Flotsam and jetsam news

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy, so I apologize to those of you who’ve been waiting with bated breath for my latest report.

The end of my time with my year 11 students kind of snuck up on me. It’s probably because I’ve never ended a school year in September. I had my last regular class with them yesterday, and it didn’t really hit me that I’m done teaching them until one of my classes handed me a little poster with a class picture and their signatures. I laughed a little because more of their comments complimented my looks than my teaching (Nicole Kidman and Annie of “Tomorrow” fame” have joined Barbie on the list of women students have compared me to), but I suppose I’ll appreciate it when years of teaching have made me grumpy and sour. I’ll miss my 11s.

The school calendar is really complicated, and I won’t explain it completely, but basically the year 11 students begin year 12 next month, while the year 10 students won’t move up until January. This means that my schedule for the next few months has a big hole, which will soon be filled by teaching grade 8. And with this newest reshuffling of the schedule, I'll only be teaching 3 days a week, and I’ve been relieved of my grade 7 responsibilities. I’m starting to think that they want me to learn the name of every student in all of junior and senior high.

Sushi and bookstores have been a fun feature of the last couple of weeks. My coworker Tim (he’s a fellow Midwesterner) and I started exploring good sushi places a couple of weeks ago. Some of our Indonesian co-workers know of an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet, so a group of us are going next weekend. I’m pretty excited, even though wasabi and I have a complicated relationship. As a small side note, I’m getting much more proficient with chopsticks. On the subject of bookstores, Tim and I also found an excellent one in a western suburb of Jakarta (Lippo Karawaci) where you can read in egg shaped wicker chairs that hang from the ceiling while looking out the window and sipping “Refreshing Tea” or “Relaxing Tea” from the bookstore’s café. Good bookstores are rare enough in Jakarta, partly because this culture is not much of a reading culture, and the ones I’ve found don’t make leisurely browsing easy. The same area also has a lot of restaurants that look like they’re worth trying. We had some tasty Indian food at one and enjoyed dessert and live music at another.

Last Monday we had a blackout at school. Apparently, random power outages are fairly common in Jakarta. The school is equipped with a generator to deal with it and the light came back on a couple minutes later. It doesn't really surprise me that this city has power problems. Infrastructure is not exactly Jakarta's strength, and a city of 10 million takes up a lot of energy.

Also along environmental lines: yes, this city suffers from air pollution and trash everywhere, but they do have some good ideas. At the grocery store, you buy many liquids and gels in pouches not bottles. For example, I bought hand soap in a bottle the first week I was here, but now that I'm running out, I can just buy a pouch of hand soap, and it cuts down on waste. The same goes for cooking oil and laundry detergent and dishwashing liquid. Packaging in general seems less wasteful here. (Unfortunately, there’s no recycling, and I still cringe a little when I throw away plastic bottles or paper.) Another thing is that there’s no central air conditioning. IPEKA cools classrooms and offices with wall units, but the hallways and the lunchroom don't have AC. Besides cutting down on climate costs, this also means that we can control the temperature of individual classrooms, unlike most American classrooms.

I miss fall. I’ve never had a September without autumn, and it’s hard to believe it’s September without changing leaves and crisp, cool sweater weather.

Last week I found a Walter in my refrigerator. “Holy cow!” I said. He crawled out more slowly than usual and posed for several photos on the side of the fridge while he was warming up.

Topic for next time: Ramadhan