of the other band wins both bands.  As in marbles, you try to collect as many bands as you can.
Another game:  A row of round nuts are lined up.  About one foot behind this row a line is drawn.  About two meters in front of the row of nuts, another line is drawn .  A person with a handful of nuts stands in front of the two meter line and throws nuts at the line of nuts.  The  person tries to knock a nut out of the row across the back line. If you knock the left hand nut out of the line and across the back line, all nuts to the right are yours.

After a beautiful sunset, and a tasty meal, we slept on an open veranda on bamboo mats, and no covers.

Next morning, we watched as children left to be at school by 7:00 a.m.  The older ones go down to the sea coast for school, while the younger ones go to the local school.  The older children play a game of "Kick the Coconut" while going to school.  The children at the local school cleaned up the yard with reed brooms, and then participated in  the opening ceremonies for the day.