It's an Experience

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

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!

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

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

I kid you not.

My house

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

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!)