50 NEW THINGS ABOUT INDONESIA

Not long after I moved to Indonesia I had a blog post called 30 Things I Have Learned About Indonesia in (Nearly) 30 Days. Now that I've been here a year I'm making a new list of 50 things, but I'm breaking it up into four sections:

* 10 Things About Life in Indonesia

* 10 Things I Miss From Home

* 20 Funny Things My Students Say 

* 10 Reasons I Love Being an Expat

So... without further ado:

10 Things About Life in Indonesia

1. Everything is written in English, but nobody speaks English. Generalisations of course, but it seems that most flyers, posters, advertisements, brochures, menus, directories, and a lot of other things are written entirely in English. However, few people speak English fluently and a lot don't speak any English at all. You ask, "Where can I find cleaning supplies?" at the big-box store and you get a funny look and/or embarrassed giggle and the employee invariably goes off to find the one English-speaking colleague on shift at the moment.

2. Indonesians are really friendly. People seem very good-natured here and don't hesitate to give you warm smile and help you out. As I wrote above, people don't always speak English but they almost always go and find someone who does if you have a question you want answered. People frequently lend you a hand and middle-aged women who have only seen white people on television will call you beautiful and make you take a picture with their five-year-old daughter if you bump into them on the train or are walking through their neighborhood. The worst is that men sometimes leer at you but even so, it's more obnoxious than predatory. 

3. Perhaps to help deal with aforementioned men-leering-at-you problem, most trains and buses have a "women-only" section in front. It probably also has to do with standards of modesty in this Muslim country. At first I thought it was kind of weird, but now I really like it. Sometimes women stare at you too, but its mostly in the "Hey, you're different," sort of way I mentioned above, and even so, women seem to be a lot more polite than men. Women generally look out for each other more, I think, and won't make a big deal out of fact that you're "bule."

4. Never expect efficiency. I'm mostly a go-with-the-flow sort of person, so this one doesn't bother me as it might some others, but it can still be frustrating. At school for example, if you need something from the upstairs supply room and the one person who has a key to the room is absent that day, no one else in the admin office or cleaning staff seems able to open the room or find a solution to get it open. Nope, you'll just have to wait until So-And-So is back. And when something isn't available, it's always promised to be available "tomorrow." Indonesians hate to disappoint, so they will just tell you "tomorrow" every single day (even if it ends up being weeks) because, apparently, it sounds better than just telling you, "I don't know when it will be available, but I'll let you know when it is." Ha! You'd never hear that. 

5. The smell of raw sewage mixed with the fragrances of pollution and stale canal water is known, formally among Bina Bangsa expats anyway, as "Jakarta Fresh." It's a very distinct smell. When I first moved here, the smells were new and sometimes vague, but now I can identify a breeze of Jakarta Fresh leaking up the street in an instant. Generally if I'm walking with someone, we turn to each other at the same moment and say, "Whew! That is some Jakarta Fresh right there!"

6. Continuing my thought from #5, Indonesia > Jakarta. Jakarta just kind of sucks... Sorry to say. There are some very nice restaurants and bars and dance clubs, and as many malls as your heart could desire, but it's lacking in almost everything else. There are one or two nice museums and some cool historical buildings in the old part of town. Even so, Jakarta is mostly an overwhelming sprawling mass of concrete, with skyscrapers and malls punctuating a sea of little lean-to villages and three-story business blocks. And, it smells so lovely too. And then there's the perpetual blanket of smog that lies over the city. But the rest of Indonesia is much nicer, fresher, greener, and enjoyable. Whenever I meet people trekking in Asia I tell them to definitely skip Jakarta and head straight for Yogyakarta, which is also in Java, but so much nicer.

7. A little package wrapped in banana leaves = lunch! (Or dinner, or breakfast...) Banana leaves are the original brown paper lunch bag. If you're travelling and someone is giving you lunch on the go, it will probably be a banana leaf wrap with rice, chicken, half a hard-boiled egg, and a few vegetables inside. 

8. Burping in public is totally fine. Well, you can't exactly burp anywhere you please, but it is much more acceptable. People really don't think much of it. It's like blowing your nose I guess. If you blow your nose really loudly, it can sound kind of gross, but people don't mind too much or make a big deal of it. Same with burping here. When I've gone for a massage before, sometimes the masseuse will burp almost constantly. Which personally I find disturbing, but the reason is that they are supposedly releasing gas trapped in your tissue when they massage you, and then they burp to give the gas an exit to the world.

9. People rarely suspect I'm American. This was also true in Europe (at least on the Continent - maybe the Brits knew where I was from) but here people just don't guess you're American because North America is so dang far away, few North Americans make it here for any length of time. People more often guess my friends and I are English, Australian, or Dutch. One time, I had a guy believing we were from Moscow for at least a solid minute or two.

10. You can guess fairly accurately what a bule does by where he/she lives. ("Bule," again, is the Indonesian term for white person. It literally means "faded.") We who are faded in West Jakarta are more of the working class expats, mostly teachers and pilots. There are a lot of pilots in the buildings where I live. Mostly young European guys who can't get work at home so they fly for the Asian budget lines. The bules who live in South and South-Central Jakarta are the richer ones. The ones who own their own businesses and work for governments and stuff like that.

10 Things I Miss From Home

1. My family and friends. Well, duh. Goes without saying. I'll see you in December!

2. Fresh, raw vegetables. Can't complain too much, because I can buy fresh veggies from both the supermarket and the local market, but fresh vegetables are almost never served with meals in run-of-the-mill Indonesian restaurants (besides the typical two slices of cucumber and one slice of tomato which seem required.) I also can't complain because I can go to Western-style restaurants to get salads, but still there seems to be a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables served with meals. Usually it's just starch and meat. A lot of starch and meat.

3. Clean air. It's just not that good here. Go outside of Jakarta and you can breath freely and deeply but here inside our lovely, sprawling metropolis of millions, the air is always a little hazy. : (

4. The seasons. You know, all four. Not just rainy and not-rainy. Once in a while when it rains it can actually be cool - mid 70s or so - and then I can actually put on jeans and feel cozy and I like that. But otherwise it's warm everyday and the sun rises and sets at the same time everyday.

5. Nice, quiet, peaceful 4:30 AMs. Normally, I have always considered myself a religiously tolerant person, but lately the cacophonous 4:30 AM call to prayers has really been testing me. Our new apartment overlooks a stretch of kampung and it seems there is a mosque every hundred yards or so. I don't really know how many are out there but they all start about 4:30 and it's no lovely sound. They use very loud, fuzzy bullhorns and amplifiers and compete with each other for sheer volume. It's not melodious Middle Eastern motifs either. At one mosque they have given the job to a kid who must be about 10 - he definitely hasn't reached puberty yet - and he doesn't know many good melodies so he just belts out a repetitive sing-song tune that sounds like a playground chant. Anyway, I wouldn't even mind it at 4:30 if it stopped after a minute, but it goes on until 4:50. Every day! Truly, I have no complaints about living in a Muslim country - except for 4:30 AM call to prayers that go on for 20 minutes.

6. No smoking areas. Even indoors at restaurants you aren't guaranteed clean air! Everyone smokes like chimneys (what do you expect when the cheapest cigarettes are less than $1 a pack) and there is no such thing as a smoking area. Whole restaurants are smoking areas.

7. The open road. Traffic is terrible! I don't miss driving for myself so much, but I don't enjoy being stuck in traffic jams.

8. Free, drinkable water at restaurants. It's such a joy to get to Singapore and enjoy a complimentary glass of tap water! I have to buy a drink every time I go out to eat more or less. Drinks can cost as much as a meal - about 3 or 4 dollars sometimes.

9. Quick check-out lines at the grocery store. You need to schedule at least 15-20 minutes to get through the check-out at the grocery store. First of all, the Indonesian check out clerks are in no rush whatsoever. They go so slowly, just because. Second, there aren't two conveyor belts, like there often are at the big grocery stores in the States. Instead there's just one short conveyor belt, and when the guy or gal is done ringing up your groceries, they will also bag them for you. So that can be a long wait, waiting for everyone in front of you with their 100 packages of instant noodles and their 50 bars of soap and 10 bags of frying oil and sambal, to have everything rung up and bagged by someone who isn't too bothered with quick service in the first place.

10. Cheese. Not much good cheese here. I can get Laughing Cow, Babybel, and a few others, but otherwise the quality isn't as good, and it's not as abundant or cheap. I miss cheese! Most of the best dairy is imported from New Zealand or Australia. (I also miss Cheez-Its; I haven't found them or any decent substitute yet.)



20 Funny Things My Students Say

This list was supposed to be only 10 things, but there were just too many I wanted to share. (Disclaimer: I don't speak Indonesian hardly at all. My vocab is pretty limited to, "Good morning," "How are you?" "How much is it?" "Thank you," "You're welcome," "Fried noodles, please," "Turn left here," "Wait!" and "What?" So if it seems like I'm poking fun... well, I am a little, but I don't want to be hypocritical. I know my Indonesian is less than perfect. In fact, it's less than conversational, and I'm sure I sound rather ridiculous to the locals.)

1. "So cheating, lah!" This one is perhaps my favourite. "So cheating," is their way of saying "unfair!" and "lah!" is an emphasiser picked up from Singaporean English. Just stick "lah!" on the end of anything to add extra oomph. 

2. A variation on this is "So bad!" which you use to show your disgust with something, but more in a lighthearted way. For example, "Sorry, we don't have time to play a game." "So bad, Miss!"

3. "She always minds my business!" Translation: She always butts into my life when I don't want her to. It's exactly the opposite of minding your own business.

4. "So how?" Translation: So now what should I do? It's one of those awkward direct translations from an Indonesian phrase. It might be used in this context: "Miss, I don't have my markers to colour the poster. So, how?" 

5. "Have...?" Translation: Is there any...? Will there be...? Could be used like this: Students aren't allowed in the Teacher's Room, but a student might be hanging around outside, wanting to talk to Ms. Lynsey. To ask if Ms. Lynsey is there, the student might say, "Have Ms. Lynsey?" (Or, alternatively, "Is there Ms. Lynsey?") Or you could ask about what's on your upcoming test: "Have past tense?" Or what's available for lunch: "Have french fries?"

6. "For a while..." Translation = For some undetermined amount of time. You might hear, "Miss, I go toilet for a while?" "Miss, I borrow scissors for a while?" 

7. That's another one I heard quite frequently: "I borrow, yeah?" 

8. "Last time..." Translation = Some undetermined time in the past. Possible usage: "Last time, I had a hamster, but it died." "Last time, my family went to Bali." "Last time, we play catch in the courtyard."

9. Lest you misunderstand me, "catch" is not a game of throwing a ball back and forth, it's tag. There's no such thing as "tag;" instead, you play "catching." It's not "He's chasing me," but, "He's catching me."

10. Along the same lines, you don't search for something, you "find" it: "I'm finding my little sister, so we can go home."

11. "Photo" as a verb. If a students asks "Can I photo you?" say, during a field trip, I usually reply, "No, but you may take a picture of me." And if they tell me, "I photoed her!" I will say, "Oh, you took a picture of her?" I'm constantly repeating things back with the correct grammar. I don't know if the kids notice. They probably think I'm just crazy and never understand anything they say the first time.

12. "Ever..." THIS ONE DRIVES ME NUTS! It's a direct translation from Bahasa Indonesia that just doesn't work in English, but it's difficult to explain that to a student because we do have the word "ever" in English, but not in the way the kids here use it. They might say something like, "I ever go to Disneyland Hong Kong," for "I once went to Disneyland Hong Kong." 

13. They also say "already," a lot. Lots of Indonesians do. In Indonesian you say "sudah," which means "already," but it just floats by itself, so they do the same thing with already. "Have you eaten?" "Already miss." Or, "Have you finished page 50?" "Already, lah!"

14. "Can?" Translation = Is it possible? Will that work? Might be used like this: "I need to make photocopy. Can?" 

15. Conversely, you use "can't" if it's not possible. If something is just too difficult, and you are ready to throw up your hands and thrown in the towel, you exclaim, "Cannot, Miss!" (Or, "Cannot, Sir!" if you are whining to a male teacher.)

16. "Must to..." Translation = It is necessary to; You have to (there isn't really a good translation in English; in French I guess you would say "il faut.") Possible usage: "Must to sign permission slip before you can go." Or, "Must to go home! I have lessons! Miiissss! I cannot stay! My mom will be angry to me!" Hey, I think I just found #17.

17. "So-And-So very angry to me." It's never angry with me, but angry to me. I hear parents say it too, so it's no wonder the kids do too. "My boy very lazy, you know. But when I angry to him, he still don't want to do his homework." (Again, I'm not trying to make fun of anyone so much as I'm just imitating what I actually hear people say. The parents at the school mostly speak English - which is nice because I can't speak Indonesian - but it's not always a polished version of English. And again, these are generalisations of what I hear some people say.)

18. "Running-running," "Shouting-shouting," Translation = Hmm... Hard to translate this one actually. In Indonesian you pluralise something by saying the thing twice. For example, book is "buku," but books is "buku-buku," and I think that's where this comes from. I hear kids using it to empahise something. If I walk into the classroom and the kids were messing around and Student A wants to tattle on Student B, he might say, "Miss, he was running-running and shouting-shouting!" Maybe it means they were running and shouting a lot. I don't really know.

19. General misuse of prepositions. I hear things like, "Spread the jam to the toast," and "I was born at June." It doesn't change the meaning too much, just sounds odd.

20. "Thingy-thingy." Translation = whatchamacallit. You know, a thing whose name you can't remember. A thingy-thingy! Possible example: "Miss! Can't find the thing-thingy!" 

10 Reasons I Love Being an Expat

1. I get to explore new parts of the world, sometimes as a tourist, sometimes as a resident. I know this one seems obvious. I mean, that's sort of why I decided to try international teaching in the first place: to experience life overseas and see a new part of the world close up. But I guess it is my number one reason for being an expat. I suppose it wouldn't be unfair to call it a lifestyle choice. I'm not so attached to my home country that I need to live my entire life there, even if I do suspect I will eventually settle down there. (Probably...) I like trying to live in new places! 

2. Improving my geography. I can actually find Malaysia on a map now and even show you where Singapore is, even though it's probably too small to show up on its own. Also, Myanmar is west of Thailand and the Mekong River runs through a lot of different countries.

3. Getting new stamps in my passport. I admit it, I love collecting new stamps for the countries I visit. If you exit through immigration, you can really say you've been to a place. Like how I was in Hong Kong for only 12 hours, but, I have a stamp to prove I left immigration! (And it has Chinese characters on it!) Most of my stamps are from Indonesia right now.

4. Making new friends and connections. I have made a few Indonesian friends, but I have also met people when travelling and met other expats around. I have met people from Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Taiwan, China, Russia, Netherlands, Italy, and South Africa. It's easy to stay in contact with people if you want to. It's fun to chat with people from different places and find out what you have in common or what is different. And, not surprisingly, the people who are willing to engage you are generally very friendly.

5. Learning the art of travelling. It is an art, something you get better at the more you do it. Mostly I think travelling involves common sense and balance. Do exciting things, but don't be dangerous and wear yourself out. Try new foods, but don't eat anything that looks like it's been siting out all day. Push yourself, but not too much. Be safe. It's okay to reach out and make friends with other travelers but you don't want to trust everyone you meet. I mean, obviously. Mostly common sense, but still, I do think you get better at it the more you do it. The more airports you visit, the more customs people you have to smile at, the more hostels you stay in, the more you learn how it all works and how to get the most out of your travel.

6. Meeting and hanging out with other expats. One of my favourite parts of living the expat-life. It started with meeting my parents' friends who had taught with them in Kuwait. Former expats, I guess. When I lived in Belgium for student teaching, that really confirmed in my mind that expats are really cool people and that I wanted to be one and hang around with them. Expats always seem to have interesting stories of places they have lived and visited. Many of them are perpetually on the move, relocating every few years. Others have been in their adopted countries for years on end. With expats you can joke about the funny things about living abroad and swap stories and feel like you have something in common, even if you come from, or live in, different countries. Sometimes, I will admit, it feels weird to chat about travel and life abroad with people who aren't expats because you can come across as pretentious. It think this is because it costs money to travel and you seem to bragging about how you have the means to travel. But when you are in the company of other people who share your life, it's easy to talk and joke and share stories.

7. Having two homes. Minnesota is still my home home, and it's the place I feel most rooted to, but sometimes I also refer to my apartment in Jakarta as my home. It's nice to have a place of your own, with your own kitchen, and couch, and bed and your own pictures on the walls. This is my home now, and it comes with all the mundane details like having a security deposit, paying utilities, taking my laundry down to the laundromat, stocking up on groceries, and of course, going to work. That doesn't stop me from every once in a while looking around and saying to myself, "Wait a minute. Now just how did I end up here again?"

8. Showing people around my new country. Like, say, my parents! It's difficult to get a lot of visitors from North America here, but once in a while one shows up. Nicole and I both had our families visit this June, and Kristina has a close friend visiting in August. If anyone else wants to come visit me, I'm happy to plan a trip! It was great to show my parents around Indonesia. Half of our trip was things I've already done which were cool enough to warrant doing a second time, and the other half was new for me.

9. Learning a new language. As I've mentioned above, my Indonesian isn't very comprehensive or polished, but I probably know more words than I realize. I mostly have a tool-box of crude vocabulary that I can make use of. But it's fun nevertheless to be able to communicate with people who don't speak English. Even better if you can communicate successfully!

10. Travel opportunities! Plane tickets to Asia are sooo expensive; I would never be able to travel as I do if I did not live here. With a handful of week-long term breaks and three day weekends scattered throughout the school year, I have been able to see quite a few different regions and countries, and I will keep on doing that this year. Why in the world wouldn't I? Right now I'm contemplating Vietnam as my next holiday spot for term break.



I realize it's a long list, but I hope you've enjoyed a few insights into my life one year on in Indonesia. As always, I've got more things to blog about and hopefully lots more adventures coming up. As to my family and friends, I miss you! One year away from home is a long stretch, but I will be back in December. But we can stay in touch in the meantime. 

HIKE, EAT, LIE IN THE SUN // PART TWO: EAT AND SUN

This is part deux of the Malaysian adventure. I left off with us leaving the Cameron Highlands the same way we came, by bus. The bus trip wasn't too long, and before long we had passed through Johor and got off at the town of Butterworth. (Yes, Butterworth. You can blame the English colonists for that one.) We got on a ferry to take us across the water to our next destination, the city of Penang. Penang is mid-sized island off the west coast of Malaysia. Taking the ferry was fun: we got to see the city come slowly into view while leaning over the railings, and I don't think there were any other tourists. Also, it was very cheap!

One of the best things about Penang is the diversity and melting-pot feel. It's not very segregated between Chinese, Malay, and Tamil and you are likely to find a Hindu temple, Chinese medicine shop, and mosque all in the same neighborhood, maybe even on the same street. There are also lots of old, cool colonial buildings there. It's a place with a strong feel of history and culture.

After checking into our hostel, Lynsey, Kristina and I set off to conquer nearby Penang Hill. (Nicole had unfortunately hurt her knee the day before and couldn't manage the hike.) We started at the Penang Botanical Gardens. After walking around a few times, we finally found the entrance to the hiking path leading straight up the hill. "Hill", by the way, was a bit of a misnomer. More like a sheer slope.

Half way up the "hill" we found a rest area where some older chaps were resting. These men, all in the 50s and 60s it seemed, climb the hill regularly for exercise, or fun, or who knows why. Anyway, I felt a bit ashamed being so out of breath in front of them. But they let us refill our water bottles there. On the second part of the journey up Penang Hill we were lucky enough to meet a man who had a house overlooking the city and ocean surrounding the island. He invited us to see the view from the garden of his house and it was truly impressive (and also a good place to catch our breath once again.) The final stretch up the hill really did me in - it was steeper than anything I've ever climbed before - but with tiny baby steps at the very end I made it. At the top of the hill there are lots of people and some things to see and do. Everyone sane just takes the cable car up. I saw two interesting things: a Hindu temple and a centipede about a foot long, crawling along the curb.

That night we went out to experience what Penang is perhaps most renowned for: its street food. We headed out to Gurney Drive (aka: Glutton Drive) to eat all sorts of wonderful food, with an actual street-food map in hand, produced by the city. (On a side-note, I keep talking about Penang like it is a city, but it's actually just the name of the island; Georgetown is its main city.) First of all, the mere sight and smell of the place was an experience in and of itself. Numbered stalls standing shoulder to shoulder crowded along a several block stretch offering noodles, soup, cuttlefish, meatballs, fried food, and much more. We made it a multiple course meal with a strategy of "divide and conquer." Each person was responsible for buying one food item and bringing it back to the table for all to share. I only made it through three courses, just couldn't make it to the fourth. Alas, I am not a food warrior. Still, I felt like I wouldn't need to eat again for a week.

Our time in Penang was short and we left the next afternoon after a quick walk about town (which included, for me, seeing Fort Cornwallis, the old English garrison, and a famous feng shui house, the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion.) Next stop was another island: Langkawi. The goal for Langkawi was to enjoy beach and sun and surf for three days.

Our first hotel turned out to be a bust. Essentially they, or someone, had lied in their description online. There was no beach next to the place, only construction. And it looked like a worn out, smoke-stained old place with very little happening around it. We took a taxi over to a more popular beach and were able to find two basic rooms only a short walk from the main road with restaurants, next to the beach. A much better choice. And who should we run into there, but Arjen! I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising: the backpacker trail in Malaysia (like Thailand) is pretty well established and it's not unusual to run into people you've met before. My friends also said they saw the Russian guy we kept running into in Cameron Highlands in Penang.

Langkawi was blissfully relaxing and lazy. There were a lot of tourists and backpackers but it didn't have a very strong artificial, touristy feel, like the more commercialized parts of Bali. It was more laid-back. We really did spend three days lying in the sun on the sand, periodically running into the water for a while. Somehow - miraculously - I was the only one who didn't get any sort of sunburn. I was pretty religious about applying sunscreen though. Funny, it only took me about 15 years or so to learn that lesson. One highlight was renting kayaks for the afternoon and exploring some nearby islands. Lynsey and Kristina manned a kayak together, and I was unfortunately stuck on my own. It worked out though - even though I didn't have their strength I was more coordinated just by myself and while they went askew and then overcompensated and then over-overcompensated, I made it back to shore in good time. It was a small victory for one as lacking in upper body strength as myself. The islands were beautiful and we got to take a swim on one. Another highlight was taking a cable car ride to the top of one of the tallest (the tallest?) mountains / hills on the island and getting a panoramic, bird's-eye-view of Langkawi island. On a clear day, they say you can see right to Thailand. I think I might have seen Thailand, but it was kind of cloudy.

We used every day available to us for that break and were in Malaysia all nine days. I liked each part of it, the hiking, the eating, and the beach bumming. When I meet other travellers doing their pan-Asia journeys, I always recommend Cameron Highlands if they ask me for a suggestion or favourite thing I've done. Now, it's a new year and time for new adventures. I already have a few things to catch up on in this blog, such as Mom and Dad's 2+ week visit just a little while ago. I haven't even edited the photos from that trip yet! But, I promise, more to come. Keep posted!

HIKE, EAT, LIE IN THE SUN // PART ONE: HIKE

Not quite as snappy as "Eat, Pray, Love," but it will do. These three thing: hiking, eating, and lying in the sun are a pretty apt summary of our week-long holiday to Malaysia. As you may or may not know, we have breaks after every term at Bina Bangsa. In between the last break (terms 3 and 4) my friends and I headed to Malaysia. In a word, it was awesome. I would not have thought of travelling to Malaysia before, but once I started reading about it and then once we were actually there and travelling around, I would definitely recommend the country for anyone planning a trek around SE Asia.

As is often the case, I'm writing this blog post far after the fact. Many of the entries in my personal travel journal are the same way. A lot of them begin with the words, "Sorry I didn't finish that last entry," or "Sorry to take so long to write about..." Don't really know who I'm apologising to though. I am sorry to write about Malaysia several weeks late, but only a little bit. I would say I'm about 15% sorry. 17% tops. Anyway, I've got to, because now that the school year is finished (!) there will be a new trip coming up.

Now that we're done quantifying my regret, on to Malaysia! Happily we spent every single day of vacation there, from 22 March to 31 March. On the 22nd we didn't do anything but to fly to Kuala Lumpur that night and find our hostel. We were starving though, not really having had dinner, and wandered to a nearby street with big Chinese banners and lanterns. It looked like a typical Chinatown street and at the end there was one little place still open with a number of people eating late night noodles. So we enjoyed some street food at 2 am and went back to the hostel to sleep for a few hours.

The next day was the first full day of our trip. We set off early to go to the bus station, which was only a couple of blocks away. We had booked bus tickets to the Cameron Highlands, further north. The bus ride was pleasant one and I started to really enjoy myself. Malaysia, despite being very similar to Indonesia in a lot of ways, feels a bit more, how shall I put it, polished? A bit more tourist friendly, more green and open, more modern, with less of the chaos and crudeness of Indonesia. Not all of Indonesia is crude of course (and by crude, I just mean unpolished.) Bali is very polished. But, that's about it (so far as I know.) The bus trip only took a few hours, the last one being a series of hairpin turns right up into the highlands, and then we were in the town of Tanah Rata.

Tanah Rata is a wonderful town that I would love to build a summer home in if I was a wealthy person with summer homes about the world. It's lovely and beautiful and green and... cool! Up in the highlands it can be downright cool and sweaters are not unjustified. It's also very diverse. Like most of Malaysia, it seems to be a melting pot of Malay, Chinese, and Indian. Nicole, Kristina, Lynsey and I ate at this one terrific Indian restaurant for at least three of our meals during our three days there. Nicole and Lynsey hadn't really tried Indian food before, but quickly fell in love with it.

When we got off the bus we headed to the place we thought our hotel was. It wasn't quite the right place, but it was another hotel owned by the same people, Gerard and Jay. We only met Gerard on our last day, but we met his wife, Jay, right away. Jay is an awesome person. Immediately friendly and welcoming, she personally drove us to our guesthouse in her jeep. (First though, she showed us a Pitcher Plant growing on the garden wall so that we would be able to recognise them when we were out and about hiking.) After we had dropped our things at the guesthouse she showed us the trails we could hike on our own. The Cameron Highlands are a prime hiking spot. The trails are only a little challenging. They do take some physical effort because they can be rough or narrow or steep in parts, but they're really not too bad. Most of our hikes lasted about four hours or so, which I think is a perfect length. Although the paths are worn enough to tell where to go, they are not exactly the sort of things that are actually maintained by anyone. Instead, they are just worn down by other hikers. Sometimes there were forks in the path and then you just have to dig out your map and try to determine where you are, because although having a map certainly helps, it doesn't make it immediately obvious where everything is or where you should go.

Hiking through the jungles was great. It was beautiful and peaceful and it felt great to be surrounded by greenery. We ran into other hikers only once in a while. The first day we headed toward the neighboring town of Brinchang. We took a wrong turn at first, but soon got back on the right path and ended up at a neat strawberry farm. The place grows lots of strawberries and lettuce hydroponically. They have a great assortment of all the strawberry desserts and drinks you could want at their cafe and we even picked some strawberries ourselves. Before heading home, we stopped at the night market to look around had some delicious corn on the cob.

The next day was a day-long hike. We took a cab to Brinchang again and began on Jungle Walk #1. It was a couple of hours to the top. Somehow I ended up muddier than any of my friends (maybe not so surprising after all) and once we reached the top, some random tour guide gave me a rag and bottle of water to clean off my legs and feet. There were plenty of people at the top who had taken the road up. But hiking was much better! We also saw a man at the top who had started hiking at the same time as us. He looked like a fit old man, and he seemed like an expert at the hill. We asked him if he had done this trail many times before and he said, no, first time. Crazy old guys, climbing mountains.

On the way down we walked along the paved road. We came across an absolutely beautiful scene: a tea plantation sprawling down the hills, more green than you can imagine. It was breathtaking. I couldn't stop taking photos and they don't even do it justice. We had to stop just to admire the scene for a while before continuing on, looking for the Boh Tea Plantation visitor's center. Still using the map we got from our guest house, we cautiously made a left-hand turn at an unmarked fork in the road and hoped we were on the right path. Turns out we were just walking through the "backyard" of the tea plantation, through greenhouses and along winding paths. We asked for directions from someone to confirm we were going the right way, but, typically, the guy we were talking to just said "Yes," and I don't think he really knew what we had said at all. Lesson learnt: Many people will just try to tell you what they think you want to hear lest they disappoint you or make conflict. Doesn't mean there's any actual communication going on. So, eventually we were at a dead-end in a greenhouse, realising we weren't headed for the visitor's centre after all, and heard thunder in the distance. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!" We turned back but got caught in the downpour anyway. And it wasn't just a light rain, it was truly a downpour. After a few minutes we realised we were going to get wet one way or another. There weren't any taxis (or any vehicles) around so we said, "Screw it," and walked along the road in the rain, getting completely drenched. Once we got back to the fork in the road and went the right way, we found the road to the visitor's centre really wasn't that far away after all. We stopped for a minute underneath a little shelter. There were lots of people crowded there, trying to avoid the rain. We got lots of funny looks, but already being soaked to the skin, we just continued on.

By the time we got to the visitor's center, we were cold, wet, and hungry. The place was packed because people were sheltering inside and there was a traffic jam leading up to the plantation. We had some hot tea to warm us and I scarfed down a sandwich faster than I think I ever have in my life. Next, we had to figure out a way back to Tanah Rata. The first tactic was to politely ask other tourists who looked like they could help us out. No luck. One couple turned to each other and discussed secretly in German before telling me no, they couldn't help. (We later saw them leaving with room in the backseat of their car. Jerks.) So then we tried to get a ride on a bus full of Tamil-Malaysian tourists. The driver was very cranky though and absolutely put his foot down on that. That's when we met Arjen.

Arjen is a very tall, Dutch guy (I know, "tall" and "Dutch guy" are redundant) who was about our age, early 20s. He too had hiked to the tea plantation and was stranded. Immediately we bonded over our shared predicament. We stood around, trying our luck again with the Tamil bus driver, while a visitor's centre employee berated Arjen (only partially joking) for all the Dutch shortcomings on proper tea making. Eventually we had to give up and started walking back to town (about 8km away if I remember right.)

Well, we hadn't gotten very far out of the plantation when a truck passed us on the road. Kristina stuck out her hitchhiker's thumb and the truck actually pulled over! There was room for two, so Kristina and Lynsey got in. That left Nicole, Arjen, and me to keep on walking. Not five minutes later, who should come by but the Tamil tour bus! And they pulled over for us. It wasn't the driver's decision, that's for sure, but apparently the little kids crowded at the front of the bus made him pull over. I felt it was a triumph. That's what he gets for being so cranky. So, we stood in the middle of the crowded bus and got a ride to the outskirts of Brinchang, where we met up again with Lynsey and Kristina. The Tamil-Malaysian tourists kept asking us questions and laughing at everything we said, even if we weren't joking. But their cheerfulness made me laugh too.

We only had to walk a little ways further before we lucked out again. A white pickup pulled over for us and all five of us got a free ride in the bed of the truck which took us right to Tanah Rata, and dropped us off at a spot about 10 minutes walking distance from our guest house. It was amazing and it felt awesome to ride in the back of that truck after having being drenched in the rain and hiking all over all day and being absolutely exhausted. A perfect end to the day. Later, we met Arjen for dinner at our favourite Indian restaurant.

The next day was more hiking. I really enjoyed walking along the jungle paths. We ran into people occasionally, but not too often. That night I walked around the town a little bit and ran into this tourist who we had kept running into over the past couple of days, right from the time we arrived. He was a backpacker from Russia, so we chatted a little bit at the night market. All in all, I enjoyed every minute of Tanah Rata and would go back at anytime. The next morning we left by bus for  the city of Penang, further north.

GONG XI FA CAI! (MEANS A 3-DAY WEEKEND FOR ME)

Actually, "Gong Xi Fa Cai" means "Happy Chinese New Year." It's a phrase that was everywhere recently because Chinese New Year is a huge deal.

First, an apology for not blogging since January. ("Maaf!") Term 3 has come and gone in that time, and we have now finished two weeks of Term 4. More than 3/4ths done with the school year - hard to believe! I don't know if there is much to update about school. It continues to be a learning experience for me in multiple ways. There is so much to learn during your first year of teaching and I'm usually thinking of ways to make each term better than the one before.

I know how to work in the Asian-style school system now, but I am still learning new things and coming to understand the intricacies of it little at a time. One of the main differences between Western-style schools and Eastern-style schools (based on my limited experience here and talking to teachers from other Asian countries) is that here everyone must be on the same page at the same time. All students in a grade level go through their academic units at the same time. They might go at slightly different paces and each teacher may teach them in slightly different ways, but they will all complete the same worksheets and take the same tests on the same dates. Parents consider it to be of utmost importance that all students are given the same worksheets out of a sense of fairness. If a child in my class gets three practice worksheets, but another in a different class gets only two, how can that be fair? Because after all, they will all be compared to and ranked against each other. (The idea that "fair" might not be the same as "equal" doesn't really exist.) I understand it, but I still find it hard to wrap my head around sometimes, coming from a tradition of having personal and professional autonomy in the classroom. The good news is, the more familiar I become with how everything runs and what parents are expecting and what the end goals are, the better I am able to make things efficient.

But enough about school. You would rather know about my three-day weekend trip to the city of Yogyakarta during Chinese New Year. In any case, that's what I'm going to write about.

Before we get there, though, a word about Chinese New Year itself. CNY for me, before living in Asia, meant that there were some sort of celebrations going on in various Chinatowns around the US and maybe we can go out for Chinese food or any sort of Asian cuisine, and no more thought was given to it. I had no idea what a huge deal it is. I do believe that CNY is as big and important to many families as Christmas. For the Christian Chinese population here, I don't think it's that's an exaggeration. The traditions include giving money in red envelopes (ang pao) to your loved ones, eating lots of good food, and giving money to the lion during a lion dance (barongsai.) I had many students absent from school because they were visiting family on extended Chinese New Year celebrations.

On the Friday before the three day weekend, there was a celebration in school. Many students gave dance performances. Some teachers too, including me - I was wearing a red tunic and had my hair in pigtails! Then we all went down to the courtyard to see the lion dance. (Not to be confused with a

dragon dance. According to the interwebs, a dragon dance involves many performers, but a lion dance is operated by just two.) During this time we were doing a fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity, so we had to be careful to not let the little kids mistakenly give their fundraiser money to the lion. They were so excited to see it though. Me too. I think it might be the first time I saw a dance like that. I can only imagine how horrible it must be to be inside the lion though - coordinating the jumps on and off platforms and running around.

Sometime after that week, I went out to dinner with some friends. Mildred, my Singaporean friend of Chinese descent, taught us about eating a traditional salad. It's a huge, multi-person salad with lots of different ingredients and sauces, all of which have a symbolic meaning for a good upcoming year. You shout "Huat Ah!" and mix up the salad with your chopsticks altogether and enjoy. I notice that people here in Southeast Asia love food. Not just consuming it, as we tend to do in the States, but really enjoying and sharing it.

Now on to Yogyakarta. I had been wanting to visit this city from before I left the US last June. I had heard that it was the heart and soul of Java, and I think that might be true. (FYI, the name is pronounced like "Jogjakarta" and sometimes it's spelled that way too.)

Nicole, Kristina, Lynsey and I flew out of Jakarta on Friday night. On Saturday morning we woke up at 3:30 AM to meet our driver by 4. We had the car and driver from 4 AM until 10 PM and we used every minute of that time. Stepped out of the car and onto the pavement in front of our hostel at exactly 10 and by that time we had done so much.

First order of the day was Borobudur  the largest Buddhist temple in the world, located northeast of Yogyakarta. There was some confusion with getting in, especially because our driver spoke not a word of English, but we were there when the gates opened and with our Indoensian work visas (KITAS) we got a discount price! I think we paid less than half the normal foreigner price.

Borobudur was amazing... at first. Actually it never ceased to be amazing, but we had a much harder time enjoying it as the morning went on. We started with the traditional Buddhist clockwise circum-ambulation starting at the eastern gate. We walked around beautiful Buddha statues and reliefs in the wall as the sun was making its way up the sky. Very beautiful, very peaceful. And then... "Hello Miss. I am from an English school. Can I ask you some questions?"

You never mind the first time. "Sure," you reply.

"Where are you from?"
"Jakarta."
Much giggling.
"We're from Jakarta."
"What is your nationality?"
"American,"
(On a side note, the usual response to "I'm from America," is: "Ah! America! ... Barack Obama!" The usual response to, "We live in Jakarta," is: "Jakarta banjir," which means, "Jakarta's flooded.")
"How long have you been here?"
"We're just here for the weekend,"
"What do you think of Indonesian people?"
"Oh, very friendly. Very nice."

Then you will be asked to sign a paper that confirms the student of English did in fact have a conversation with an real-life Westerner, and you go on your way. For one minute, and then... "Hello Miss. I'm in an English class. May I ask some questions?" And Indonesian people tend to be quite meek and cautious so this is usually accompanied by embarrassed smiles and/or giggles. You probably agree to do the survey a second time, even though you really just want to circum-ambulate and see the amazing largest-Buddhist temple in the world you've come all this way to see. But they just keep coming, and coming, and coming.

An hour after we had arrived and enjoyed the place to ourselves, soaking in the amazing ancient site, the place was inundated with English students and school kids travelling in packs and assaulting us from all sides. Not just kids either, but adults too. A middle-aged woman practically pushed me into a photo with her and her friend. We must have been asked for our photo about 30 times or more that morning. You will usually agree at first if people ask you politely, but it gets real old, real fast. Many Indonesians, especially those outside of Jakarta or Bali, have never seen Westerners so there are loud shouts of "Turis!" ("Tourist!") and "Bule!" ("Westerner!" - although the term deserves a little more explanation than that.)

You try to be understanding. Many of those kids have only seen Westerners in movies and television, so it must be exciting to see real-life white people, but the way they just mercilessly swarm on you and shamelessly yell at you and ask for photo after photo is downright annoying, not to mention rather disrespectful. To be fair, most Indonesians still act true to the stereotype and are quite polite, but others are not. So when people ask for photos, there's usually two caveats: "Just one photo, and if you're going to take a photo, I want one too." So I actually have quite a collection of pictures of me and my friends with all sorts of Indonesians.

We couldn't stay there too long, it was too overwhelming. Which was sad. That being said, the site of Borobudur itself was amazing and beautiful and I do recommend it to anyone who gets to Indonesia  But on a weekday. As early in the morning as possible.

After Borobudur, we went to a pottery village that was recommended in the guide book. (We travel with a minimum of two or three Lonely Planet guides it seems.) We stopped along a street with lots of splendid pottery and other art and craftwork. I couldn't resist a beautiful didgeridoo and brought it home with me for the grand price of 30,000 rupiah. ($3!)

Next we headed northwest of Yogya to Prambanan, a large Hindu temple complex. It was just as awesome as Borobudur to walk around and take in the history and art, but far less crowded. We only got asked for a picture once, by some nice, polite young guys and we didn't mind at all because they were very cool about it. Krisitina ran into them later and ate lunch with them. Both sites, Borobudur and Prambana had an amazing feel to them because they are so soaked with ancient and venerable history. And they're just beautiful too. We did have to wear hard hats inside one of the temples at Prambanan because of the risk of falling rocks, but nothing happened (except that I wore a hard hat on my head.)

Still trying to make the most of our day and the driver we had hired for 18 hours, we went to visit a nearby volcano. Gunung Merapi (translation: Mountain of Fire.) It was getting dark so we could only hike a little bit. Met some teenagers on the road who, of course, wanted a picture with us. But they were really funny. Very excited and dorky and funny and we gladly took a photo with them. One of the girls grabbed onto Nicole's arm looking like she was about to cry she was so excited! And then we parted ways and they laughed as they continued down the road. I'm certain they're going to tell the story about the night they randomly ran into some bules on the road for some years to come.

The neatest thing about Mt Merapi was the lava flow we found. After hiking up quite a steep grade on the road and then down another little hill, we came across a blackened area that had been literally incincerated, a path cleared from the forest in the last eruption, which was only a few years ago. It was pretty awesome to stand in the middle of where the lava flow had once swept through.

Finally headed back to Yogya to a restaurant recommended by Mildred, where we ordered an entire fried chicken (and again, I mean "entire" in a very literal sense, as in it came with the head and neck. I don't remember if the feet were still on.) All this in one day. (And I think we only got lost once. At one point our driver stopped outside a random house on a random street. We think he got lost, but couldn't tell us, not speaking English, so we theorize we stopped at his house!)

The next day we stayed in Yogya and explored the city. We went to the market in the morning and went to find the Kraton, which is the palace complex of the Sultan who still rules a part of Yogya. To be clear, it's not a palace in the sense of Versailles, but a bunch of nice buildings and courtyards. The Sultan and his family still live there and have some governing power over the walled area of the Kraton, and also some adjacent neighborhoods.

On our way, we stopped in a store to buy water, and the owner told us that the regular music and dance performances at the Kraton would be later than usual that day due to a visit from some important person. Instead he suggested we go to a particular art gallery. En route to said gallery we ran into a man who told us about a batik workshop and we decided to follow him there instead. The people in Yogya were very friendly and lots of people gave us directions and talked with us. Like in Bali, being able to speak any Indonesian seemed to impress the locals. There are a lot more tourists there than in Jakarta so the residents are more used to speaking English. You say "terima kasih," ("thanks") and people will say, "Oh! You speak Bahasa!" "Er, no, not really," and you look sheepish as you pinch your fingers within an an inch of each other to indicate that your Bahasa skills are in fact minimal.

The batik workshop was great. Local artists work on splendid, beautiful batik artwork and train in new artists. Everything there is local, small-scale, and authentic. Tried out some batik-making techniques ourselves on a sample cloth and bought batik artwork there. Later on, when we did go back to the Kraton, we found out we had missed the performances after all. We still walked around though and another random man on the street told us about a wayang kulit workshop we could visit. So we did. Wayang kulit are "skin puppets" that are used for shadow plays. They are made from leather and usually feature people in traditional clothing with exaggerated features so that they don't look like any one group of people or another. The workshop was a cooperative that works for the Sultan.

That afternoon was also busy. We went to a bird market with all kinds of bird and other animals for sale in cages (which was actually pretty bizarre after a while) and went walking around some ruins of a bathhouse. That evening, we went to see a Ramayana ballet. We took two of the becaks that are everywhere in the city to an outdoor dinner theater so see that traditional play about gods and goddesses and  kidnappings and love triangles and monkey gods and fight scenes up in the heavens.  Most of the other people there were middle aged European tourists.

The next day we did make it to see the gamalan music performances at the Kraton, which was very nice. I think we sat and listened and enjoyed for a solid hour. We ended our time in Yogya by seeking out the southern courtyard of the Kraton where there are two huge banyan trees. Tradition dictates that if you can walk blindfolded between the trees and make it from one side of the square to the other, you will have good luck. I tried twice and failed twice. The guide who gave us the blindfolds had to nudge me in the correct direction so I wouldn't run into the tree on the right! I asked him if this meant I would have bad luck or just neutral luck, but I didn't get a clear answer.

In any case, it was a busy, but utterly awesome trip to Yogyakarta. Hopefully I'll be taking Mom and Dad there in June when they come to visit!

Once again, sorry for my tardiness in blogging. Now that I've written about Yogya, next time I can tell you about our term break trip to Malaysia!

THE VENICE OF INDONESIA

 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.

Well, that's it for now. I shall be sleeping in tomorrow and enjoying several cups of coffee well past 6 AM, which is when I usually leave the apartment to go to school. I just hope the power stays on in the building! (And that the owners of the laundry shop come back soon. They're probably flooded in too.)


(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.)

TEACHING IN INDONESIA: SO WHAT'S IT ACTUALLY LIKE?

Hello Family and Friends. This will probably be my last post of 2012. Tonight at about 8:30, my roommate Lynsey and I will get on our Turkish Airlines flight back to the states. (Well, our flight to Singapore, then Istanbul, then Chicago, and then we will part ways and I will catch another flight to Minneapolis.) With the time change factored in, I will be back just before midnight on the 16th.

I had meant to update a little about some of the other fun things I've done in the past couple months since going to Thailand: visiting the beautiful Thousand Islands for a weekend (which involved swimming, snorkeling, and seeing a monitor lizard) and going to Singapore a different weekend with our Singaporean friend Mildred. Singapore is fun, but ever so clean, modern, efficient, and sleek. Basically it's what would happen if Ikea was turned into a country. We went to the Botanical Gardens, Chinatown, saw the Merlion and hung out on a beatuiful beach in November on Santosa island. There was also a Thanksgiving buffet meal at a swanky hotel in Jakarta where the champagne flowed freely and fun was had by all. Good times. Well, there's you mini update anyway. I don't have the time or energy for a longer explanation. After crying my eyes out while watching CNN this morning, I am already feeling drained. It's useless to put it out of our minds entirely, but Lynsey and I are listening to the comforting sounds of Paul, John, George, and Ringo so that we can move on and think about other things.

Nevertheless, I would like to write a little bit about what it's actually like teaching in Jakarta. In a word, it's different. I realize now that when I signed up for this whole overseas teaching thing, I was rather naive about the fact that not only would the country be different, the student would be different, the culture would be different, but also the school itself and the school culture could be very different. When I student taught in Belgium, the school operated on Western educational principals which I was already familiar with and there wasn't much I needed to learn or transition to, other than learning the IB standards.

Bina Bangsa is quite different from the Western schools I have taught at. It uses the Singaporean method (albeit a little out of date, because they don't progress as much or as often as Singapore actually does) and now I actually know what that means. I can't say I'm always a big fan of the educational philosophies that underpin how the system works, but it is what it is and it's my job to learn and adapt to them. What I mean by that is, for instance, for the past couple of years I have been molding a philosophy of education in which I believe that hands-on experiences are important, projects and holistic learning are essential, tests are not so important compared to integration into the so-called "real-world." It's all on my educational website if you're really that interested in reading it. At this school (and in the Singaporean system to a degree) tests are all-important and competition is the key. So, as I say, it's very different.

We had parent-teacher conference yesterday. Almost every parent wants to know what rank their child is in the class. Quoi? I can't imagine an American parent ever asking that. American parents might want to know if their child is doing okay and developing okay compared to other children the same age, but never would they want to know what their child's "rank" in class is based on total percentage of grades. It was easy to deal with that question however: "I'm sorry, I don't rank the students." There, taken care of, and also true. Many of the parents - most, I would say - are true Tiger Moms and Dads. This is not a stereotype, it's just true. I had one parent say, "I'm not so concerned about grades so much as that my son is developing creativity and social skills," and my jaw about hit the floor because it's just a rare thing to hear expressed here. Wish all parents could be like her. I was shocked to hear another grandparent express concern that her grandson's English-language accent was lacking and that he sounded too much like an Indonesian person. Um, he is an Indonesian person. But I promised her nonetheless that I would listen to hear if there was anything amiss with his pronunciation. Anyway, the vast majority of parents are very nice people, very friendly to the teachers, but also demanding that their children's percentages just go up, up, up. A lot of the students have tuition teachers for extra classwork after school just for this reason. Unfortunately, time left for just being a kid is little.

Here's just a little bit more about what the students are like here in West Jakarta.

Here are some adjectives that describes the average student at my school: privileged, nannied, wealthy, Jakartan, 75-99% fluent in English, rotund, sheltered, Chinese-Indonesian, trilingual, motivated, interrupting-all-the-time, good natured, normal kids.

The first three (privileged, nannied, and wealthy) are due to the fact that it's a private school. The wealthy Chinese-Indonesian business class of Jakarta (which is about 99% of our demographics) like to spend their money and don't blink an eye at expenses. Almost every single student has a nanny who takes care of them at home and a driver to bring them to school. Some families have a driver for each child! (It's an odd role reversal that it's the teachers who take the school buses to work and the students who arrive in cars.) Unfortunately however, the influence of having nannies can bring about some negative consequences for the kids (at least in my opinion.) First of all, nannies tend to replace parents without actually acting in a parenting role. Some parents don't live at home (some are even on different islands or in different countries) and some don't interact much with their children. For example, a friend of mine had to pull aside a student to address a behavior problem one day. Asking about home life, she asked the girl if she saw her parents everyday, to which she nodded. When asked if she talks to her parents everyday, the poor girl burst into tears. I don't know how common this sort of parent-child relationship is, because I'm sure it doesn't describe all the families at our school, but it is a reality for many kids.

The nannies also tend to baby the kids, because that's what they're paid to do. A friend who coaches the after-school swimming activity walked into the girls' dressing room one day to tell a girl she needed to hurry up because her older sister was waiting for her. The reason it was taking so long? The nanny was dressing the girl - who was a 4th grader! Apparently nannies also used to literally spoon feed students at recess and lunch up until 3rd grade, and put the students' backpacks on the lifts so that they could pick them up on whatever floor they were going to. Both of the last two practices are now gone, although I frequently have to stop my P5 kids (P5 = 5th grade, P4 = 4th grade, etc. P stands for "Primary,") from putting their bags in the lift. They claim the bags are too heavy. I give them two options. Take some things out so it's not so heavy, or just deal with it and carry your heavy bag downstairs.

Many of the students are also sheltered. They go on vacation, but they tend to go to resorts and play their iPads, not go mingle and explore. They have trouble relating to real-life adventures. (Sad, really...) I also say rotund, although that applies to maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of the students. It's not their fault obviously. The most popular foods are fried noodles, rice, and chicken. I rarely see students eating fruit or veg at lunch or recess time. In fact, my P4 students looked completely disgusted one day when they saw me eating a carrot, raw of all horrors! Vegetables are always fried or cooked.

Now, to talk about their good qualities, they are generally a very motivated bunch. They want to do well in school. I can say that pretty much across the board about all of my students. Part of it is that they have pressure from parents, but there is also a culture of wanting to do well. And the fact that almost all of them can speak English, Chinese, and Indonesian is very impressive (granted to varying abilites.) They are also very sweet kids, generally speaking. They like their teachers and respect them. If their behaviour is out of line they will usually change it when told why. I have mischievous kids, and demanding kids, but I don't have any that deliberately try to sabotage class activities or be destructive.

Where I struggle with my students is in getting them to wait their turns, or using imagination and critical thinking. The fact that they receive constant one-on-one attention from their nannies at home means they often (scratch that - regularly) fail to understand that there are many of them and only one of me, and I most likely cannot help them the instant they want it. Female teachers are addressed as "Miss" and male teachers are addressed as "Sir." (I go by Ms. Danna here, like in Belgium.) If I've given the students something to do, at about that time when the majority are finishing the task, it's a barrage of "Miss!" "Miss!" "Miss!" "Miss!" "Miss!" and they will shove papers in my face, demanding that I check their work that instant. Of course I tell them to back off and wait their turn, but it took me a while to come up with the slogan that I plan on repeating until they understand: "I hear you. Wait your turn." They are bad interrupters too. Again, they want instant attention. I had to lecture my P5s the other day that unless it's a true emergency - unless they are bleeding profusely - they must wait because I will probably be done saying whatever I am saying  in a few moments. I try to thank people for raising their hands too. Again, I don't necessarily blame the students. They are used to having the instant attention. I just need to make it very clear that they must wait their turns and why.

That's about it for the students. I have relatively small classes. My P4 Science class is 15 students, P4 English is 24 students, and P5 English is 23. (That last one is also my form class, or homeroom.) It wasn't hard to learn names because out of all those students I mentioned above, only one has a Chinese name, the rest have Western names, although sometimes with surprising pronunciation of familiar names.

There's a lot more I could write about. The fact that we have Heads of Department, who must clear everything. (Aaah!! Micromanagement!) and also level representatives. I am the level rep for P4 Science so I write the tests and at least two worksheets per unit for all four P4 classes. As I say, it's just very different. Everything from the fact that we have no permanent classrooms and move to the different classes while the students stay put, to the way tests and report cards are done. Not to mention, beyond the mechanics of how the school day unfolds, the cultural basis behind what is done and why. Which, if you want to know about that, is better done in a conversation than a blog post.

That's it for now. I may - may - write more if I am stuck on a long layover with wifi access. Hopefully that will not be the case in Istanbul however, because of the chance to take a free tour of the city via Turkish Airlines that Lynsey and I will definitely check out. I sure hope that works out! I want to see the Hagia Sophia!

Well, I'll be home in something between 24 and 48 hours! Can't wait to spend Christmas with my family and friends. And see snow on the ground and wrap up in sweater! I miss that here in Indonesia. There is no sense of "coziness" that you get with a proper winter. But soon enough I'll be back in Minnesota and there will be lots of coziness I hope. It's been an incredible 6 months. Here's to the end of an interesting, eventful year!

A WEEK IN THAILAND, PART TWO: CHIANG MAI

On to part two of the Thailand adventure. We were on the night train, watching the country pass by and wondering when exactly we would arrive in Chiang Mai. Because of how the rail system is set up, at times we had to stop for a long time while another train passed us by, so that in the end we got there a few hours late. When we did get to the Chiang Mai train station we took one of the pickup truck taxis, called a songthaew, to our hostel. The songthaews have benches in the truck-beds with tall roofs over them, so that about 8 people can fit into one.

Our hostel was really nice. It was called Dozy House, and was in the northern part of the old city. Chiang Mai  is built within four very old walls. As I read when I visited the city's museum, the city was apparently born on a Thursday at 4 AM, thousands of years ago, and its head is at its northern wall and its feet are at its southern wall. Culture and history are everywhere in this city.

On our first day, after checking in, we got a car (and a driver) from Dozy House to bring us to the famous Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. (Wat means temple.) It's located partway up a mountain and is one of the most famous temples in Chiang Mai. And there are a lot - there must be at least a dozen in the city, perhaps more. To get to this one, you began with a long climb up a brick staircase, flanked on either side by ornate, tiled dragon statues / railings. At the top, the procedure was the same as it is for any temple: shoes off, sarongs on. I really enjoyed this particular temple because of its great sense of peace, quiet, and spirit. Everyone was respectful and didn't talk above a low voice; no one was running around, just circling around the chedi, paying their respects. You could visit one of the monks if you wanted to receive a blessing, or walk three times around the chedi (the central dome-like structure) to pray, pay your respects, and light a candle. Or you could just walk around and look and soak in the atmosphere, but anyway you went about it, it felt like a spiritual experience. I think the mountain setting added to this.

That night we got a nice dinner at a restaurant close to Dozy House and went to check out the night bazaar on the other side of town. Chiang Mai is small enough that you can easily learn the streets with a little wandering and map-checking - it was easy to find and we didn't even have to take a tuk-tuk there. At the night bazaar we saw some traditional dances on a stage in a central plaza area and then spent the rest of our time looking around at the hundreds of stalls in the open spaces of the bazaar and all up and down the streets. A lot of the goods there are tourist-oriented: lamps, decorations, pants, skirts, dresses, candle holders, etc. I think - or at least I would like to think - that all the goods are local though. Probably made either by the sellers themselves or someone they know personally, at least in the case of the decorations and other handmade items. We didn't buy much of anything that night but resolved to go back again at the end of our time in Chiang Mai.

That night I had to make a very difficult decision. We were planning on going on a three day, two night trek in the hilly areas outside of Chiang Mai, and were leaving the next morning. We had arranged it ahead of time and would be with a couple of guides and stay in tribal villages or houses at night. Up until that night I had still been planning to go, despite not feeling very well, to be honest. I thought I might just push myself because I definitely didn't want to miss out on the experience of hiking in the wilderness in Thailand. But that night as we went around the night market and I felt exhausted and slightly feverish, my eyes getting puffy and tired, I knew that I couldn't go. If there had maybe been an option to leave and drive back to Chiang Mai as soon as I started to feel unwell, I might have pushed myself and attempted the trek. But we were going into the wilds where the only way out would have been a helicopter and I just couldn't put myself and the others at that sort of risk. So... I decided not to go and hang out in Chiang Mai instead. The next morning was difficult, because I was obviously very upset not to be going, but I stuck by what I knew was right. I wished my friends good-bye and then set off on my own exploration of the city.

That day, Tuesday, I took it pretty easy. My stomach still felt very  uncomfortable, so I stuck to rice, vegetables, and peanut butter toast. My accomplishments for the day were going to the museum in the center of town and getting a massage. On Wednesday, I went on an excursion I had signed up for the day before. I figured if I couldn't make it for a three day hike, maybe I could manage a one-day trek. This trek included almost everything my friends were also doing: elephant-ride, hike to waterfalls, and river rafting, but done by 6 PM.

For the trek, I was picked up in the morning by the tour company in a songthaew. I was the last one to join, the others in the group being three Germans and four Chinese tourists. We first visited an orchid farm, which was fairly interesting. Then we continued to drive out of Chiang Mai towards the Mae Rim river. The very lush, green scenery was beautiful and I enjoyed seeing it pass by from out the back of the songthaew.

The next stop was the elephant trek, which lasted for about an hour, or maybe a little less. I shared an elephant with one of the German girls, Susanna, and we fed the elephant mini bananas as we hiked along. Awesome as it was to ride an elephant in the first place, ambling along, seeing the countryside from the hightened perspective of the elephant was perhaps just as cool. We ended near the river and zipped across it in something that resembled a metal elevator box sliding along a cable.

We stopped for a lunch of pad thai (I have come to learn that a small parcel wrapped in banana leaves = food inside) and continued on to our trek. We walked for 50 minutes along a beautiful path next to a river until we arrived at a spectacular waterfall that seemed to suddenly come out of nowhere. Waded and splashed and sat around for a while. I tried to edge up as close as I could to the waterfall without getting completely drenched (not that that would have been so bad!)

The last event of the day was rafting - first in rubber rafts, then sitting on a bamboo raft - down the Mae Tang. Being on the water was amazing and it was such a beautiful day and place to be that I got a real sense of peace out of drifting along the river. I tried to soak it in, so I could remember it when I got back to the urban jungle of Jakarta. I was really happy I opted for the one-day excursion and still got to experience some nature. (And it only cost 1000 baht, or about 30 dollars, for the whole thing!)

That night, having finally regained my appetite, I ate at a small mom-and-pop type restaurant and had some wonderful pork curry dish. Just as I was about to leave, however, the rain started to come down with lots of gusto and I was effectively stranded. I asked the woman if I could stay and maybe watch the TV that was playing in the back of the restaurant. And when I say "asked" I really mean gestured, because she didn't speak any English and I don't know any Thai. The rain continued and I watched a ridiculous sitcom, full of silly antics and over-the-top gags and sound effects, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There were some portraits hanging on the wall and I managed to ask the woman who was in the pictures. She got out her English-Thai dictionary, and even though we couldn't say anything to each other, we had a very pleasant conversation about her daughter and granddaughter who were in the pictures. When the rain finally let up and I left, I felt very happy (and somewhat warm and fuzzy inside) to have made the acquantaince of such a nice, old Thai grandmother.

One the third day of my solo stay in Chiang Mai I headed to a local market in the morning. The zipper on my back had broken off while zipped up. I asked the owner at Dozy House where I could go to buy another one and she gave me directions and let me rent a bike from the hostel. Biking was a lot of fun. I remembered to keep to the left side of the road, and using what I've observed of road rules in Indonesia and Thailand, successfully managed to get myself outside the old city walls and to the big, sprawling local market. It was really local: the number of white people dropped dramatically - saw maybe four or five other white people there in a the span of a couple hours. I shopped around for a new bag (eventually settled on a small backpack, and bargained for my price of course) but when I went to buy it, I had to explain to the lady that I needed a scissors or knife or something to cut open my other bag so I could get my money out. Instead of giving me any scissors, she sent me along to a small corridor behind some shops to where there were couple of people randomly working at sewing machines. A man fixed the zipper for me, and then sent me along to another woman at a sewing machine to patch up the new zipper and secure the whole thing. She asked for 10 baht (about 30 cents) and I tried to pay the other man too, but he wouldn't take anything. Silly me with my Western materialistic mentality - why buy another bag when you could just fix the zipper? So now I have a small backpack and my old bag (which I'm still using.) I wandered around after that and explored the market.

For lunch I went to a tiny food court upstairs where nothing was in English. (Good sign I figure.) I saw one couple there who looked like expats who seemed to know what they were doing. When I went to ask them for their advice on ordering food, they invited me to sit down. The woman was originally from Thailand and the man was Australian; they live in Australia but visit Thailand every year. Before I even realized it happened, they ordered a meal for me and we chit-chatted for quite a while. The food was tasty and it was very rewarding to have such a nice, impromptu meeting with the couple. They even invited me to stay with them if I ever found myself in Australia. (And I just might!)

I spent the rest of my afternoon temple-hopping on the bicycle, by this point feeling pretty comfortable navigating anywhere in the small city. In the evening I returned to Dozy House where the owner told me my friends had gotten back. I met up with them at the night bazaar and we spent more time perusing the stalls and eating at the food court. The highlight of the night was the very glitzy cabaret show with Thai men in drag. It was so campy, I loved it! At the end of the show they invited people up on stage to dance and I decided to jump up there and give it a go. Dancing on stage at a cabaret drag show in Thailand? Check! The second highlight was bargaining and purchasing for very cheap at the midnight rate, a sturdy, proper backpacking backpack. I can't remember the exact price now (grrr!) but it was less than $100. I think I got it for about $50-60, which is absolutely ridiculous.

On our last day in Chiang Mai I went to a museum out of town (a sad, somewhat surreal, mostly empty-of-people museum that looked like it hadn't been touched since the 70's) while my friends visited the temples I had seen the day before. We ended our stay by taking a Thai cooking class and made some awesome food and met some other travelers: two British guys, two Chinese women, and an American couple from Texas.

We left for Bangkok by the night bus, having decided that the train was too unreliable. Of course, the bus was also more than an hour late in arriving. After traversing the country during the wee hours of the night and waking up early to some loud Thai pop music on the stereo system, we arrived in the industrial part of Bangkok and got a taxi to the airport.

And such was our whirlwind, but thoroughly incredible, adventure in Thailand. I'm only sorry I took so long to write about it. If anyone reading this ever finds themselves in that country, go to Chiang Mai. I don't image anyone could regret visiting there.