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.