After eating so much in Vietnam, it feels like time to shape up. My friend showed me a swimming pool north of my house where you can swim for 12,500 Rp a session ($1.36). There are cheaper pools in Jogja, but this is close to my work and home and doesn’t require navigating too much traffic, so I’m much more likely to go. It’s also not as populated as the others, making me feel like less of a spectacle as a single, swimming, female bule wearing something more revealing than the full-body wetsuits other women wear here. Definitely got a lot of stares in just a one-piece and shorts.
The pool is at a fancy sports/housing complex called Merapi View, so named because on a clear day like today, you have direct sight of its namesake:
Swimming pool today with the active volcano Mount Merapi in upper right, above the clouds.
At the pool today, I kept remembering a particular time swimming in DC when I dislocated my kneecap mid-breast stroke, since even such zero-impact exercise was too much for my soupy patellas. I don’t have the words yet to describe the impact of such chronic physical instability on your life, when you’re only 22 years old and can’t trust your joints to hold you up. Now after recovering from my May 2009 surgery, I never worry about my knees’ stability. That is a personal miracle. I would never have moved here or been able to do all the things I’m doing with the knee I had before.
This brings my Definitely Good Life Decisions total up to two, namely patellar realignment surgery and moving to Indonesia. And if you ever need a good knee surgeon, which I hope you never do, his name is Dr. Jack Andrish at the Cleveland Clinic.
Before: patellar subluxation, sunrise view
After: kneecap in place!
Success!
mcljava 