Good Food, A Visitor, and an Island Trip

Okay, so I've been in Jakarta for two weeks now, doing teacher training all day and learning Bahasa Indonesian. I've been hanging out with the other English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) a lot. I've also been going to some reaaallly great restaurants in Jakarta. Thai,Vietnamese, Lebanese, Indonesian food...yuuummm!!

A great surprise though...a visitor from home! My friend Vivian, Pomona class of 2004, is here for the week. She was doing the JET program (teaching English in Japan) for the past year and has been traveling around Southeast Asiaand she's now in Indonesia. Yesterday we took a break from the big,smoggy, trafficky city of Jakarta and took a boat out to Sepa Island for some blue sky, white sand beach, and coral reef. It was fantastic to get away from the city for a day. Having a visitor has been a good excuse to go see all the sights that haven't got around to seeing yet, so that's an open invitation for anyone else to come out and visit!

This week we're all in Bandung. It's a big city as well, but not as big as Jakarta. There's actually blue sky here as opposed to smoggy greyness and traffic isn't as bad. It's a walkable city and a lot prettier too. We're here in Bandung for one week observing different schools and to practice teaching. We get one real class of Indonesian students that we get to teach on Thursday...I'm really excited! I've taught before, but I'll be teaching in such a different context than I'm used to so I'm glad I get a warm-up class before actually going to Bali to teach.

We went to the Dago teahouse today and had lunch up on this hill with a great view of the city. Oh man, the green scenery here and having gone to the islands yesterday has me pumped and ready to get out of the city and get to my town Tabanan in Bali. The next time I write will probably be from there...

A New Beginning

Going from one program to the next, I left New Mexico after my last summer teaching at Breakthrough Santa Fe and directly transitioned to my next adventure as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Indonesia. Twenty-four hours after leaving Albuquerque I arrived in Singapore by way of San Francisco and Tokyo and met up with my fellow ETAs along the way. After a nice hotel stay in the very clean city of Singapore (where chewing gum is against the law!) and a quick flight toIndonesia, we arrived safely in Jakarta, a gang of thirteen jet-lagged, disoriented but excited ETAs, prepared and unprepared for the year ahead of us.

We made our way to the hotel in Jakarta which will be our home for the next month. I was so excited and exhausted at the same time. I swear I felt like I was on some reality TV show though: "Real World: Americans in Indonesia." See what happens when thirteen young Americans are plopped into a foreign country with no language training or teaching certification and try to teach English to Indonesian high school students for one year. Who will survive? Who will go home early? And most importantly...who will hook up? But what organized group progam doesn't feel like that nowadays?

There's another Filipina in this group so we've bonded over our Southeast Asianness: familiarity with pronounciation of Indonesian words (Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog are both Malay-based), our ability to eat rice three times a day, etc. Yep, and we are often mistaken for Indonesians or some other non-American nationality. So it's interesting to go shopping with a group of obvious bules (foreigners) and have the experience of sales people turning to us to translate. For me that's further incentive to learn the language as quickly as possible. It's so frustrating not being able to communicate!

On that note, we started our first day of classes today. We took taxis to the AMINEF office (where we're going to meet everyday) and had our first lessons in Bahasa Indonesia and in teaching English as a foreign language (TOEFL). We do these classes for a month and then are shipped off to our various locations (mine is Tabanan, Bali).

As for visits, stop on by if you're in the area. Don't worry, you'll all be enticed once I get to Bali and can describe it to you.