I have to admit, the name of this blog post is not my own original turn of phrase. I lifted this from a caption that my friend Christian put on one of his Facebook photos showing a completely flooded street near our school. But it was such a good title for the picture I decided I had to use it. (Not the one to the right; I took that picture.)Jakarta has turned into Venice. Except instead of gondolas paddling serenely up the canals, we have motorbikes, cars, bicycles, inflatable rafts, and people soaked up to their knees or waists forging through murky, polluted, city rain backwash floods in the streets. So... very nearly the same.
This is really the rainy season now. I thought I had seen some good examples of serious rainfall before Christmas break. That was merely the prelude, it turns out. It rains everyday. As I write, a thick and smudgy solid curtain of rain is soaking everything in sight, making the construction site below us into a lake and turning the streets into rivers. Thunder occasionally rumbles through the sky and there are some fairly bright bursts of lightening too.
This morning when I woke up I had a vague, niggling sense that we might have a rain day. It was raining on the way to school (we took an alternative route, going the wrong way on one-ways and splashing through slightly less flooded streets to avoid the really badly flooded streets.) A different van with some secondary teachers got stalled en route to school and they had to get out and wade in the water to push the van along.Only 6 of the students in my homeroom showed up today - the rest couldn't make it. The school day started and I had 7 kids in my first class of the day (4th grade English) and two of them left within half an hour. About 45 minutes into class (or, as it happened, building-paper-bridges-just-for-fun-because-I'm-not-going-to-present-my-English-lesson-to-just-five-kids) school was cancelled ("and there was much rejoicing") and the kids scrambled off to the bottom level of the school to wait for their drivers. I even heard a story of a first grader whose driver couldn't make it with the car so he walked to school to give the kid a piggy-back ride back home.
It didn't rain much after 8 or 9 in the morning, but it seems to rain through the night, like it is now. In fact, while I was writing just a few paragraphs up, I got a text from my Head of Department saying school is cancelled for tomorrow. (And I just texted 46 parents to let them know too.) So, if Minnesota has snow days (albeit grudgingly,) Jakarta has flood days. I'm happy to be able to sleep in tomorrow; not so psyched about making up these lost days on future Saturdays, as I think will be the case. (Saturdays just aren't sacred here, the way they are in the US.) We were told at school to buy more food, water, candles and/or a flashlight and long extension cord. If the power goes out in our apartment building, they may bring a generator up to our floor.
In other news, I'm back in Indonesia! The first week has gone well (that is, the 3 days out of 5 that we have not been flooded in) and the routine seems familiar now. Last semester was challenging because I felt like I was "driving by sight." It's apparently a German expression I read somewhere ("Fahren auf Sicht," I think?) that describes those situations when, say, it's so foggy out that you can only see five feet in front of you and you have to proceed slowly and carefully because you have no idea what's coming up down the road. But now I know what a typical semester should look like, so I anticipate that this semester will be easier.
On my way back to Jakarta, two cool things happened, as far as I am concerned. One is that to go from Chicago to Hong Kong (en route to Jakarta) we flew not east or west so much as straight north, then south, over the polar ice caps. I was mesmerized by the flight screen showing us north of Canada, north of Greenland, and then, miraculously, we were in the Eastern hemisphere, and north of Russia. How often can a person say they are north of Canada or Greenland, or Russia? And at one point, the map showed our closest landmark to be Svalbard! (Which I'd really love to visit someday.)
The second neat thing was visiting Hong Kong. I quite unexpectedly ran into another BBS teacher in Chicago before we got on the same flight to Hong Kong, and then the two of us ran into another teacher once we got there. We had both booked different hotels, but they weren't too far away from each other, so we figured out the airport shuttle and subway system together to get there. We had a 13 hour layover from 8 PM to 9 AM. My hostel was pretty easy to find, just a few blocks away from a subway station, and after I checked in I made the most of my short stay and went walking around. I poked my head into a few shops and even tried some late night street food at a place that was selling what looked like little bits of octopus tentacles and fish and kebabs. I stuck with a vegetarian kebab. I was lucky to get a few hours of sleep that night before going back to the airport and arriving in Jakarta in the mid-afternoon the next day. It was too short a stay in Hong Kong. It would be nice to go back for a three or four day visit sometime.
(P.S. Here's an article about the flooding, if you're interested. Many areas have been affected worse than the particular neighborhood where I live. It's bad here, but not quite as dire as the examples in the article.)
