pics and running

Yes. Here I am at Pamu'uk. It doesn't get much better than this. If you could see inside my hands, You would find a sand composed of shells as well as qtz. The waves sifted these two media in very exciting ways.

In other news: I finally got in a run! Yes, I woke up at 7:30 am(!) this morning and walked to the park near Jesse's house. Now, I am an experienced travel-runner, having run in 8 countries to date, but something about Aceh had kept me from running for almost two weeks. Jesse has been very careful to show me how not to aggravate Sharia law, so maybe that has kept me timid. We wear long sleeved shirts on the way to the courts, a quatermile away. I wore my basketball shorts and a t-shirt for this particular run which is about 6 times as much material I usually use when its 85 degrees. As I got to it, I felt all my insecurities slipping away. Here I was, running. Here I was, it was normal. Even they sheets of laughter from the uniformed and covered hs students on their way to school were normal. The one thing that wasn't normal, was that I didn't go very long. I cut the run at 20 minutes because I had to fart, and farts these days are usually diarhea. My runs have lead to many public poops, from Madrid's Casa del Campo, the Berliner Lustgarden, and every supergreen tuft of grass in Roseville. I also hate to admit it, but I felt pretty out of shape. I must have looked like a basketball player who is trying to run but has no idea how to which, at the moment, is exactly what I am. Is this the beginning of a sub15 min 5k next spring? Perhaps. Perhaps.