Anna in Indonesia

I'm coming home!

2010-05-25T18:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it's my last night in Manado. Tomorrow I fly to Jakarta, the next day to Singapore, and the following day to America.

Am I glad to come home? YES. Of course. Will I miss it here? Some things, yes. We'll see. But nine months is kind of a long time, and I'll be very glad to start something new. There are a lot of things I'm looking forward to, including but not limited to:

good bread!
friends who live in my city
a comfortable chair to read in
family
the wonderful St. Louis Public Library system!
driving a car, putting things in the trunk
having a little anonymity / people respecting my sense of self

Maybe I should clarify the last. The thing is, the other teachers at my school generally treat me like a puppy. They have loved having me around to take pictures with, or to dress up in Manado batik, but I could have been a horrible teacher and none of them would have minded. The last few days have made my position especially clear; I've been pulled around for one picture after another, people taking hold of my arms or shoulders or cheeks without asking for or expecting to need permission. "Miss Anna," they'd say. "What?" I'd respond. They'd stare at me for a moment before mouthing "FOTO" and waving me over to one place, then another (depending on the light). They even encouraged strangers to take pictures with me. "Anna, they want to take pictures with you." "I don't know who they are." "Yes, it's ok."

People in this country LOVE to take pictures of themselves and other people, and everyone sort of went crazy at their last chance to have a picture with this lovely specimen of whiteness. So right now, I'm thrilled to be going home. Please note, Mom: I don't bother taking pictures of myself because a million other people take pictures of me. After that, there's hardly energy to care what I look like.

Anyway. I'm coming home, leaving a horde of adorers and sweet people behind. My students love me, and I will miss them. I'll miss this city, too; it's been my city for eight months. But! I'm moving on to bigger and better, back to a job I love and then, in the fall, graduate school! (Which may not sound like a happy, exciting thing, but trust me, it is.)

P.S. Family, don't be upset that you're on the list after a chair. The list is in no meaningful order!

Ghosts

2010-05-19T06:27:00.000-07:00

One day at school, there was a disturbance. I don't mean like a disturbance in the force (as if a million voices cried out and were suddenly silenced), but rather a bunch of students were running to and fro and making a lot of noise.

"Is there... an animal in the classroom?" I asked Ibu Vera.
"No," she replied. "A student... has a ghost inside her. How do you say it?"
"Possessed," I told her. "A student is possessed?"
"Yes. Do you want to go see?"

Well, why not. Vera confessed that she'd never seen this in person before, only on tv, so she was very interested. We worked our way through the crowd, but when we got to what was presumably the epicenter, we learned that the girl had already been moved. So we headed over to the Osis Room (I have never understood why it has that name). Waiting outside with the other teachers, I saw an unconscious girl being carried by a couple of boys to the nurse's room. But it was hardly important that a girl had fainted; everyone was anxious to get into the room to see the possessed girl.

As for me? Well, I never believed she was actually possessed. My Indonesian students seem very... impressionable. Seriously, Indonesians scream when power goes out in the mall. THIS HAPPENS NEARLY EVERY DAY. As for this poor girl, she was lying on the floor, being held by a couple of teachers who talked to her as she cried and spoke, seeming very out of it, nervous, and distracted. There was absolutely nothing supernatural about it; the girl just looked like she was having a nervous fit. I couldn't understand what was being said, but Vera explained it.

"They are praying and counseling her on her problems," she said. "Because when you are weak or have problems, it is easy for the ghost to get in."

Well, it was time for class, so I left the Osis room and headed over to class 10-J. We weren't far into our discussion about telling time when two girls sitting in the front of the room screamed and jumped up from their desks. One ran to the back of the room and more or less collapsed; the other ran to the door (presumably she was only reacting to her friend's actions). Immediately the teacher hurried to the girl in the back, holding onto her and talking to her. I felt pretty useless, just watching and making sure the other students stayed back. The girl was moving her legs around, and another student came up to hold her legs together (because she was wearing the uniform skirt, of course).

"What's going on?" asked a class 11 student, appearing by my side.
"Well, I guess she's possessed by a ghost," I told him, and he nodded in understanding.

It was later explained to me that the earlier girl had been filming a horror movie in the woods with her friends, so it's obvious where the ghost came from. The second girl? Who knows. When she first screamed, I thought maybe she imagined seeing a ghost outside the classroom, and that combined with the anxiety of the day might have caused her to become hysterical. I don't know. In any case, I was thinking that we should really get her some medical attention. Another teacher appeared and lifted the girl's feet. Oh, good," I thought, "lifting the legs is good treatment for people in shock." But in fact, he just removed the girl's shoes and socks and pulled on her toes (which is something that happens in massages, so it's not out of nowhere, but still odd).

Shortly, the girl was being carried out of the classroom for her round of prayer and counseling. Several other students were crying, one or two looking sort of hysterical themselves. As a class, we took some time to pray, and I tried to put some semblance of a lesson back together, but everyone was wound very tight.

I tried to help. "She keeps crying," I told the other teacher, indicating a student who wouldn't even lift her head from her desk. "I'm afraid she's going to make herself sick." Another girl had her eyes closed, and I was afraid she had fainted. At the end of class, every student but her stood up (which is normal for every class), and I insisted that the other teacher make sure she was conscious. She lifted her head and blinked a bit, which was not entirely reassuring.

That was the end of it. I think the two girls' parents were called, and they were taken home (imagine that call at work: "Your daughter's been possessed; please come get her."). No doctors were involved, either for them or for anyone who fainted (at least two people, I would say). What really surprised me, though, was how everyone seemed to accept what was going on. No one had any problem accepting that ghosts were the cause of all this trouble, and they even knew what to do! How on earth were they prepared for possession? That's my question. How did they know what they were supposed to do about it?

This country can be weird, weird, weird.

Ok, the NEXT blog will be about ghosts

2010-04-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went diving in Gorontalo with my friends. Gorontalo (as a province) calls itself a "hidden paradise", and the diving at least is really underappreciated. There's only one dive operator, and he's not there all the year, which is kind of a shame! It's not quite as easy to get to Gorontalo, and there's no convenient island like Bunaken to keep tourists nicely secluded in beach bungalows and stuff, but the coral is well worth the visit. It's very big, for one thing. There's a big expanse of coral, and plenty of variety in organisms.

My friends have seen whale sharks, but they were a no-show both times I dived there. We did, however, see two species of dolphins from the boat. For someone who as a pre-teen adored dolphins and who had never actually seen on in the ocean before, it was totally cool.

Julianne snapped some photos of the whale shark. Still haven't seen one myself!

All coral in Indonesia suffers from environmental damage. Trash is a problem, and bad fishing techniques can cause a lot of damage. During one of my dives in Gorontalo, we heard an underwater bomb go off somewhere in the distance. Although officially discouraged, dynamite fishing is still practiced and is, of course, a horrible environmental practice. When we surfaced, there weren't any boats within sight, which is a pretty impressive example of how well sound travels underwater. It must have happened pretty far away, but I knew right away what it was when I heard it. (It's funny how I can just know; it was the same way with the earthquakes. Things start moving and instantly my mind says "earthquake".) Since Bunaken was named as a national marine park, there has been a great effort to protect the coral, and dynamite fishing is nonexistent there now (there are enough people diving that everyone would know immediately!). It's a shame that Gorontalo's coral is not protected in this way; in a place where new species are still being discovered, destructive practices need to be stopped.

Anyway, to get off my high horse, ten or eleven hours south of Gorontalo by ferry lie the Togean Islands, which are also a cool place to dive. Four of us took the overnight ferry one Friday, crossing the Equator in our sleep (way cool!). There was some cool stuff, like an octopus!! It was kind of disappointing to look in the book afterwards and discover that it's a "common reef octopus". Well, I feel special anyway.

Pretty nice, isn't it?

Sunday night meant another overnight ferry back. This is actually a pretty decent way to travel. We just rented a (crew) cabin and slept pretty peacefully. It's certainly more pleasant than an overnight bus ride.

The Togeans were a nice place to stay, with beaches and palm trees and all that nice scenery. My one regret is that we didn't get to dive the sunken World War II bomber (!!), but for that reason I'm going to do my best to get back there next month! A sunken plane is really too good an opportunity to pass up.

A Naturalist's Guide to My Home

2010-04-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Indonesia is the number three country for terrestrial (land) biodiversity? Well, I'm certainly seeing that, because it seems like every week some new kind of organism moves into my home. So here's a little list of what's living with me.

1. Geckos. Of course there are geckos. There are geckos everywhere in this country, including my kitchen and above my air conditioner (though a small one fell from there and met its untimely demise). No problem. They eat...

2. Moths. Most of the moths I get are really tiny, but I dutifully got air-freshening moth-repellent for my closet. They're not really a problem. I wish the geckos would instead eat...

3. Mosquitoes. If I spot one in my bedroom, it's worth however long it takes to track it down and kill it, or else it'll be annoying me all night. Much like...

4. Bedbugs. First I discovered I had them because of all the bites I had, and then people from my school came and fumigated my bed. But, they came back. This time I've seen them. I'd do something about them myself, but really my mattress needs to be pulled outside into the sun on a day it doesn't rain. And my mattress is really very big. I certainly couldn't manage it myself. So I'm waiting for a Pak to be a little less busy and come help me out. It's a little gross but not a big problem. Bedbug bites fade quickly and don't itch nearly as much as jellyfish stings.

5. Spiders. They eat the mosquitoes, right? I sure hope so. Mainly there are some big ones in an upper corner of my bathroom and on the staircase, either too high to reach or their webs are complicated to destroy. There was a veritable apartment complex going on on the staircase, and I was afraid to go for any of the spiders, because the others would surely run away before I could kill them all.

7. Cockroaches. These can be pretty awful because they're gross, fast, and they sometimes make noises. I had one miserable night when one cockroach ran under my bed, and then called out to its friend, who also ran under my bed. I stayed on the bed (off the floor) until morning. However, the next day I put down some cockroach-killing chalk, and since then three dead ones have turned up. This chalk is pretty amazing. It also gets rid of...

8. Ants. Wow, seems like my list should be tapering off here, right? NOPE. As Sarah Mac says, there are loads of different species of ants, and we sure see a nice range. Mainly I get tiny ones in my room and on/in my computer, but in my kitchen I get some big ones, too.

9. Giant geckos. These things are actually kind of freaky. I've seen two of them in my kitchen, and I would have suspected they were rats but from the fact that they were on the ceiling. When I turned on the kitchen light, one fell from the ceiling, ran up the wall to hide behind the table, and then ran out in front of my to hide behind the fridge. These guys are fast.

10. Something with teeth? I'll admit I don't know what's been chewing small holes in my instant noodle packets. I can't imagine a giant gecko climbing my freestanding little shelf without toppling it, so I suspect it's a mouse? Don't know for sure.

11. The bugs that infiltrated my rice. Sorry that I'm getting kind of vague on the details, but I'm just going for a list of the minimum number of species. There may in fact be more than one kind of bug in my bag of rice. This is why, when I bought new rice, I also bought a tupperware container.

12. Birds. Now, this is a little unusual. The windows in my house are mostly covered with panes of glass, but at the top it's just wooden slats, with a sizeable gap (so if you're thinking shutters, you're wrong). Every once in a while, a bird slips through and can't find its way back out, which is pathetic and dumb. But recently the birds started a new project: building a nest in my window. I didn't realize this until I opened my curtain and a large heap of twigs and plant debris fell out. The birds weren't exactly happy when they came back and found out that everything had crashed. Well, sorry birds, but you can't live here.

(13. The cat. I no longer see the cat; in fact, it's been a good long time. But at one point, there was a cat that would come in and poop in the corner in my kitchen. It never ate any of my food or anything, just came in to poop, apparently. After we blocked the entrance to the kitchen, the cat pooped on my couch. But it's been gone for a while.)

Impressive, right? I know these were things you probably didn't really want to know about, but considering that a big part of my life is spent speculating on, cleaning up after, and assassinating these life forms, I thought you should know. I have some pictures, particularly of the bird's nest materials in my window, but the internet is being unreasonably slow and can't upload anything. When things pick up, I'll add some pictures. I'll even add a picture of my new haircut!

My next blog is going to be about something exciting: ghosts. Namely, the possession by ghosts of students at my school. I shall present my eyewitness account!

Update / Toba

2010-03-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

If you're in my Yahoo address book, you may have gotten up to three (as far as I know) emails saying I'm in London, I'm in trouble, and I need money. Well, I appreciate gifts of money as much as the next person, but please rest assured that I am not in trouble and I do not need anything. Most of all, I have not left this country, as I would not legally be allowed to return without going through a heck of a lot of visa paperwork, and that's just not something I'm willing to do right now.

No, I am most assuredly still in Indonesia. To be specific, the past weekend I was in North Sumatra, staying on Lake Toba, the world's largest volcanic lake! Very exciting. I did some sightseeing while trying to solve my email problem, having a foot infection, and coming down with the flu. (It really seems unfair to get the flu this close to the equator. I've always associated it with cold weather, you know?) So, anyway, I'm going to make this short and just put in some pictures!

Traditional Batak weaving:

Traditional Batak dance:

It's a very, very big lake.

A digression about food!

2010-03-12T21:39:00.000-08:00

I think about food a lot. I've got a whole list of things to enjoy when I come back to the states: sesame tofu, gelato, salsa, delicious sandwiches with things like sprouts, good cheese, etc etc. I dream about Thailand a lot; the food was fantastic.

Just look at that! Isn't it marvelous! Red curry with tofu, a coconut shake that almost makes you cry with joy. Seriously, the food in Thailand rocks. I was sad to go.

The thing is, food in Indonesia is not that good. It's sad, but true. Indonesians aren't much on spices or herbs, so there's nothing in the way of, well, subtle tastes.

There are a few basic rules with Indonesian cooking:
1. Deep fry everything, from tofu to bananas to whole fish.
2. Seasoning means garlic, salt, msg, or kecap manis (sweet soy sauce).
and most important of all...
3. No meal, breakfast included, is complete without rice.

Indonesians eat rice all the time. They believe you can't be healthy without eating rice. In January, the housekeeper here was on vacation, and a man was brought in to take care of the house. Whenever I cooked something, he would offer me rice. "No, thanks," I'd say. "I'm making spaghetti." But still he offered me rice. Surely I wanted rice with my spaghetti??

Indonesians are all conscious of the fact that rice is their staple grain. People ask me all the time what Americans eat. "Americans eat a lot of things," I tell them. "Well, Indonesians eat rice. What about Americans? Americans eat bread?" "Americans eat everything," I tell them patiently. "Bread, pasta, and, yes, rice." The weirdest thing is that people think that because I'm an American I don't eat rice. I've gotten some surprised reactions when I say that yes, of course I eat rice. Heck, I even like rice.

So, back on topic. Indonesia is a tropical country, full of fresh exotic fruits and stuff like that. Why shouldn't the food be good? Well, the food suffers from the same problem as many things in the country. It starts out ok, and then people do something weird and unnecessary to it, like putting mayo on top of a pizza. You're left thinking, why? Why on earth would you think that was worth doing?

Another example. Lots of people ride motorcycles here. Lots of people ride motorcycles past my house. Additionally, lots of people saw off their mufflers. As a result, motorcycles reach ungodly levels of noise. And it leaves outsiders like me wondering why anyone would ever want that. What are you hoping to attain, motorcycle drivers of Indonesia?

Back to food.

This is gado-gado, which I eat pretty often. It's an assortment of vegetables with peanut sauce, krupuk, and some kecap manis on top (don't worry--there's rice in there too). It's pretty good, generally. The glass you see there, full of murky green-brown stuff, is a drink called Es Cendol.

Es cendol is a sweet, cold drink that tastes exactly like a caramel apple. If you're very hot and thirsty, it's delicious. But they didn't stop at making a cold drink with a tasty flavor. No, the Indonesian iced beverage manufacturers decided to go one step further and add something unnecessary and unpleasant. In this case, green gummies kind of like worms, just the right size for sliding up your straw and slithering down your throat.

Who in their right mind would ruin a perfectly good drink like that? Where's the sense in that?

Well, that's the tragedy of living in Indonesia. You can't eat cha-chas all the time.

It's an Experience

2010-02-10T21:58:00.000-08:00

Well, I haven't updated in a little while, so here's some recent news from my life:

1. There was an earthquake this morning, enough to feel but not enough to cause any damage. Just a little shake that woke me up.
2. I have bedbugs. I wasn't sure at first; I thought maybe it was just an odd concentration of mosquito bites. But I have a line of at least ten bites in a row, and all the bites center on my left elbow and knee. So apparently I sleep on my left side. My elbow looks kind of diseased, actually, with that many bites. And of course the mosquitoes are still in full force these days, so there's always something attacking me.
3. This weekend I'm taking my Advanced Open Water Diver certification, and I'll make use of the awesome underwater flashlight that I got for Christmas (thanks Mom and Jeff. I don't know if there will be an occasion to use the dive knife, but it's awesome, too). I should say, it's a great flashlight, and diving last weekend my friend Ashley praised my light highly.
4. The woman who lives downstairs told me yesterday that she's moving to the small room by the stairs, so she can rent out the two main rooms. There's a family moving in this weekend, and the mother is--get this--Canadian. This is so, so weird. There will be an English speaker in my house! Just downstairs!

The thing about living in Indonesia is that you think that you have the lay of the land, things more or less figured out, but then the weirdest stuff happens. Like a Canadian moving in. Or, in another example, your downstairs neighbor suddenly has huge sacks full of cloves, and she lays them out on tarps to dry in the sun. Why? I have absolutely no idea. What will she do with sacks and sacks of cloves? I have no idea.

Another example: there's a festival ever year around Minahasa, and a friend tipped Erica and I off about where we should go to see it. Actually, we were invited to a party and told the festival would be happening in the same village that day, but we never did find the party and so we just ended up at this event in Kawankoan.

What we were told about the event is that young men dress up as women, and young women dress up as men, and they parade around town, and if they come to your house you're supposed to give them money or something.

Well, this was sort of accurate. There were a lot of young people dressed up like the opposite sex.

But there were, in fact, people of all ages dressed like that.

The theme of the event was SHS, which stands for three things, apparently.
Semua Harus Sekolah (Everyone should go to school)
Semus Harus Sehat (Everyone should have health)
Semua Harus Sejahtera (Everyone should have safety)

To this end, there were people dressed as nurses, soldiers, and lots of people dressed up like students.

Sure enough, they paraded around. And I found a good place to watch them all go by. But, as I said, even when you think you understand what's going on, you really don't.

See that guy? Third back? Who is wearing a costume made of hair? His sign reads something like "Choose according to your shining heart." ??? I asked the people around me and they said, "Like King Kong! You know King Kong?" Yes. King Kong is a giant gorilla. That is a being made entirely out of hair. It has no face.

No idea.

Thailand

2010-01-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

So, it's been a while since my last post, but this is mostly because I was out of the country for a while, then I was in the country but away from home, and finally because I had four hundred photos or so to sort through for the blog. (Be assured that you're getting the best of the best.)

Anyway, we are allowed to leave the country once during our grant period, for up to two weeks, so I went with some other teacher friends to Thailand and Cambodia.

Flew in to Bangkok, where we visited the Golden Buddha. Maybe it has a more official name, for all I know. "Wat" is Thai for temple, I believe, and so this was Something Wat, at least, but it's famous for a large golden reclining Buddha. When I say large I mean huge.

After Thailand, we took a taxi for 6 or 8 hours to an island called Koh Chang. It's the second biggest island in the country, apparently, and the name means "Elephant Island." We spent several days hanging out on the beach and enjoying the food (and getting massages).

Oh, and we also rode elephants. I mean, it's Elephant Island, after all.

That's me, Alexa, and Thom. Not pictured is Sarah, who has been there and done that (because she's cool and has been to Asia before). We hung out with the elephants in the water, and then we rode them around in the rainforest a bit before coming back and feeding them some bananas.

The food in Thailand was great, and while we were there we took a cooking class. We learned how to make red curry, pad thai, and spring rolls. Making the pad thai, I was like, "Oh, yeah, no big deal, just like we do at home."

After Koh Chang, my friends went off to Cambodia and I went up to visit my friend Mer in Chiang Mai (sorry you don't get a clever nickname, Mer). It was pretty great to be in a city with used bookstores and bagels and things like that. On Christmas Eve, I rented a bike and went to the zoo, which was fun. And then on Christmas Day Mer and I got massages and had a great, relaxing holiday.

After a couple of days I flew to Phnom Penh to meet up with my other friends, and we had a somber day of visiting some of the historic landmarks of the city (the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields). But from there we flew to Gili Trawangan, a small island off of Lombok, which is near Bali, and we were back to beaches and relaxation.

Stay tuned for part two, which will have more pictures of food.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-24T20:07:00.000-08:00

Well, Happy Holidays to all. I'm on my Christmas vacation right now, hanging out in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with my friend Mer (Grinnellian working for an NGO outside the city here). We're going to spend the holiday at the spa, getting massages and stuff, and also eating a LOT of food. There are a lot of tourists here, but otherwise Christmas isn't a big holiday here.

In Manado, however, Christmas is a very big deal, and I'm sure that it would be exciting to be there (I'm glad to have the exciting vacation, though). Manadonese people get a lot of their traditions from the Dutch, so Santa came on December 6th, not the 25th. In Dutch tradition, Santa (or Sinterklaas) lives in Spain, and travels to the Netherlands every year by boat. He sends Black Pete down the chimney (so he doesn't get dirty himself, I guess), and the good children get presents. The bad children get put in a sack and taken back to Spain, which seems pretty awesome, actually.

Now, Black Pete is black because of the soot from the chimney, but originally the character may have been a slave, or maybe he was just a Moor (from North Africa). I've heard varying reports from Dutch tourists. In any case, Sinterklaas sometimes travels around the streets, and he takes a man in blackface with him.

In Manado, they drive around in the back of a truck, blasting Christmas music. And Santa has four or five men in blackface, and a clown, too, for some reason. This has happened a number of times; you hear really loud Christmas and you start looking around for the traffic slow-up that is Santa and his posse (he's followed by decorated angkots, so traffic is definitely effected).

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a good holiday. It's a little hard to believe that it's Christmas, because it's so warm and unchanging here that time doesn't seem to work the same way. But I'm thinking of everyone back home and wishing you well!

Teaching in an SMA

2009-12-01T17:28:00.000-08:00

I'd like to talk a bit about what school is like here. Specifically, my school.

There are about 1,000 students at the school. There are three grades, 10-12. After grade 10, the students are put into a more specialized program, so grades 11 and 12 are split into science, social studies, and language. School starts at 7am and ends at 2:15 (earlier on Friday). There are four periods, 45 minutes each, then 10-10:30 is a break (for lunch), then there are five more periods. Myself, I think 10am is a bit early for lunch, so I usually eat a late lunch when I get home.

Discipline is pretty different than in the States. First of all, the gates are closed at 7am, and any late students can't come in. "If they're late, it's better if they don't come at all," one teacher told me. Or, the late students are brought into the teachers' room and scolded for a while, then switched. As in, hit with a switch. Not a lot, but once or twice to get the point across.

If there's announcements at the beginning of the day, all the students have to gather in front of the school, and afterward the schedule is pushed back and the periods shortened. Some days there have been teacher meetings, during which the students just hung out in their classrooms, I guess. Between classes, a bell is rung, but it's not automatic, so whenever a teacher realizes it's time to switch, they ring the bell. When there's no electricity, which is not uncommon, nothing happens. Not to mention, only some of the rooms have clocks, and these all say wildly different times. So people don't seem to care too much about the schedule. The teachers are often late, or go past their time and teach into lunchtime. It's very different from the States, and it's something that can be annoying at times.

Some teachers don't show up to class at all. I'm supposed to have a teacher with me in the class at all times, but one of the teachers I work with never shows up. Last Friday, a class asked me to stay and talk with them after our class. "Don't you have another class?" I asked. "No, the teacher doesn't come," they told me.

I'm not sure about homework at the school. I believe the students are taking ten different subjects, and homework for all of them would probably be a lot. But, based on how they behave in my class, there's not a lot of accountability when it comes to classwork. Whenever I assign homework, it's just to finish something outside of class, and often some of the students already have finished it. But it's very difficult the next class to get anyone to have their homework.

One of the other trying points is that the students were raised in a very different culture. In our orientation, we learned that Americans and Indonesians are on opposite ends of the individuality spectrum. Americans are very, very individualistic, and for that reason value personal freedom and competition, whereas Indonesians are much more communal, and so hate to separate themselves from the group. The students are afraid to single themselves out in any way, and they try to help each other, so they do things like tell each other the answers.

As for English class, well, mostly the teachers teach in Indonesian. So they're learning about English more than practicing it and getting comfortable with it. That's why we're here, to get them used to speaking English. So I try to make my lessons interesting, and to encourage creativity, and get them all talking in English. It can be very difficult sometimes to get the students to participate, and I think that's the hardest part of the teaching. If the students make an effort, my activities will help them. But there's not a lot I can do for the students that just sit there. In any case, I'll keep trying lots of different things, and I hope that my students are gaining something from my being here.

I've talked a lot about the difficulties of teaching, but there are good things, too. The students can be very excited, especially about playing games, because they can't do that in other classes. My students also LOVE to sing. All Indonesians love to sing, but especially the Manadonese. My first week, I had to sing in every class, and the classes would sing to me, too (usually "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz). Many of my students are eager to learn, and there are class periods where I just have to stop and laugh because the students are having so much fun with their English. Some of them really like to imitate my inflections (I think English is one of the more tonally expressive languages), so whenever I say something like "OH-k" they all have to repeat it. They also love to say things like "Barack Obama--he is my father."

This past week, I've been teaching them about Thanksgiving, and I made a crossword puzzle out of the vocabulary. But I didn't realize how many words are the same length...

"The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by Native Americans and the ______" "Potatoes"
"People of all ____, young and old, enjoy Thanksgiving." "Eggs"
"Thanksgiving is a time for families to come __________" "Potatoes"

Twilight--uncanny

2009-11-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

I kid you not.

My house

2009-11-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

Here (finally) are some pictures of my house.

Here is my bedroom. It's very clean in this picture because my friends were coming to visit. I have a large bed, a wardrobe, a desk. Oh, and an air conditioner, which is a big help.

Here is my bathroom.

You see I have a Western toilet, which is nice. I don't have a sink, but I have a mandi, which is like a big tub to hold water. To wash my hands, then, I get some water from the mandi with a bucket, and wash over the drain in the floor. The shower is on the other side of the room, out of this picture. It's just a shower head in the corner, so after I shower I have to sweep all the water to the drain so the floor will dry.

On the other side of the bathroom is another bedroom.

Last year there were two English Teaching Assistants living here. This room is bigger, but it doesn't have air conditioning, so I went with the other room. Besides, I think the cockroaches were coming from this room. Not that I have seen any live roaches for a while--the anti-bug chalk works really well.

These are some pictures of my kitchen. There are two room, one of which is more like a balcony, but there's no door between them, so I consider them to be the same room, even if only one has a real ceiling. I have a sink, a table, a stove with two burners, a fridge, and a little shelving unit for storage. Oh, and a rice cooker and a waffle maker, now. There's a gecko that lives in my kitchen, though he runs away when I come in. If I leave the room for a while, he'll stick his head up over the windowsill and make a sort of clicking, chirping noise to see if I'm still there.

It turns out that there is also a cat who likes climbing the first floor roof to come into my kitchen and poop in the corner. I find this very odd, because it doesn't eat any of my food, it just comes in and poops regularly in the corner. Very strange.

Cooking is interesting, because the stove is super hot. A lot of what I cook turns out either burnt or undercooked, or a mixture of both. My most common meals are French toast and hash browns, or vegetables and rice. I found a jar of spaghetti sauce at the store, but it turned out to be really gross (very thick and sweet), so the other day I ate buttered noodles with onions and garlic instead. Last night I cooked tofu with kecap manis (sweet ketchup?), and it was very good. For some reason it was the perfect temperature for the tofu to cook, though carrots and broccoli are sort of hopeless. That is, they will never be cooked quite right, but I don't mind slightly undercooked vegetables.

I also eat out pretty regularly, either gado-gado (vegetables with peanut sauce) across the street or ikan bakar (fish cooked over a fire) down by the ocean. I never was very interested in eating fish at home, much less a whole fish, but now I like it a lot. The meal consists of the fish, whole, with rice and vegetables (usually a spinachy stalk kind of thing), plus dabu-dabu (chili sauce), for a couple of bucks.

Now that I've been talking about food so much, I am very hungry, so I'm going to go home and eat lunch now. Oh, but I almost forgot the other room in my house.

It's basically a parlor. But I don't hang out there too much because it can be too hot.

Bunaken

2009-10-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

This weekend, some friends came into town to celebrate my birthday with me. We watched a movie, ate waffles, and yesterday, went to Bunaken, which is the name both for an island near Manado and the marine park next to it. There's a public ferry, but it doesn't go very often, so the four of us rented a boat to take us there and back. The picture above is the view from the boat. The island that looks just like a mountain is Manado Tua, or Old Manado. For some reason.

We didn't go straight to the dock on Bunaken Island, but instead they put down these glass window sort of things on the bottom of the boat and went over the coral reef so we could see it. All of us were amazed; this reef is huge, and only about three feet deep into the water. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and the men on the boat thought it was really funny how shocked and amazed we were. But it's really very beautiful, and easy to see even from above the water.

So, instead of swimming at the beach, we stopped in to rent some snorkeling equipment (except me, I used my nice mask and snorkel from scuba training) and took the boat back out to an edge of the coral reef. I'd never really been snorkeling before, and I was a bit skeptical about it, and especially about doing it in the ocean and dealing with the salt water in your mouth, but it was just as simple and easy as could be. We basically drifted along the edge of the reef and looked at the coral and the fish and had a great time. The reef drops off, so there's sort of a vertical ledge, and it's very easy to swim along next to it.

We spotted some scuba divers beneath us, and now I'm very excited to go back soon and dive, because it looks like the easiest dive you could imagine, and it was very beautiful in the water. At the end of the day, my friends left for their overnight drive back to Gorontalo. I was very tired afterward, and sunburned on the backs of my legs and in a nice line where my two-piece separated, but my burns are pretty mild and so I'm fine today. All in all, I had a great time going to Bunaken and now I can't wait to go back! But it will have to wait, because I've got plans to travel for the next couple weekends!

(Sorry there aren't more pictures, but I was too busy snorkeling!)

Sometimes you feel like a nut...

2009-10-21T17:55:00.001-07:00

Well, life has been going on here more or less the same. It's still very hot, and it hasn't rained for a while, though I'm told there's a rainy season SOMETIME. I'm on my second week of teaching now. Mostly we sing simple songs (this week it's a song I learned at camp about pizza), play games using language, and do some activities. This week, in anticipation of Halloween, I'm telling my students the story of the ghost of Bloody Mary (who appears in the mirror if you call her name three times (in the dark)), and then they write their own ghost stories. I've learned a lot about Manadonese ghosts, some of which are pretty scary.

This Monday I got sick. I don't know if it was something I ate (the rolls I got across the street are the prime suspect; the rambutan seemed fine) or what, but I was pretty sick! And Tuesday I woke up with a fever, but it was an improvement from the night before, anyway. So I stayed home, and the Oma I live with came up to check on me and try to help me about FIFTY times, mostly because she's very forgetful. She told me that eating would make me healthier, and I wanted to say, "I don't think you understand the nature of my illness," but since she doesn't speak English I just ate a little rice. Later, some teachers from school came by and decided that I had gotten sick because I was so tired from doing my own laundry.

Anyway, I feel just fine now, better than fine, even, because my friends from Gorontalo are coming to visit me tonight! Alexa and Sarah, who live together in Limboto, actually, outside of Gorontalo, are driving up here for the weekend to celebrate my birthday, which is very exciting. Hopefully we'll go to Bunaken, and at the very least we're going to have waffles and hang out and have a grand old time.

I have quite a few pictures, but unfortunately I'm having some technical difficulties on that end, since I'm using a computer at school. So, next week, at least, I will sort it out and put up some pictures of my current life. Until then, here are a couple pictures I stole from other people. This is us at Tangkuban Prahu, one of the volcanoes around Bandung!

Manado

2009-10-11T00:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's been a while since my last update. I'm in my house, but I don't have internet, although I've been trying for the last two weeks to get it. It'll probably be a while, so I'm stuck at internet cafes, where my time is limited. So I'll try to give some information about my life right now, but a bigger update will have to wait.

I live on the second floor of a house, renting from an old woman who doesn't speak any English, which isn't a problem. My house is very close to my school, so I can easily walk back and forth, though sometimes I get escorted home by teachers or students.

Things I do not have:
the internet
a stove (yet)
hot water
a bathroom sink (I brush my teeth in the kitchen)

Things I do have:
air conditioning
a flushing toilet
a refrigerator
a gecko living in the kitchen
a couple cockroaches, some ants, and some tiny moths
rolling blackouts

Manado is very hot, but during the last week it started to rain every day, which helps. During the dry season the power goes off regionally every day, so every afternoon I've been without air conditioning or running water (because I live on top of a hill, it takes an electric pump to bring me water). But this should be ending now with the rain, which is nice.

The city is pretty easy to get around, so I've been downtown a lot, where there are restaurants and shops and things. So far I've had a lot of time on my hands because I was just observing in the class, but tomorrow I start teaching, so that should keep me busier.

Everyone here is very friendly and helpful, and I've been feeling fine. I've invested in some pest-control, and everything seems to be working all right. Hopefully I'll get internet at home next week, and then I can post come pictures!

Selamat Idul Fitri!

2009-09-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

Today is an Islamic holiday, Idul Fitri. It marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting, and the holiday can last about a week. People feast and visit family, and it can be really difficult to get anywhere because the streets can be packed from all the travelers.

Last night we went up to the Dago Tea House, where we had a view of the city to watch the fireworks going off everywhere. Today, since we couldn't do too much, we took off to get out of the city. I went with some friends to what we heard was a tofu factory, but there wasn't much production going on. There were some great fruit popsicles, and some fresh and very tasty fried tofu.

After that, we took an Angkot (a van-like form of public transportation) to Maribaya, where there were supposed to be hot springs. We did find a hot pool, but it didn't look that great, but it was really worth going there for the waterfalls.

And we saw a monkey.

Can you see it? It's right there in the middle. Looks like a macaque, don't you think?

All in all it was a really nice day. Now here's an unrelated pretty picture (of a sunrise):

Bandung! and food

2009-09-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm now in Bandung for the rest of orientation. The city is a couple hours away from Jakarta, and it's a lot nicer. Jakarta was super crowded and smoggy, and Bandung seems a little less congested. The view from the hotel is very nice; we can see basically the whole city and the mountains to either side.

Bandung is known for its clothes shopping, but it's also a place where you can get any kind of food you want. I've eaten pizza and pad thai, as well as traditional Indonesian, of course. I end up eating fish pretty often.

The food is cheap, but we're not supposed to eat the cheapest food, which is from the street vendors. It's not recommended because we don't know about what kind of water they've been using, and we're not to drink from the tap. Could make us sick.

We've gone a couple of times to eat at the nearest mall (of many; this one is within walking distance). At sundown everyone is going out to eat after fasting for Ramadan, so the mall is very busy and there are lots of families out with us.

One thing that's great about Indonesian cuisine is the fruit. There's so much fresh fruit, all sorts, and growing seasons aren't like the US. Indonesians drink a lot of fruit juice, and, for example, strawberry juice is just strawberries pureed in a blender and poured into a glass. It is also fantastic.

Here's me at the Holland Bakery by our hotel, with some komodo dragon-shaped bread. I'll talk more about food later, and about stuff that we're doing, but for now I've got to get to Bahasa Indonesia class. Sampai jumpa lagi!

Tectonic turbulence in Jakarta...

2009-09-02T03:04:00.001-07:00

Well, maybe you'll see on the news when you wake up that there was an earthquake today in Jakarta, around 3pm. I'm fine; everything is fine. I was just sitting in my hotel room on the seventh floor, and I definitely felt it. The building was swaying enough to feel it, and there are plenty of cracks in the plaster, but nobody was injured around here and all the buildings are fine. We went outside and waited for a while while the hotel got checked out, and then we came back inside. It was definitely an interesting experience.

Meanwhile, orientation has been going well. A lot of people have come to talk to use about different opportunities for people that we'll be working with, and ways to get more involved in helping people improve their English. We've also been eating very well, since breakfast and lunch (and coffee breaks) are buffets at the hotel. Yesterday we went to the Fine Arts Museum and saw some pretty cool paintings.

So, anyway, I have now been through an earthquake. That's something I couldn't say before today.

Traveling pictures

2009-08-30T16:59:00.001-07:00

(I originally wrote this at 1am, but the internet was shoddy, so it's going up now. Jakarta is 12 hours ahead of Central time)

Here's a picture at the airport in Hong Kong:

Stormy skies over Singapore:

The beginning of the flight to Jakarta was pretty bumpy, since we were flying straight through rainclouds.

But we made it to Jakarta!

These pictures are from the balcony of my hotel room.

After settling in to our rooms, we had lunch in the lobby and then went out to a shopping area. It was kind of like a mall, only much, much bigger (at least 7 floors and three towers). Coming back, I was so tired that I fell asleep right away. It's the middle of the night right now, so I'm going to go back to sleep. Orientation starts tomorrow. We'll be in Jakarta for the next week or so, then we're moving to Bandung for the rest of orientation. Good night!

2009-08-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm here, all is well, and after some lunch I'll post some pictures!

Some info about where I'm going

2009-08-25T17:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm leaving the country on Friday. I'll be flying to Chicago, then Hong Kong for a brief stop, then a layover in Singapore for the night before finally flying to Jakarta in the morning.

Here's what the country looks like (click to enlarge and see the whole thing):

Indonesia is made up of about 6000 inhabited islands. Jakarta is on the island of Java, in the Southwest corner of the country. After the month or so of orientation, I will move on to Manado, where I'll be living and teaching at a public high school. Manado is on the northern tip of the island of Sulawesi, which is the funny shaped island right in the middle.

Here's a close-up (see Manado in the top right corner?):

Sulawesi is home to some unique animals:

the babirusa (there's a baby babirusa at the St. Louis zoo right now--it is very cute)

the Celebes macaque

the tarsier, which is the smallest monkey there is, I believe

(to mention a few)

The city of Manado is right on the ocean, and the area is famous for snorkeling and scuba diving...

Anyway, I'm going now to work on packing, so check back here later, and I'll keep you updated on my trip!

2009-05-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I said anything on this blog, and I'm drawing a line here; all the previous things were about Turkey, but next I will use this blog for my time in Indonesia! During which I hopefully will be better about updating regularly. Fingers crossed.

Pergamon theater

2007-10-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday was my birthday, and I had a really good day. We went to an international craft fair, ate waffles and cookies and pastries, and turns out that some student group was hosting a Tim Burton movie marathon last night, so we did that too. Tonight we've got a Halloween party hosted by our friend (a Grinnell grad) who works at the Embassy. So things are going well.

As to other stuff... Well, classes vary from hard (Greek) to easy (History and Linguistics). Eastern Roman Provinces is the most interesting, and I had trouble with the first test, but I feel like I really had the second one under control. I've started having papers due, but it's no big deal so far. Turkish class is plodding along, and the core course is tedious (because of the stuff we have to read), but only once a week.

I don't have any related pictures to show, so here's my favorite spot from our week-long field trip. This is at Pergamon, on the Acropolis. This first picture is just a nice example of the view. Straight ahead, the ground just drops off, and to the right it almost does, because that's where the theater is.This is a shot of the whole theater. This is just what all the postcards look like. The theater would hold at least 20,000 people. And the view from the seats was great. Since the town center was on top of this huge hill, they didn't have the space for a normal theater, and had to build a steep, narrower theater. It's huge. And absolutely incredible.

This is what I mean by steep. In this picture, I'm standing at the top of the theater, looking down.
Being down at the bottom, looking up at the whole theater, felt really amazing. I got such a great feeling being here, and it was definitely my favorite of all the things we saw.

My dad cleaned his apartment.

2007-10-03T02:20:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to announce it to the world.

Anyway, I got my pictures off my camera, so here's some interesting highlights of September:

Here I am as Hector, while Britt, as Achilles, drags me three times around the walls of the city. Good thing I'm already dead, because otherwise it would be pretty inconvenient to lie down on the dusty, dusty ground.

Similarly, here I am as Aeneas fleeing the destruction of Troy. My father, Anchises, is on my back, and though you can't tell, I'm leading my son Ascanius by the hand. My wife, Creusa, is right behind... Wait! Where did she go!? Oh no! Creusa!

(to all non-nerds, sorry)

Well, just to complete the set, here's a picture from the Asclepion at Pergamon:

In Athenazde, our Greek book, the son, Philip, gets involved in a fight, is hit, and falls over and somehow results in becoming blind. So Dicaeopolis has no choice but to take him to the priests of Asclepius to hopefully be healed. So here we're re-enacting this process, to commemorate our time in Pergamon.

Less esoteric pictures will follow.

Some interesting pictures

2007-09-23T11:00:00.001-07:00

My camera's pictures currently won't upload onto my computer, so I don't have any recent pictures to show. So here's a picture of a large Medusa head used as a column base in the old Byzantine (Justinian, I think) cistern. No one's quite sure why there's these two Medusa heads, or where they came from, or why this one is sideways (and the other one is upside down). We went to the cistern the first full day, same day as the Hippodrome.

Zooming forward in time, here is a picture from the Chora Church, which is famous for its many mosaics and frescoes. This mosaic shows the death of Mary. I thought this was particularly interesting because Jesus is holding a baby in his arms--that baby is actually Mary's soul. Weird, huh? I'm not sure when we went to this museum (church), because apparently I neglected to write about it in my journal. But it was a little later.For contrast, here's a lovely mosaic that was once part of the floor of the Great (Byzantine) Palace. It depicts two leopards eating a gazelle (I think). There were a lot of fighting scenes in the mosaics: a lion and an elephant, a deer and a snake, and eagle and a snake, a gryphon and... a horse? I think that's what it looks like.

Anyway, I hope I figure out the pictures soon, and then I can put up pictures from Troy and Pergama, etc. Until then I'll try to post some more random pictures.

update

2007-09-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

Well, here are some pretty pictures that have nothing to do with right now. This picture, for example, is from one of the Prince's Isles, in the Sea of Marmara.
Right now I'm in my dorm room at Bilkent Universitesi in Ankara. Students are free to arrive anytime now, so I don't know when my roommate will show up. This week we joined in the orientation Turkish class (basically the same stuff as our last Turkish class) and went on a field trip to Ataturk's Mausoleum and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.

This is me eating lunch back at Istanbul Teknik. Looks like this meal today is yoghurt soup (gross), schnitzel (with fries), pilav, and kavun (melon).

This next week orientation continues at Bilkent, and our group also starts our own Turkish class and our core class on Turkey.

Here's me and Kelly, who also goes to Grinnell, eating ice cream. Turkish ice cream is very thick, so that they don't do round scoops, they just use a thing more like a shovel to get a flat chunk of ice cream. It's very good, anyway. I'm eating chocolate and banana in this picture.

Of course, they have lots of other ice creams too. They sell cartons in the grocery store, and lots of ice cream bars and stuff sold everywhere.

Aya Sofia

2007-08-19T06:20:00.001-07:00

These pictures are from the Haghia Sophia, which was originally built as a church but later (after the Byzantine Empire was defeated) became a mosque. It was burned down twice, during riots and such, during the Byzantine. At some point, then, it was restored and the mosaics were uncovered. Most of them are Jesus with emperors and empresses. The whole place is very huge. On the wall above the balcony are hung large religious writings, which you can see in the third picture.

Hippodrome

2007-08-14T04:01:00.000-07:00

The Hippodrome was a long arena/racetrack, with three big columns in the center. This is the brazen column. It is believed to have been cased in bronze, which was then stripped off and stolen during the 4th crusade. It's not in the best shape because of that and because, apparently, the Janissaries used to climb it as a feat of bravery. I believe Constantine erected this tower.
This is the serpentine column, which originally had three serpent heads coming out at the top.

The next one is the Egyptian tower, which Theodosius put in. He took it from Egypt to erect here, but it broke on the way, so is only about a third of its original size. The base has carvings of him and his family at the races.

I would have liked to take a picture to show the length of the Hippodrome, but that's not really possible.

This dome is a fountain put in by Kaiser Wilhelm.

The Hippodrome was connected to the emperor's palace, and at one point there was a big riot, in which lots of people gathered in the Hippodrome and decided to crown their own king. The emperor Justinian wanted to flee, but his wife Theodora convinced him not to, so instead he sent his general out, and 30,000 people trapped in the Hippodrome were killed.

Galata Tower

2007-08-14T03:52:00.001-07:00

Our section of the city is Galata, the northeast peninsula, between the Bosphorous and the Marmara Sea. The first night, we hiked up the hill to Galata Tower, from which you can see all over the city.

The dorms where we live are down near the waterfront, so basically wherever we are we just need to go down to find our way back.

my room

2007-08-12T08:23:00.001-07:00

This is my room in the dorms in Istanbul, including the view from my window. Even though there's a mosque right next door, we didn't hear the call to prayer this morning. The first one of the day happens at sunrise, which these days is about 5:30.

I'm rooming right now with Morgan Smith, of Centre College in Kentucky. Profs Kamp and Whittaker are in the room next to us, and everyone else is scattered around either on our floor (4) or the one below it.

smashing.

2007-08-09T08:56:00.001-07:00

New Blog

2007-08-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

This is the new blog--so that I can keep up with Brian and Ashley in the travels-abroad-journals. Today is Sunday, party with the family. Friday I fly off to Istanbul. Hoorah!