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.