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.