All the Pretty Beaches

So I said in my last post that I would finally fill in the details on what I'm actually doing here, but it's been two weeks and I've done a lot of cool things outside of the program, and I'm more likely to forget them in the next week than I am to forget what it is I do here every day. So once more, the meat of my time here will have to wait.

The weekend before last, we had a long weekend which I, like many student sin my program, used to get off of Java. I made myself a whirlwind circuit, getting to three new islands in just over 4 days. I started the trip in Bali, where I went straight from the airport to a beachfront restaurant with fresh fish.

Jimbaran Beach

 After eating, we headed to Kuta, Bali. Kuta is a wild place, one of the biggest party spots in Indonesia known to Australians the same way Cancún is to Americans. A group of us decided to take one night in Kuta before moving on to being more cultured and sensible travelers. I had a lot of fun dancing, and meeting Indonesians, who were consistently surprised that I could speak Indonesian (a frequent occurrence here, especially in Bali and other touristy places). The next day, a couple of friends and I chartered a car to explore central Bali, which is gorgeous and has a negligible amount of tourists-- good for tourist-hypocrites like me. Driving around, Bali's reputation as a stunningly beautiful place was backed up by what we saw. Not only is it a beautiful tropical  island (like all of Indonesia, on the coasts at least), but also because it's overflowing with elaborately carved and sculpted Hindu temples--just about every decent-sized house has a family temple accompanying it.                        

Tanah Lot

Rice paddies in central Bali, hundreds of years old

Pura Lahur Batukau

The next morning I took a two hour boat ride to Gili Trawangan--the furthest out in a chain of three stunning islands just off of Lombok.

Lombok Buffalo

There I met up with another group of friends, and also spent a good chunk of time diving. I got my scuba certification last summer, in part because I knew I might be in Indonesia this summer, and I'm very glad I did. The water here is full of life-- among the highlights were sea turtles, a black-tip shark, and more fish than I could hope to remember the names of swimming around the reefs. Gili Trawangan is pretty built up though, and I was glad to set-off the next morning for Lombok. Driving through Lombok was probably the prettiest scenery I've seen-- jungles and monkeys and volcanoes and buffalo and giant mosques and pristine beaches all jumbled together.

 I left Gili on a boat, and after a couple of hours in a van, I was in Kuta, Lombok, a surf town that's still toward the bottom of what looks to be an inevitable exponential curve toward becoming a mainstream tourist stomping-ground. Kuta is gorgeous, and relaxed enough that I could will myself to browse the little shops and just hang-out on the beach for a few hours at a time. But sadly, kuta was the last stop, so the next morning I was back on an airplane, and the next night I was already home.

Kuta, Lombok

Looking to my hotel from the beach, a bovine family

Because of all of the casual but extremely interesting conversation I had with people during my travels, it was hard to come back to class, where we often hours and hours talking just to talk, and sometimes about topics that aren't necessarily the most interesting to me. But after a frustrating recent experience where I was surrounded by a lot of Javanese I couldn't understand and English I didn't want to hear, my appreciation for class has returned.

Admiring a tempe factory's soybeans with my host-parents

Anyway, after that grinding but uneventful week of class (there was one trip during the week, but it was quite underwhelming) I settled into my first weekend that I actually had no plans for. All the same, I ended up so busy that I didn't even get to think about doing my homework until 9:30 Sunday night (and that's pretty late here since I have to wake up at 6:30). Between hanging out with a couple of Indonesian friends, visiting the house of one of my tutors, checking out Malang's tempe (a type of fermented soybean squares that is my #1 staple here) home-industry with my host parents, and taking a day-trip to a stunning beach--on par if not surpassing Kuta, Lombok-- that's 3 hours away (including an hour of dirt roads that required frequently exiting the car to clear rocks, push, or guide around mud-pits and potholes), I had a fun-packed but exhausting weekend.

"Famous Peacock" Beach in Southeast Java

On my old blogs I used to have a list of 3 things that are different from America each week. Even though it's late in the game, I figure it's better to highlight just a few rather than none at all. So without any further ado:

1. Motorcycles. Everywhere. Driven by everyone. Pretty much the only cars are vans and SUVs, and they're dramatically outnumbered. This is especially startling in parking lots. They fit A LOT of motorcycles.

2. Breakfast is a meal like any other. Maybe it's not unusual to have fried eggs or something sweet for breakfast now and again, but usually it's a meal like any other-- white rice with tempe, maybe some tofu, and then some meat (most commonly fried chicken or little meatballs called bakso), and some well-cooked vegetables.

3. Indonesia has six official religions-- Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. While there has been some history of inter-religious strife, Indonesian's are very confident in the principle that all religions are just different ways of worshiping the same God, and are very tolerant, accepting, and proud of religious diversity. However, you must have a religion. When I've started to approach the topic, most Indonesians have seemed confused by the possibility of Atheism/Humanism/Secularism.

So I just wrote a bigger post that had a description of every day life, but it was lost to the bowels of the internet, so I'm just going to review the excitement of last weekend's excursion, and a better explanation of what I'm actually doing here will come in the near future (even though my time here is already half-way up).

Last weekends trip was touted as a trip to Bromo, a little volcano with a big ole crater, but a bunch of things were tied in to the trip. Bromo itself is cool because the crater still has boiling sulfur at the bottom (it erupted last year), but it's not that big or pretty and it's really crowded. It was also really crowded on top of the nearby mountain from which we watched sunrise over Bromo (jury's still out on whether or not it was pretty enough to be worth waking up at 1 AM, but overall the experience was worth it). After climbing up Bromo and scrambling down its sandy slopes to avoid the huge line to walk down the path, I walked around the volcanic ash dunes just at it's foot and that was cooler than Bromo itself because the swarming masses were out of sight. 

Before Bromo, we went to a village up in some mountains/hills nearby, and that was--for me--the real highlight of the trip. At first we were paired up with a local to give a little tour and chat/interview about village life (every trip the program organizes has to have it's language-practice aspect so we do a lot of interviewing). From the guy I was paired with and some others I met, I found out some really interesting things. For instance, the village is surrounded by these really steep terraced fields where they grow mostly potatoes, and apparently all of the fields are the whole village's property, and everyone works in all of them. Also, pretty much everyone in the village learns Tengger (the local language), Javanese (the regional language) and Indonesian (the national language). Also, they can always tell if people are from the same village or not by their Tengger accent, even if the village is just a couple of miles away. I was also shown some pictures of two British linguists who had lived there maybe 30 years ago and written up a grammar for Tengger.

After all this chatting, we met briefly with the village head, and then were told that there would be a performance just outside. Boy were we in for a surprise. At first, it was 6 or so guys dancing pretty blandly to Gamelan music while carrying little cut-outs of horses. That went on for quite some time, to the point that we were getting confused, when things changed quite suddenly. Guys with whips came around and wrestled a few of the dancers to the ground. At first I thought it was still choreography, but gradually it became clear it wasn't. What followed was a couple of hours of watching 3-6 guys who were possessed by spirits (I myself don't know what exactly to believe about what was happening, but some way or another, these were definitely people in a wildly different mental state. They acted bizarrely, walked around aimlessly, dancing sporadically, and sometimes had to be subdued when they tried to run away. The men with whips would whip the ground and whisper to them, apparently in some way controlling or calming the spirits. The men with whips also gave the possessed whips, masks, food, and even--with their hands from a bucket--a bath. Only three of the dancers were possessed after the dance, but at different points different people jumped in and out of being possessed, including bystanders who hadn't danced at all. A couple of them collapsed to the ground after being possessed, and one fell on top of a guy who then bumped into me. The guy who was fallen on wasn't wearing shoes and his feet got really badly torn up, which led to fifteen minutes of all of the possessed taking turns sucking the blood out of his foot, while the little boys all swarmed around and watched. The whole debacle I'm pretty positive was the wildest thing I've ever seen people do.

I would have videos here of the dance/trance but I'm having uploading issues and tomorrow I'm setting off for Bali to start my mid-semester break. More on that, and maybe the videos sometime next week.

A Heartily Full Week

First, some highlights since my last post:

A friend’s host mom is the co-host of a Contemporary Islamic Music radio show on Indonesia’s national radio network, and she asked him to bring a few friends to a recording of the show. So I went along and watched a thirteen-piece band for a couple of hours. The presence of Americans was an extra gimmick for the show, so at a couple of points I ended up with a mic in my face singing along to one of the songs.

To reiterate and reemphasize, this was on Radio Republik Indonesia—Indonesia’s equivalent of BBC or NPR. Anyway, afterwards we took pictures with the band (they asked for pictures with us before we did with them—pictures with bule (foreigners) are a hot commodity here—though we were also glad to be getting pictures with thoroughly decked-out rising stars of Contemporary Islamic Music.

            Less of a story but some good pictures—I went with my tutor, riding on the back of his motorcycle, to a couple of old Hindu temples. The temples are stunningly detailed, and date from well over a thousand years ago, before Islam became the dominant religion in Java.

           

Then there’s Saturday:

            First we went to a pesantren—Islamic boarding school. The school we went to is one of several hundred in Indonesia, and is home to about 2,500 students. I sat down and chatted for a while with a class of middle-schoolers, which was a lot of fun. They even gave me one of the hats that they’re required to wear.

            Afterward we went to a village called Dampit. A student from UM (CLS’s host university) is from the village, so his family set-up the whole thing. We ate a huge amount of delicious food with fish from nearby, chicken that had been raised in the village, and scrumptious fresh coconut and papaya.

            We also toured around sine of the agriculture and industry in the area. The village next to Dampit has a little factory complex where they make snacks, and Dampit has rice paddies and also a brick-making place. In the factory, I sat down at a table with some girls who were twisting dough in a very particular way with great skill. Eventually I learned and made maybe 60 myself. I had fun and they were really nice, but it also made very privilege-conscious. And not just because this was a fun jaunt into something new for me and day-after-day, year-after-year for them. The dad of one of the girls walked by and told me if I wanted to bring his daughter to America I could. He was way less than half joking.

            From the village, I went with a few friends to the final home game of Arema, the local soccer team which has the most fanatical following of any team in Indonesia. The game started off good, but fizzled out as a 0-0 tie. However, it was still a lot of fun, as the crowd was huge and crazy. Lots of flares and fireworks. At one point the players even had to come off the field because there was too much smoke after the visiting fans lit all of their flares at once as a distraction when Arema had a free-kick.

  That was all in one day. Exhausting, but tremendously fun.

Sunday was an early 4^th of July celebration, which turned out to be amazing. Every class had to perform, which was a lot of fun, but what really made it amazing was that all of the tutors and teachers showed up, and a lot of them had put an incredible amount of effort into their own performances, which included a Balinese dance to start things off, and a story, backed by live music, that started with traditional Indonesian puppets, and turned into a play before literally erupting into Independence Day fireworks. It was really fun, and really touching how much work was put into this holiday that most of the tutors and staff had never celebrated, and had little reason to care about.

Aside from the things I’ve done, there are a lot of less concrete things that I’ve seen or done that merit mention. But by a lot, I mean way too many. Indonesia is a pretty modern country so its not that the things people have and use are so different, but Indonesia definitely feels a ways away from the West and Westernization. From squat toilets to breakfasts that are just like lunch and dinner to call-to-prayers starting at 4:30 AM, to a very different sense of humor, there are a lot of things that are different. More different than anywhere else I’ve been.

On the learning front, I’m still learning a lot. I think I’ve slowed down a little bit because I’m a little more into seeing the place and less motivated to just study now that I’m semi-competent at communicating. Plus since the words I’m learning now aren’t as basic as the ones I was learning before, I don’t use them as often so adding 30 words to my vocabulary today isn’t as big an improvement to my communicative skills as it was at the beginning though it still takes the same amount of effort. 

Anyway, I'm things are tremendously tiring but tremendously good. My biggest complaint is that I miss peanut butter, and I just have to make my way to a store and apparently I can find some. And that's it for now.

So It Begins...

So here I am, in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. I'm here studying the language (Indonesian/Bahasa Indonesia) through a state department program called the critical language scholarship. I'm a week in and, well theres a lot to say already. But I'm hopefully going to be able to keep myself to something closer to a highlight reel than a complete synopsis. We'll see how this goes.

After a slightly grueling two day orientation in DC, the 29 CLS Indonesia participants (scholars?) set off for an even more grueling travel-- 32 hours take-off to touch down, with layovers in Amsterdam (long enough to make it into the city and take a few pictures), Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. If you get a chance to fly Malaysia Air, they have awesome food, steward uniforms, and especially fantastic videos.

The first few days involved a lot of introductions (difficult without yet speaking any Indonesian) and ceremonies. I met my two tutors, four teachers, and my host family, all exceptionally friendly and helpful. I've mostly been spending my time figuring out mnemonics to memorize as many words as possible so that I can work on being able to string them together more fluently and on being able to understand anything. I have to say, I've done pretty well. It's pretty incredible how much I've learned in just a week. I haven't made too much progress in understanding (though I can follow people who speak slowly with a select vocabulary) but I can express just about everything that I want to--I'd almost say my communicative abilities are already comparable to what I could accomplish after 4 years of Spanish classes. Maybe I will actually be able to get some degree of fluency in just two months....

Most every day has been just in class and hanging out with my tutors and host family, but we did go on a group trip last weekend to the Wonosari Tea Plantation. The plantation was very pretty and very green, but the activities we did there were more interesting and entertaining for the  cultural differences they brought out--for one, the trips language-learning aspect was that we were all supposed to interview tea workers. All of the Indonesians thought this was a normal and acceptable thing, but to a lot of the Americans it felt somewhat voyeuristic and invasive. The other big difference was the games and karaoke that made up a bit part of the programming. The gist of most of the games seems to be "do some silly motion in close proximity to other people without any actual goal". It succeeded in getting everyone laughing, but at least in my case the humor was more in my complete lack of understanding as to why we were doing what we were doing. It just kept going for hours and hours, which made it only get funnier. At one point, I actually cried from laughing too hard. Another difference that emerged prominently through the course of the day was that of the public opinion of being alone. Indonesian culture doesn't have the same appreciation for occasional solitude, which can sometimes be aggravating, especially since there are somewhere around 20 people who feel that they have been personally entrusted with my well-being. On the other hand, those 20 people are an awesome support network for learning and anything else non-solitude-deprivation related.

lots o' tea

karaoke

Coming-up:

• Continuing to increase my conversational competence and thereby become more of a real person
• A trip to a little village and to an islamic boarding school there
• A Fourth of July celebration/talent show (on July 1st)