Emma’s Year in Indonesia

I’m sitting in my usual internet cafe, letting the ice cream settle as I try to avoid scratching the 3 mosquito bites I’ve acquired on my knee tonight, and inhaling lungsful of cigarette smoke. Its interesting to watch the world go by and try to figure out what everyone does on a Friday night during Ramadan. Not much really, this place is really busy, with families having tea and coffee, and there’s a big group of guys sitting near me, hanging out on a Friday night I guess. I’ve been trying to figure out what a brochure near me is about. Its advertising an English tutoring school, but along the side of it is written in big letters “we are not a sausage factory!” strange…but then again, a lot of things in Indonesia can be pretty strange.

 I think I need to start getting a newspaper because I’m so out of touch with what’s going on! I could get a subscription to the Jakarta Post (the English newspaper here) but that would mean having to deal with the paper boy more often. He appeared at my door again last night, wanting help with his English homework. But once helped him he seemed to leave me alone, so  hopefully that’s a sign he’s backed off a bit after Phil’s talk. Apparently he gave the other girls in my kos a written apology.

I’m reading the Sydney Morning Herald website for my dose of news. At least I have a vague idea of what’s happening, mainly thanks to Mum’s updates. I seemed to have aquired a reputation amongst a few in ACICIS for knowing a bit about what’s going on at home. Every now and then someone will come up to me and ask me if I have any exciting news from home. I think my horse flu news is getting a little outdated now, so I’ll have to find something else to report on.

 Its funny reading an Australian paper when you’ve been away from the place for a while. You realise how much Australian culture shows through. For example, this headline about Joey Johns : “Fans robbed of final salute” It seems a little extreme! And the reference to “mates” in an article about the Bali bombings sounds oh so Australian. I still can’t get over how un-Indonesian those bombings were and what a massive surprise it was.

Ok, so this is me being out of touch, but can someone tell me what’s happening in Burma? 

This week has been a frustrating one so far. Mainly in terms of uni. My really good class that I have on Mondays looks like its not going to be so good after all. This week we started the next section of the class that will run until the end of the semester, where students are allocated to give presentations each lesson. This makes it less interesting, because the lecturers were really good, and many of the students have accents that are difficult to understand and speak quickly because they’re nervous. Fortunatly, the students have been told to make a handout of their speeches which will be given out at the beginning of the classes. Unfortunatly, this means that we don’t need to do much other than sit there and pretend to listen for 2.5 hours. My class on Tuesday was on, but we still have no sense of what each lecture is about, it takes about half an hour to figure out what the topic is, the lectures have very little structure and when i asked what the assessments were for the class they said that they haven’t worked that out yet. They haven’t even told us if there is a textbook we need to study. And the mid-semester exams (I presume I’ll have one for this subject) are on in a couple of weeks. As for the other subject that the lecturer hasn’t turned up for yet, Phil has been trying to find out what is going on with it since last Thursday. I turned up at 12.00 on Tuesday, because some of my classmates said they thought the class might be moved to then. But after spending about 15 minutes wandering around the general area where the class could be without seeing any students, I concluded it wasn’t on. Eventually, last night I gave up and asked to switch subjects. So now I’m switching to one about the basics of International Relations that was on this morning, because I should be able to catch up on the 4 weeks i have missed reasonably easily. I should also be able to get a dispensation allowing me to change subjects and waving the 4 missed weeks.

The international relations class goes over a lot of stuff I’ve already done, but I liked it because it reminded me of how much I enjoy international relations and how much I loved studying that field back in Australia. Being the second white person in the class of around 50 or more, I couldn’t get away with quietly being the new person. The lecturer pointed me out as a ‘teman baru” (new friend) at the beginning of the class and asked where i was from etc. Then halfway through the class he asked if I could understand what I was saying, because I wasn’t laughing at his jokes! After that whenever he cracked a joke everyone in the class would turn and look at me to see if I was laughing. Which of course i was, even though I didn’t find his jokes funny. So this made the class quite interesting. Javanese was entertaining as usual, so at least i’ve ended my week on a good note. Now I have a 4 day weekend, which doesn’t excite me very much as i don’t have much to do. My health also hasn’t been great since Dieng, as the pollution from the trip has really aggrevated my cough, which slows me down a fair bit.

The past couple of days have been a really amazing experience. I don’t even know where to begin! Dieng is a really interesting and beautiful place, and was certainly an interesting adventure to embark upon. It is a village that sits on the top of a volcanic plateau, in the hills of central Java. Its a volcanically active area, with coloured lakes and craters with bubbling mud and sulphur.

Becky, Sarah, Emma and I set off to Dieng on Thursday afternoon. To get there, we caught ‘travel’ to Wonosobo. ‘Travel’ is a cheap way to get around, its basically a minivan that does a door to door service for those booked to travel on the bus. The bus isn’t airconditioned, which means that you have to open the windows and cop lungful after lungful of diesal fumes. After a few hours your fingernails go black from the pollution, and you feel so dirty and disgusting. The van is usually also loaded up with boxes, food, packages and other bits and pieces that need transporting. So you find yourself surrounded by boxes and baskets of food. It was great to watch the sunset out the window, and then spot the shadows of volcanos looming above us once nighttime set in. We reached Wonosobo at about 8.30, after about 4 hours in the car. As it was night time, there were no buses to take us another hour to Dieng, and our driver’s asking price was far too high to let him take us there.

 So we spent the night in Wonosobo, we found a nice place that had a massive family room with hot water and a tv and could fit all four of us in. This was lovely until we figured out that the road we were on was quite major, and spent most of the night awake listening to trucks roar past.

After staggering out of the motel the next morning we walked through the streets of Wonosobo looking for a bus to take us to Dieng. Wonosobo is a very sweet town, its much quieter than Yogya (understandably!) and hilly. It almost felt like a country town in Australia, where you’d look down a street and see rolling green hills in the distance. Everyone in the streets would stare at us in amazement, most people would stop and you’d see their jaw drop at the sight of white people. 

 The bus trip to Dieng was full of all sorts of people and all sorts of foodstuffs. We passed through so many villages as we climbed the hills, along windy steep roads to the top of the plateau. After about an hour we reached Dieng. Dieng is a very small, sweet village. The houses are all well built and really interesting shapes and sizes, and the people are lovely, they call out to you and want to stop and chat to you to find out where you’re from etc. None spoke english, the main language they used was javanese, but could converse pretty well in Indonesian. The main thing they seem to grow around here is potatos and cabbage. Our accomodation was reasonably basic but had a little bit of hot water and a western toilet. We managed to fit 4 of us into a very small room quite comfortably, so it wound up being quite cheap.

So we spent Friday afternoon wandering around chatting to people, having a look  at the coloured lake, climbing a hill, looking at one of the craters and checking out the remains of ancient Hindu temples. The crater stank really strongly of sulphur and I’m sure there were lots of toxic fumes in the air. The site is quite dangerous, to get to the crater you walk amongst boiling rocks and pools of bubbling sulphur mud. I found the fumes too overwhelming to get close to the crater, only Sarah could climb up the hill to check it out. Apparently it looked amazing. As we were leaving I noticed that someone had lit a fire up near some shrubbery. After a few minutes I realised it wasn’t just someone burning off rubbish, as it was spreading to a wide area and the flames were twice the height of a person. So I gathered up the others and we moved away. A couple of the locals went down to it and tried to beat it out with big sticks. As this was looking extremely futile we got out of there fast.

 Jess and Annabelle, one of the other ACICIS girls, arrived on Friday evening, to check out the place for themselves. They stayed there until this morning.

We decided to do a sunrise walk the next morning, which would mean that we would have to get up at 3.30am. So we went to bed at 7pm to get as much sleep as possible. Unfortunately, it was Friday, Ramadan and we were in a village with about 4 mosques. The one closest to us had a young kid doing the prayer call, and he kept making mistakes and had no variation in his tone of delivery. So we lay there with our eyes shut trying to pretend we couldn’t hear the voices so loud that it sounded as if they were standing in our room. This eventually stopped at 10pm, by which time we were all tearing our hair out and bursting into rants about how intrusive noise is, how unfair it all was and how wonderful noise restriction laws in Australia are.

Getting up wasn’t too hard because the mosques started up again at about 2.30am. So were were already awake by 3.30. It was spooky to walk through villages so early and see the lights on in people’s houses as they ate, or to pass people and cars going to the mosques.  Despite this, the roads were pitch black, and we had 2 torches between 6 of us. This got very tricky when our guide took us on a shortcut through the fields. We were walking along a narrow, rocky track with a 6 metre drop to our right. A few of us slipped and tried to grab onto the bank on the other side, only to come away with handfuls of loose dirt and blades of grass. The majority of the walk was through villages and fields, but for the last part we had to climb a hill, that had a steep path that worked its way around the outside. This was a little scary, as the path was so steep u had to use your hands sometimes, and directly to the left was a drop of…a long way down, lets just say that. It was also exhausting, we were all puffing madly and kept having to stop. The air felt thinner up there too (2300m above sea level). We got to the top about an hour and a half after we’d started the walk, just as the sun was rising. Despite lingering clouds hiding the sun on the horizon, the view was amazing - there were around 4 volcanos poking above the clouds. We were well above the cloud level, looking down as they passed over the villages and green valleys below. It was really amazing. We could even see Merapi, with smoke pouring out the top of it.

On the way back we agreed to go to a waterfall about 3km away. This was a mistake, as the road there was a very steep, winding descent, and we realised we’d have to walk back up it afterwards. We passed many farmers on the way to work. Some said hi to us and were friendly, others made comments that made it clear that they resented us, pointing out of “expensive” clothing and shoes. After a while my knee started playing up and I started limping. I got heckled so much by the farmers, who were calling out asking if I was tired and laughing, because they do this every day. Their life is so hard, you see many struggling into town carry what looks like at least 20kg of potatos on their shoulders. Our guide was saying most make about Rp10,000 a day, just over a dollar, and it breaks his heart that he gets to earn more by showing tourists around. I got a bit upset when a group of them got together and started yelling stuff at me as I limped, and laughed at me. One imitated the sounds of my footsteps (chik, tak, chik, tak - limp, step, limp, step).

We  got to the waterfall exhausted and in pain from walking downhill for so long and decided the waterfall wasnt that great and so wasn’t worth it. Then we turned around and started climbing back up. It was taking us so long, we’d walk around one steep bend, stop and rest, and then go around the next. In the end we decided we just didn’t care anymore and paid a farmer to drive us back to Dieng, with us sitting in the back of his ute. This made our day! We were all grinning with delight at saving ourselves at least an hour of climbing up a hill. We did feel like rich lazy westerners, but we were past the point of caring.

 The guide we had also ran our hotel. He was a nice guy who chatted to us lots, and took care of us. Only problem was he kept sneakily trying to rip us off or trick us every now and then. For example, he told us there was a bus that could take us from Dieng to Yogya. Then, 45 mins before the bus was due to leave, he told us it was broken and we’d have to pay 10 times the amount to hire a car to take us to Yogya. Fortunately, Becky hadn’t cancelled our return booking from Wonosobo, and were were able to get back there and back to Yogya quite easily.

It was a great trip, full of high and low points. It was great fun with the girls, we all had a good time together and a lot of fun. It made it a really good adventure. 

I’m taking respite from the midday heat in a cool, airconditioned net cafe in my street. I’ve been packing my bag because this afternoon I’m heading off to Dieng (sort of north west of Yogyakarta, in Central Java) with Sarah and Becky for a couple of nights. I don’t know much about the place but apparently its volcanic, with mud flows and a coloured lakes. There’s also a few temples there too. Its about a 4 hour bus trip there, changing buses once. Hopefully I’ll have some good photos to show for it when I get back!

I’ve been having a down week, so going away this weekend will be a good way to lift me back up again. Nothing bad has really happened its just that every now and then I get hit with a low, we all go through this, its still part of us adjusting to being here. I’ve had some good classes to cheer me up though. Yesterday I had a hilarious class for Javanese. Its for foreigners only, and the teaching method for the teacher seems to be ask us things in Javanese, give us a few words of vocab and then expect us to respond. So everyone sat there, frozen in their seats with a look of fear on their faces as he went around the room asking us questions for 2 hours, and if you got picked then he’d keep asking you the question until you figured out what the answer was. I got the giggles after about half an hour, just because everyone was so tense!

 Last night we had a checkpoint meeting at the ACICIS house, to brief us on immigration and health things that have come up. Mark received a round of applause for being the first (and only so far) to be hospitalised (he had dengue and recovered in about a week). Afterwards we all swapped stories about the weirdos that hang around us bules (white people). It turns out some are notorious offenders! Like the Jakarta Post paper boy, who spends most of his time going around visiting and ringing the girls, wanting to be their friend. Unfortunatly he’s friends with the security guard in my kos, and so keeps turning up at my door, and at the doors of the other Australians living there. The other night he wanted me to go with him to meet his mother! At 8.30 at night! So Phil has promised to sort him out today, and anyone who knows Phil can tell what that will be like…

 My Thursday class has turned out to be a real dud. We’re in week 4 and the class still hasn’t started because the lecturer hasn’t turned up yet. I chatted to the students in the class about it, and they said that they had heard that from next week it might move to Tuesday at 12.00, or Wednesday, they weren’t really sure. But they reckoned if I just turned up at 12.00 on Tuesday a class might be on. When I asked which room they pointed one way, and then changed their mind and pointed another way. Apparently the lecturer is a very senior figure, who lives by his own rules and cannot be questioned by anyone, and is in Jakarta at the moment. If I can’t sort this out by early next week then it may be possible for me to join another subject and get a dispensation for being 4 weeks behind everyone else. 

My class on Tuesday also wasn’t on, which was a shame because noone in the class has seen a syllabus, or knows when the assignments are, or even what the texts for the subjects are. The lecturer always bolts as soon as the class is over, so noone is quite sure what is going on. I was hoping to block his exit in the class on Tuesday and ask him, but I guess it’ll have to wait until next week. 

Sounds pretty bad doesn’t it? Yeah it is but that’s just Indonesia, that’s life here. Everything is extremely laid back. And after all, I’m going to one of the best universities in the country that so many students can’t get in to, so I shoudn’t complain. I think some of the other ACICIS students are having trouble comprehending this. 

The past couple of days I’ve been laying low to have a break from the sun and from walking/riding in an effort to conserve my energy. Ramadan is in full swing, with poor Jess and Sarah getting prayer calls wafting through their rooms at all times of the day, and night. The worst its been for me is that there is a little area outside my room for prayer, and people keep turning on the light outside my room at all times of the night, illuminating my room. But I’m getting the hang of it. I always feel guity to eat or drink in public, so I’ve stocked up at the supermarket and have been saving my daytime meals for when I’m in my room.

 There are still earthquake reports flashing up on the tv most days, but again we’re still not feeling anything.

Firstly I just want to let everyone know that I wasn’t affected at all by the earthquakes in Sumatra last night and this morning. The furthest they were felt was West Java, and Jakarta, and I’m more in the central Java region. Yogyakarta is also too far inland to be affected by any possible tsunami, and I have no plans to return to the beach for a while.

I’m killing time at uni because my Thursday morning class has been cancelled for the third week in a row. So hopefully the first class will take place in week 4. That’s my only class where the lecturer hasn’t shown, all my others have been fine, which is good. I’ve had a few good classes. In one on Monday we were broken up into groups of 5 to discuss the application of democracy in Asian countries, which was good for my Indonesian, and I was pleased that I didn’t have any difficulties doing the task.

Yesterday was the conference/symposium on Aus-Indo relations. My paper went ok, although apparently I spoke to fast for those who’s english wasn’t very good (I had to give the paper in English, which was a shame). I’m doing an interview at 1pm today for Kanguru radio, the Australian community radio here.

Today’s the first day of Ramadan. Most food places, including the canteen at uni, will be closed for the next week at least. Which is a bummer because I’m hungry! I’ll have to go to the supermarket and stock up on supplies. One of the guys sitting near me is saying that apparently there were sweepings last night, where Muslim groups went around to shops that sold alcohol and destroyed their supplies of alcohol. I don’t think it was too dramatic though, none of us seemed to really notice any rowdyness on the streets last night. I think a few of the Australian guys are going to struggle with the notion that they should be very discreet if they want to drink in the next month and will have a pretty hard time finding alcohol. All the nightclubs and bars have closed.

My apologies for not updating this much during the past week. I’ve had several reasons for this. Firstly, around the middle of last week I got a bit knocked around by fatigue and had to spend a couple of days in bed. It seems like my body had had enough of adjusting to being here and dealing with the hot climate. I went to the doctor at the hospital to get a blood test to make sure it wasn’t anything serious, and came away with reassurance that I’m healthy and a few drugs that turned out to be methadone and belladonna (I told them I had a headache and this was their solution to it!) Fortunately I didn’t take them, as I was already suspicious of being given drugs with no explanation as to what they were. I’m getting better now though and I’m being more careful. For starters I’ve stopped walking to uni and back, saving me about an hour’s walk a day in 30 plus degrees. My bike is in the repair shop, I was meant to get it back today but they were shut. So maybe tomorrow.

 Secondly, dad made a brief visit to Yogya on Thursday night until Saturday, on his way from a Panji festival in Malang. It was great to see him and have a really good chat about the things I’ve encountered here and how I’ve felt about it etc. I think you really need a good vent every now and then, no matter how much you’re enjoying things here, its always tough and there’s always something you need to get off your chest. 

This past weekend was an ACICIS organised trip to the beach with the other ACICIS students. We went to Krakal, which is about 2 hours from Yogya towards the south on the coastline. Its a really poor area but really pretty there. It was so nice to escape the pollution, noise and traffic of Yogya. I’d almost forgotten what clean air smelt like! It was really great just to go there and relax. It felt like time slowed right down and all the worries and stresses of Yogya disappeared. It was also really great to get to know the other ACICIS students a bit better. We spent the evening sitting by a fire we’d built, having a good talk and a laugh. It was so great just to have a really good laugh.

I’m quite busy over the next few days, as the Australian-Indonesian symposium is on Wednesday, and I’m giving half a paper contesting the notion of spiritual diplomacy and exploring other ways to improve Australian and Indonesian relations. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes down, as the whole thing has been organised around the idea of supporting the notion of spiritual diplomacy. It should be fun and a good experience.

 I’ve booked some plane tickets for Jakarta in October. We have a week’s break then for Lebaran, which is the festival to mark the end of Ramadan, in which everyone returns home to their place of origin to eat a lot of food, amongst other things. Normally trying to get anywhere in Indonesia is crazy, because millions of people are moving around Indonesia. But apparently Jakarta is deserted, because everyone has gone home. So that’s where I’m going.

Ramadan starts this week, which will be interesting but I imagine that it will be quite boring, with many food sellers being closed during the day and most Indonesians unwilling to do anything too physical in case they run out of energy. I’m glad I’m not living near a mosque though, as they start waking everyone up at 2.30am every morning for the first prayers and to eat before sunrise.

I have a guitar!! I went to a shop that was recommended by all of the other music shops I went to. This shop was great, they mainly make custom guitars. They had a few fake Gibsons etc and I could see about 2 real Ibanez. I explained my left-handedness to them (as well as I could without knowing the words for upside-down, reverse, strings, grooves etc) They told me that they could make a guitar from scratch, which would take about a month, or they could adapt one of the custom ones they’d already made. I opted for getting one adapted, as this would save time and money, and they did it all there for me, strung it up and tested it to make sure it had all worked. They were really nice too, really knew about guitars. I got a pretty decent acoustic for around $60. Its really smooth and playable, you’d never get anything this good for $60 in Australia! I think it was cheaper because it doesn’t have any branding on it. At least I also know where to go if I need repairs or have any problems with it. 

 My guitar came in handy during the blackout we had last night. And again for the second blackout this morning.

 Classes are going well this week, now that we’re past the introductory stuff I’m learning some interesting concepts and bits of information. Except for Writing, which I left after one hour because I was so bored but I’m going to drop that and find another class. Which means that I’ll be doing all immersion classes (the normal ones with Indonesian students as opposed to the language ones for foreigners). A fun challenge I hope. I have enjoyed the ones I’ve done so far. The problem (or challenge) with politics classes is that half of them is class discussion, like in tutorials. But its difficult to chip in if you’re having trouble understanding so many different accents and you loose track. Or, like in my class yesterday, everyone is discussing Malaysian internal politics, which I know nothing about. Well at least I have something to research for next week now!

Everyone’s been getting sick here. About 5 of the ACICIS students had 24 hour stomach bugs, nothing too dramatic. One of the guys is in hospital with Dengue fever, which is a bit more dramatic but hopefully he will recover quickly. 

I just ate a grilled chicken sandwich with chips. It was great! Bread, lettuce, tomato and chips - things you don’t really get here.

Today has disappeared so quickly, the time has really flown. I had a crazy afternoon at UII - Universitas Islam Indonesia, which is nearby. The story is, my pendamping (helper) sent me an sms on Thursday asking if I would come to her “event” at her university on Saturday. She said someone would pick me up from the ACICIS house on Saturday at 2.30. I asked what the event was and she said it involved music, food and games. I said that sounded like fun and I was in. So as I was walking to the ACICIS house (wondering why I had to go to the ACICIS house), I got an sms from the mystifyed Phil (the resident director of ACICIS) saying there were people waiting at his house to take me somewhere. It turns out they were knocking on his door asking where the ACICIS students were, and he told them he didn’t know because it was a Saturday, therefore the weekend! When I got to the house it turned out there were about 4 other ACICIS students who had also gotten this message and had agreed to come. So we were all taken to UII in a car belonging to one of the students. When we got there we met up with the UII students we know and they took us to a room and gave us heaps of food and watched us eat. We still had no idea what was going on, and tried to politely gauge what was going on. We eventually figured out we were going to be “sharing” with the new UII students (all classes at UII are taught in English so they like native speakers). We were then taken into a room full of first year students fresh out of high school and were placed in seats facing them, at the front of the room, with a microphone. The students then asked us questions and “interviewed” us about why we came to Indonesia, what we found hard about learning Indonesian, what Australian’s perceptions of Indonesia were and why Australia was so harmonious as a multicultural country (they didn’t know about the Cronulla riots). After this we were taken to a basketball court to play a game with the students. This game involved us and the students doing a relay in which we had to dress in traditional Javanese clothes, be smeared with makeup and wear ridiculous things. After we had each done this we had to throw tennis balls in the basket being worn by one of us. It was very bizarre. After this, and many crazy interactions with the students, we negiotiated to be taken home, at around 5.30. So yes, an incredibly random day! Apparently if we stayed until 9pm we could have seen a live band. 

So that was today’s adventure. In other news, my friend Miko came on Thursday to take my bike to the repair shop. The pedal was fixed but the repairer found that something really major between the two pedals was broken and the bike was unsafe to ride. Maybe sometime next week he will have the parts to fix it. In the meantime, Miko insisted that he ride one of his bikes for an hour to my kos so I could use it.  But in the end he wasn’t able to do this because he has injured his leg/knee in his motorbike crash. He looks a real mess, you can see where massive amounts of skin were grazed off the top of his hand and forearm. His face is also quite scraped, especially his top lip and nose and he has the remains of a bad cut on his top lip. And he’s limping badly. Despite this he’s back on his bike, after looking at the bike he took me to his work, a language teaching centre, to see if I can help teach English there. He laughed at me when I first got on the bike with him, saying “relax Emma relax, just because I had an accident doesn’t mean I can’t handle my motorbike!”

It looks like I’ll be giving a paper at the symposium on behalf of the ACICIS students. I don’t have long to put it together but it should be easy enough, with input from everyone. Phil said he’d give me a lot of help with it. He’s off to Malang for most of the week to visit students there. He’s leaving at 3am tonight to drive his motorbike there. It takes about 8 hours to get there apparently. Talk about dedication to the job! Not for everyone I don’t think…

Tomorrow I’m off to look for a guitar. I may have to get a custom one made for me, as there are no left handed guitars here, and I’ve decided that its not worth the discomfort and dissatisfaction of turning an acoustic upside down – from what I can tell I’d  have trouble getting the strings to sit in the grooves if I strung it upside down. And I don’t like mucking with the internal structure of an acoustic by doing that too. Its weird, I had been alright without a guitar and then yesterday I was struck with an overwhelming desire to play one. So now finding one is at the centre of my attention! Its weird, its like an addiction.