Lessons learned this morning

1. If I don't get my 8 hours of rest, I am at risk of oversleeping.
2. Oversleeping becomes much more likely when I hit "off" and not "snooze."
3. Waking up at 6:05 (five minutes before the shuttle leaves) is enough to induce heart pounding panic.
4. Wearing a uniform really reduces that paralyzing "what will I wear?" feeling when there are thirty seconds to get dressed.
5. Morning non-essentials include face-washing, teeth-brushing, breakfast, jewelry, make-up (though I did manage a couple sweeps of mascara), and a packed lunch.
6. I can go from bed to door in about three minutes if I really need to.
7. I'm not doing that again.

Skype

I am a new and passionate fan of Skype. If you have a computer with a microphone, please download Skype and call me (I'm easy to find). When I talked to my dad this weekend, I was blown away by the quality of the sound. Downloading the application and computer to computer calling are both free. What could be better?

Good news: I am less that an hour away from the weekend!


Bad news: My computer has at least a hard drive problem and perhaps other problems, too. Which means that I need to find a friend who speaks Bahasa Indonesia to help me buy a new laptop, since I'm tired of fixing a four-year-old computer. I'm not really that upset about it (all my files are safe, thank goodness); it's just the hassle that I mind. Everything here takes about 5 times more effort and 10 times more time.


Busy news: With the resignation of one of our English teachers, some teaching responsibilities have been redistributed to cover the holes. Right now it looks like I'll be helping 7th graders in "individualized instruction," which means another 100+ names to learn, bringing my total to more than 350 students in three grades. I'm kind of looking forward to it because seventh graders have an energy that gets lost by the time they get to high school.


I just realized that I may not have described my teaching responsibilites very well. If this will bore you, feel free to skip this paragraph. Most of my responsibilities are in eleventh grade, where I work with Karla. We're almost done with a unit on power in which we've been reading Animal Farm and Marked. Once a week, I and two other teachers work with tenth graders for individualized instruction, which is more of a support class for their English skills and classwork. Now I may be adding 7th grade individualized instruction, where I'll be in their classrooms once a week with another 7th grade teacher.


More busy news: I saw my tutoring student (I'll call him Daniel) for the first time yesterday. I'll be tutoring him three times a week. Teaching him will be something of a challenge, but it's nice to work with a student individually for a change.

Disciplinary news: I handed out my first "note of concern" today. A note of concern sends a student to "Special Afternoon Meeting" or SAM, which is basically detention during lunch. Actually, I wrote 16 notes of concern for students in the same class who were all five minutes late to my class after their morning break. Lateness is kind of a part of Indonesian culture, but it is frustrating to Indonesian and expatriate teachers alike at IPEKA. So I also made the students write down and turn in ideas to solve their lateness problem. My first note of concern should have come long before this since I've let things slide before, and I know discipline is one of my weaknesses as a teacher. With 16 under my belt, I think I'm over that hump. I hope SAM was a party today.

Tasty news: I made a really good curried tomato, bean and potato soup the other night, and I've been enjoying the leftovers all week. I would post the recipe, but I pretty much made it up, and I don't actually know what kind of beans I'm using since I don't recognize them and can't read the label.

More tasty news: I'm going to my favorite Korean restaurant tonight where you get to grill your food at a little grill built in the table. I always overeat there.

More good news: I successfully bought a pair of shoes last weekend. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

The much promised and long delayed first photos

Finally, Internet installed at my apartment and a brief respite from my computer woes let me give you a visual taste of my life in Jakarta.


Two views from my balcony. This was a not-so-smoggy day where there was actual sunshine instead of cloudy glare. When I'm standing on my balcony and I turn around, I see...

My kitchen is at the back to the left. My utility room is straight back through the door you can see, and my bedroom and bathroom are to the left.

My bedroom with its ginormous bed and ugly art. Sorry, no pictures of my pink bathroom and its sickly yellow toilet seat. You'll just have to come visit.

My kitchen. One of its little oddities is that each of my four burners is a different size. Don't ask me why.

Three basic vehicles on the road. Cars, vendors, and motorbikes. What you can't see, and don't want to see, is the open gutter-canal that runs through the median. I sometimes imagine what I would do if I fell in. The answer involves tears and a lot of disinfectant.

I walk down this street to catch an ongkos to the mall. You can see a few vendors' stalls along the right side of the road. I exchange smiles with a beautiful old woman at one of them when I pass.

I'm anticipating more good photo opportunities Tuesday when we celebrate Indonesian Independence Day and the students enjoy "traditional games" for the rest of the day. I've heard that there's chicken chasing involved, so it should be good. And finally, the best shot so far of one of my Walters.

So cute!

Happy Birthday, Indonesia!

Tomorrow is Indonesian Independence Day. On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender of World War II, Sukarno declared independence from the Dutch, and the Indonesian flag was adopted. I had secretly found the Indonesian flag a little boring until a visit to Wikipedia cured me. The red represents courage, physical life, and the color of palm sugar, and the white signifies purity, the spiritual life, and rice. Together they represent a whole human being and good Indonesian cooking.

Actually, so far I'm not in love with Indonesian food. Most of my experience is limited to catered meals provided by the school the first week I was here, but the food tended to be either very spicy or very deep-fried. Once they put little tiny fried minnows no longer than my thumbnail in a little plastic bag. I think I was supposed to sprinkle them on my rice, but I couldn't eat them once I figured out what they were. That's not to say that I haven't had some good food. A co-worker and his wife introduced me to an excellent little Korean restaurant near our apartments and I've had good Chinese and Japanese food. I can find plenty of American restaurants in the shopping centers, but you'll never guess what the most popular fast food joint is: KFC. I also cook at home, but sometimes it just seems like such a bother to spend time cooking just for me.

So the nice thing about Indonesian Independence Day is that I get a three day weekend out of it, but I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with it besides wondering why the three countries (United States, France, and Indonesia) I've spent the most time in all have their independence days in the summer. Actually, I think I'll go shoe shopping. I've been meaning to buy a pair of more comfortable shoes to wear to school, but my wide feet make shoe shopping hard even in the U.S., and I'm not keen on adding a new sizing system and a language I don't understand to the mix. However, I've gotten the kick in the pants I needed from my sister who told me, "Laura, suck it up, and go buy some shoes." Thank you, Erica.

Present participle post

So I've been neglecting my blog-writing responsibilities recently, but not for lack of things to share. Here's what I've been up to recently:

Mourning what looks like a fatal end to my faithful computer of four years. Just as soon as my Internet was installed in my apartment on Saturday, my computer came down with the Ebola of computer ailments. I can get it to turn on about once in every ten times I push the power button, and then I'm lucky to get five minutes of operation before the screen starts to quiver like an analog TV not quite getting the signal, and then everything freezes. I haven't exactly decided on a course of action yet, but it doesn't take a prophet to predict that there's a new computer somewhere in my future.

Ice skating. A co-worker and her daughter took me to a little ice rink in one of the malls here. (I don't know why I didn't think to bring my ice skates to Indonesia.) I wanted to go not just because I enjoy skating but also to see if I've turned into a weather wimp with all this heat. I haven't. The cold was delightful, and I'm looking forward to Christmas.

Buying my ticket home for Christmas. This was far more complicated than I expected, but the end result is that I'm arriving in Indianapolis on the 21st of December and leaving January 5. I'll be so ready for snow and cold and sweaters and seeing family and dear friends.

Receiving a delightful package of books and goodies from my mother. The way to make Laura smile is to send her books.

Researching interesting places to visit when my parents and roommate come to visit in October. My excitement goes way beyond exclamation points.

Getting a tutoring job. I'm about 90% sure that I'm going to start tutoring a very artistically talented 7th grader boy in English.

Celebrating one whole month of being here. My "anniversary" was 08/08/08, which is almost celebration enough by itself (one of the few dates where it doesn't matter if I write the date American style or rest-of-the-world style), but it was also Friday, and I was invited out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant by the family whose son I'll tutor. Then I got to watch the last half of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. It hardly seems like I've been here a month, but it's been a good one and I'm looking forward to more good months.

Teaching a graphic novel. We're reading Marked by Steve Ross in my 11th grade classes, an adaptation of the gospel of Mark. I am not very familiar with the graphic novel world and I'm not totally comfortable with the portrayal of Christ, but I love the way Marked avoids traditional iconography and refashions situations and characters to remind us how strange and crazy and challenging the gospel story is. I won't say anything more, but I definitely recommend it as a book to get you thinking.

Creeping into my kitchen every morning with a camera to capture that perfect shot of Walter.

Watching the Olympics. I've been an Olympics junkie since I was a little girl. Erica and I have sung along with the NBC Olympics theme song many times (I can hear those timpani and trumpets now), but it's a little harder to get my Olympic fix in Indonesia. For one thing, the Olympics aren't very popular here, largely because of Indonesia's limited medal prospects. Badminton is their best hope this year. In fact, there was hardly any competition for the TV rights to cover the Olympics in Indonesia. The coverage I've seen is sometimes laughable in its badness. The transition between events usually involves cutting one event off in the middle and sometimes going to an Indonesian anchor before cutting into another event in the middle. Maybe it would help if I understood more than a few numbers in the Indonesian transitions, but I don't think so. My favorite was when the visual showed a women's basketball game while the audio followed the men's bicycling road race. Perhaps Indonesia has discovered an efficient way to cover two sports at once. All in all, even though I'm closer than most of you to the Olympics, I'm feeling further away, and I've been re-examining my enjoyment of the Olympics: do I just like them because I get to watch the U.S. win? And what is it that makes a country good at the Olympics?

Living alone. This isn't anything new, but I've been thinking about how living alone has been one of the hardest things to get used to here. While living alone it has its benefits (I don't bother anyone and no one bothers me), I've decided that I vastly prefer living with other people. To all the people I've lived with, no matter how short or long the time, I miss you.

Growing, stretching, and learning.

On prices and passports

One U.S. dollar equals about 9100 Indonesian rupiah. This means that you only need $110 to be a millionaire here, but the first time I saw my 6-digit grocery bill, I think my heart skipped a beat. Unfortunately, this means that knowing how to count to ten (let me show off just a little: satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh) in Bahasa Indonesian doesn't really help me.

As far as prices, some things are very cheap here, but some are surprisingly expensive. At the grocery store, produce and most basic commodities are less expensive than you would find in the United States, but imported goods cost a lot more. Cereals can be $6-7 a box. One the other hand, I usually get to the grocery store by ongkos, which costs 2500 rupiah/less than $0.30. Most of the time, I "splurge" and take a taxi home, which puts me back around 12,000 rupiah/$1.30. When my taxi driver didn't know where he was going, and the ride cost close twice what it should have, I had to remind myself that I was still getting a ride home for less than three dollars. Today when I sent my mother's birthday present--wish her a happy birthday on August 30th--, a woman in a little shop next to the post office sold me a box, packed the present, and wrapped the box for 5000 rupiah.

However, most of the places where I feel comfortable shopping are pricey by Indonesian standards, and sometimes even by American standards. When I go shopping at the mall nearest my home, I'm not getting any steals. I've been looking for a watch for the last couple of weeks, and I can't find anything (besides large pink plastic ones) under 400,000 rupiah. Last weekend, I visited a very upscale mall called Senayan Plaza, which featured marble floors and designer outlets like Prada, Burberry, and Coach. In a country where people assume that I have money to burn because I'm white, it was interesting to find a place where I can't afford to shop.

My students certainly can. They come from extremely wealthy families with cooks and maids and drivers. Their jaws dropped a little when I told them that I clean my own apartment and ride the ongkos.

By the way, I have my passport back! I've been reluctant to tell this story until I was sure that everything was ok. When I first arrived, Suli, the head of administration at IPEKA, told me that I needed to give her my passport to get my kitas. I'm still not exactly sure what a kitas is. It's not my work visa, but it's still issued through the immigration office. IPEKA sponsors me and pays for it. When I forgot to bring my passport the next day, Suli called me that afternoon and told me that a man from the apartment complex would be coming by to pick up my passport and take it to the immigration office. With some trepidation, I handed off my passport to a man I had never seen before (to his credit, he did give me a business card and a receipt) and hoped for the best. I caught a glimpse of my passport when I went to the immigration office a couple of weeks ago to sign in half a dozen places and to be photographed and fingerprinted. However, I was not exactly comforted about my passport's safety when a co-worker reported that the kitas process is very expensive because of corruption. But as of Thursday, the school has my kitas, and I have my passport, which means one less thing to keep me awake at night.

There was another sighting of (newly christened, thanks to Megan Ranney) Walter the lizard this morning on my kitchen counter. Unfortunately, he's still a little camera-shy, but I promise that pictures from other parts of my life in Jakarta are coming soon.