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)