Life

well things have been happening. i cannot believe that its march. where has the time gone? honestly if i think about it i realize how long its been since i was at home but its all flown by like i wouldn't believe it.so yeah...crazy.

a couple weeks ago i went to a birthday party. there were 20 kids hiding in my friends room, and they all jumped out and yelled when she opened the door. she cut a cake and gave everyone a piece. when she was taking a picture with some people, they got some of the marshmallow creme frosting and rubbed in on her face and hair. they everyone started doing it and she had to go shower haha. it was really fun. all her friends were really nice to me and taught me slang. after she was clean a couple people took her outside and smashed eggs on her hair and down her back, making her need to go take another shower. one of the presents she got was the most amazing animal i have ever seen. i don't know its english name but in bahasa its called a kuskus. its...indescribable. it has tiny teeth so they feed it mashed up banana and papaya. i got to hold it and i honestly just wanted to steal it and take it home with me. it has sticky little hands and it climbed all over me so getting a picture was hard but we managed :)

yesterday we went to the airport to get my host brother and sister because they were coming home from mecca. while we were there i saw a vending machine that had beer in it for about $2. i couldn't help but imagine all the shenanigans that would ensue if that was in america...haha

everything is amazing. i don't know how i can come back from this, how i can go back to high school after this. i'm sort of dreading it. i think i'd like to just run away and be a jungle hermit. live with the animals and make a hut of sticks. that would be nice. 

sometime in april there's a trip with the afs people to bali. can't wait for that :) so until then, cheers

Magic

to say that things have changed a lot since the last time i wrote is an understatement. change happening on a foreign exchange is something that cannot be stopped from happening. the biggest change that's happened to me is that i moved host families. my first family was really nice but we never really clicked, never felt the chemistry that really is needed in a relationship. so here i am. i'm still in jakarta, though now in the south instead of the east. my new family is amazing. everyone is really nice and i like them all so much. they're really pushing me too, we never speak in english. i've been with them for almost a month and i feel like i have improved so much! the other day i answered the home phone and all went well :) i understand a lot more and speaking is getting so much better. the more i remove myself from english and try to make my thoughts in indonesian the easier everything gets. i still haven't dreamed in indonesian, but i hope i will soon. also, my new school is this huge islamic high school in jakarta. its really religious and to me seems strict, but what do i know? anyway, for uniform all girls have to wear jilbab, the headscarf, so your hair is always covered. it is one of the weirdest things i have ever experienced. i'm getting used to it now, but at first it was just uncomfortable and hot. i'm really excited about my school though. getting to see up front what an islamic school is like and trying to follow lessons and just watching the way they do it is so cool and adds such a new range of color to this year. we take a religion class, a class special for reading the qur'an, and arabic. these three are the hardest for me but some of the most interesting.

the other day a bule came to the school. he's been living in indonesia for a while, though he speaks no indonesian, and he comes to my school to give english lessons. the teachers came and got me before he came and one took me out to the road in front of the school and we bought gado-gado padang. padang food has a special reputation for its spiciness. the gado-gado was so good. and the best part about it was that we bought it from a lady who had all the food set up in the back of a van. while i was sitting there eating i just thought about how some things that just don't fly in america are totally normal here and its really amazing. i would never buy food that was made in the back of a van in america. no way. but here, why not? it made me really happy and weirdly excited. just another one of those times when i thank whatever it is that let me get sent to indonesia.

so things are great. im so happy to be here. the time since christmas has flown past, i can hardly believe it. already the halfway mark of this year has been passed. time's just never going to feel normal to me. this sounds lame but lately i've been reading a lot of blogs by exchange students. its really inspiring to me to read about their life and their challenges and seeing how they got through it and made the best of everything they could. it also makes me die of jealousy. i have always wanted to travel, and my list of places i must go to just keeps on growing. i want to do study abroad in college, and at first i had it narrowed down to just a couple countries but now i have no idea. i want to go everywhere. i want to see and experience everything. can this be accomplished in one lifetime? i don't want it to be like touristy, when you're removed from the real life of the country. this year so far has taught me that the only way to really learn about a place is to let go and dive in and remove yourself from your own world with an open mind to see the new.

indonesia is a magical place. everywhere i look i see things that take my breath away, in good ways and bad. the scenery. mosques. the explosion of life in the city. and then there's the child beggars. sick dogs and stray cats. the traffic clogged for miles polluting this beautiful city. i used to see it so separated and think that it was the people's fault. their city is polluted because its too big and there's too many people driving cars. the beggars might be for real or they could be fake, taking everything they earn back to some higher power. its not like that anymore. the flaws are what really makes it and what gives it character. and i love it all. i wouldn't trade any of it for anything in the world.

life is so good right now. i am so happy to just be alive! to be in indonesia. to speak indonesian. it comes naturally now. sometimes i do have to plan out stuff to say but for the most part it just flows. i couldn't write you an essay or anything, but i can read and speak with little difficulty. knowing the language has made things feel even better. no longer being in the dark, understanding for once what all the noise around me actually is. its still hard sometimes and i get unbelievably frustrated with myself for not saying all that i want or for not talking at all sometimes. its getting better though.

sorry this is kind of short. i will post again soon though and try to get pictures. i wanted to this time but the camera's being slow and i don't feel like dealing with it right now.
cheers

Exploring jakarta

a couple of weeks ago me and the other american exchange students and florence, a girl from belgium, met up with some friends who were going to show us a bit more of the crazy city we live in. everyone met at one mall and then came to get me at another. the day started clear but as soon as i got to the mall the sky split and it started pouring rain. they were still on their way so i rode escalators up and down for about 20 minutes while i waited for them. one of the people guiding us today came to get me, because all the others were waiting in the shelter of the busway stop. he had an umbrella but i wasn't so well equipped, so he called over a little kid to escort me. these kids are everywhere, carrying umbrellas and accompanying you until you don't need them anymore. at first it was awkward because he was so short and we were both trying to fit under the little umbrella. after a bit he handed it over to me and that was better. we could finally walk right. it was weird though. i mean in a way, to me, it felt kind of like the poor kid was my servant, holding the umbrella for me, the rich bule. theres times almost everyday when something like this happens. just some little culture bit that i'm not used to that re-underlines what exactly it was that drew me to doing foreign exchange in the first place. i just have to tell myself, if it seems weird at first, that that's just the way it is here. sometimes i think too much about what its like in america, forgetting that i am just about as far away from america as it gets.

so anyway, back to the trip. we got off the bus in the chinese district and went to a chinese hindu temple. it was so amazing. we got there at prayer time so almost all the people there were burning incense by the altars to the different deities. the air was full of swirling patterns and trails of smoke and it smelled incredible. after a while it really started to burn your eyes and by the time we left i felt like i was going to start crying (probably looked like it too) because my eyes were burning. by every altar there were offerings, fruit, flowers, cakes, and at one there was fish and chicken. All the statues of the deities were so beautiful. we all rubbed a buddha's belly for good luck as we left the temple. just as we were leaving, a muslim call to prayer rang out from the mosque. it was so cool to be there amidst the two religions. i can't believe how lucky we were to be there at that time, to hear the call to prayer after seeing the chinese hindus pray silently with incense. two religions coexisting so close to each other, creating a moment in my life i will always remember.

from there we walked through the crazy streets to a noodle house for lunch. the noodles were fantastic. they were homemade and so fresh and delicious. i will never be able to eat chinese food in america again. seriously. you guys have no idea what you're missing. after we ate we walked to a market area and saw a store full of stuff for the temples. there was a wall of incense. there were also all these paper things, like versace sandals and a louis vuitton wallet and cigarettes that you burn at the temple to send to the deceased in heaven. we saw an old man selling pork. a crazy cook pot in which there were intestines, tongue, ears, and a snout. the seller put the two halves of the snout together over and over again and it was pretty repulsive. why anyone in their right mind would want to eat a pig snout is beyond me. then we moved on to an area of mostly traditional chinese pharmacies. we watched a lady weigh out some mushrooms and saw lizards on a stick that are supposed to help with asthma. there was also a guy selling cobras. we got on public transportation and rode to kota tua, to the old city of jakarta, to go to the wayang museum.

kota tua is so cool. the buildings are all from the colonial period, such a different style from all the other buildings in the city. wayang are traditional puppets. and the museum was full of all different kinds of styles of wayang, from all over indonesia. its really cool to see how different regions design the wayang, every region is different. after we'd looked at everything in the museum we heard an ondel-ondel show going on outside so we ran out to see it. ondel-ondel are these like giant dolls that people wear and dance in. i can't describe it. look it up. anyway, the dance was really awesome but sort of eerie. its just scary to see the giant ondel-ondel moving around and then look down and see the tiny feet of the dancer inside. after the dance we went back inside the museum to buy souvenirs. the guy selling them to us was so hilarious. he told jillian she could dance like a javanese girl and that she looked like bella from new moon and that i looked like alice. then he said he was giving us a student discount because he loved americans (and said florence looked american so she counted) so everything was Rp. 10.000, or 1 dollar. he then told us he used to have an american girlfriend who was like 1 meter 60 or something, i can't remember what exactly but the girl must have been a giant, and she studied batik and since jillian was wearing batik and i guess somehow looked like his girlfriend (?) he gave her a free ondel-ondel figurine. then, so the rest of us wouldn't be jealous, he gave us free bookmarks and a hug. he kept saying he loved america and hitting on jillian and by the time we finally got out of there me and jillian were laughing so hard i think we were near tears. we got out just in time to see the last bit of a traditional betawi dance, which was absolutely incredible. we got back on the busway and rode to the national museum.

at first all around there were pieces of ruins from temples which were so beautiful and amazing. it amazes me how much people are able to create, changing a rock to a statue so incredible you can't believe that it was made by humans. we went to a huge room that had stuff starting from tribal in papua going to just about every island. There was traditional daggers, pottery, jewelry, costumes, really everything imaginable. indonesia is so rich and varied in cultures i can't believe it. for representation of some of the cannibalistic tribes there were weapons and jewelry with bones. one necklace had a jaw bone on it. we wandered around some more and then got into 2 taxis to go to grand indonesia. ending the day where it started. we got dinner and then our guides left, setting the bules loose in the mall. we ran up a down escalator and found the small amusement park. me josh and omar rode the rocket ride and the merry go round. probably the oldest people there, easily having the most fun. it was a really incredible day.

so far december has been relaxing. i haven't been going to much school because for a week they were doing exams so i didn't go at all and then there have just been days off every now and then. on tuesday actually me and my friends skipped school to go see a movie. not much is going on though, because our break starts on the 18, so when we go to school we just sit in the classroom and hang out. there are no classes. i haven't seen any of my teachers in weeks. all i can say is, if this was america, no students would be there. i don't know why anyone bothers to come here, but they do. i really cannot believe that already its almost christmas. has this year just flown by? its been 4 months. four amazing, confusing, but absolutely wonderful months. why is it that normal years take forever to pass but this one, the year that i wish would never end, is going by faster than i can comprehend? i guess that's just the way life is. i love it here, if that wasn't made completely obvious by the last couple sentences then here it is. i have only started to love it more since the language barrier started to lift. still not perfect, but worlds better than i was.
that's all for now. cheers

Thanksgiving and Idul Adha

first off SORRY it has been forever. a lot has been going on this month, mostly just school. almost everyday after it ends me and my friends go and buy food from the street vendors or take angkot to a nearby mall to walk around or maybe see a movie. its really great. my bahasa has improved SO MUCH. i still can't say a lot, but i understand almost everything. so now when i'm with people we talk a mix, bahasa every word i can but when i get stuck i say it in english and they teach me the right word. everyday i learn more, even though i usually forget about half of it by the next day.

thanksgiving was amazing. i was pretty homesick, just thinking about family all day and about the traditions we have that i never thought twice about. the us embassy arranged for all of the YES kids to be carted off to the houses of embassy workers to have a thanksgiving feast. i took a taxi to meet the father of my dinner family at a hotel in central jakarta. it was a bit awkward at first, we didn't really know what to say to each other, but it got better. the family was really nice. i think both the parents were korean-american, and they had one son who stayed pretty quiet the whole time. it was hard to have much of a conversation since we were all stuffing our faces with delicious delicious food. needless to say i ate like an animal. i can't begin to express how grateful i am to this family for opening their home to me. normally on thanksgiving, all i think of is seeing my cousins and eating more than is humanly healthy. but this year (this is really cliche..) i really felt so thankful. for everything. to be in indonesia this year. that i got the YES scholarship in the first place. to everyone in indonesia who has helped me so much so far. thankful for family, for the bottomless support and love they always give. never in my life have i thought this much about being grateful. i never really had to. it was all right there, and i never even really thought about it that much. but here, so removed from it all, and it really hit me how many wonderful and incredible things and people i have in my life. all night there was nonstop praying sounding from the mosques, because idul adha was the next day.

we had to get up early on friday to go to my host-grandma's house. when everyone got there we spread some carpets out on the floor and all sat and listened to a man lead prayers. it was so cool. i love the way arabic sounds. after the prayer there was a sort of train where everyone went around and kissed everyone else's hands to show forgiveness. when you got to the end of the train you'd sit by the last person and everyone else who came through would kiss your hand and join the line. then we feasted. instead of regular rice we had ketupat, which is a kind of sticky rice that's cooked in little cones wrapped in a pouch of woven palm leaves and boiled. to go over this there was some really good curry like soup with pumpkin. after a while there we left to the other grandma's house for a little while and chatted, then it was back to the house for a little while. after maybe an hour, we left again with a bunch of cousins and went to a bazaar. we shopped for a few hours, ate, and shopped some more. after a while we split up and i went with diandra and her group to blok m to buy cheap pirated dvds, among other things. these ones were cheaper than the ones i got in yogya, i think they were 6o or 70 cents. i love it. after we got dvds we walked around looking at all the pirated, cheap, and knockoff things. i saw an ipod mini for sale. sometime around 6 we drove to another mall and saw a man walking around in a a bright pink suit shirt, bright pink shorts, a long bright pink coat, bright pink cowboy boots, and a brown cowboy hat. it was the funniest thing i have ever seen. i was desperate to take a picture of him but there was no way i could sneak one without being totally rude. then dennie and dewi came and took us to yet another mall, where we met up with some family and ate chinese food. in this mall there was a huge christmas display with spongebob and patrick and the pineapple house and we all got pictures taken by it. they were playing lots of christmas music and it made me kind of homesick and sad. this christmas is going to definitely be one i never forget. i can't imagine christmas without snow. ahh its weird to think about! after a long day of nonstop shopping, we came home and i slept like a rock.

i had to get up early for school on saturday. lucky me. for some reason all of the desks had been taken out of our classroom, so we sat on the floor and talked until it was time to go do the morning run. i think they shortened it today, because it went by a lot faster than it normally does. so we were sitting back in the classroom lounging on the floor and my friends, who were out in the hall, got really excited and called me out to them. they had just killed one of the 4 adorable saggy cows that i walked past not too long ago. let me back up. idul adha is a holiday where goats and cows are sacrificed to symbolize abraham being willing to sacrifice his own son but instead killing a goat when god's angel stopped him. the animals are killed halal, similar to jewish kosher for those of you who know it, its just meant to be more humane. after they are killed, the animals are cut up and the meat is donated to the poor, who have no meat. i think just about every school had this happen on saturday. well i was in total shock. i told my friends i didn't want to watch but at the same time, i couldn't look away. luckily more people started to gather and my friend lady was standing just enough in front of me that i couldn't see the first awful moment when the cow's throat was cut. basically this is how it went: our religion teacher was singing prayers into a microphone. some men, who i guess came with the cows, would take the cow and somehow harness it with a rope and at the right moment cut the throat. it was so terrible, sometimes the cows would struggle and try to get away so one of the men would go grab its tail and the kids standing on the basketball court were laughing. the cut never fully killed the cow. it would lay there, in what i'm sure was unimaginable pain, almost but not quite decapitated (sorry this gets pretty graphic) just waiting for it all to end. they'd blink and kick their legs. blood was everywhere. after the poor animal finally died, one man would grab its head and another would grab its tail and they'd drag it off, leaving a nice trail of blood, to go finish decapitating it. then they'd spray the blood away and it would be the next cow's turn. they were scared. you could tell they knew what was happening and they were scared. i know this is so much more humane than a slaughterhouse but frankly, there is no humane way to kill something. nothing about the act of killing, no matter the creature, is humane. while it was horrifying and sad, i'm glad i watched. i learned A LOT. my views of meat have forever changed. never again will i look at it the same way, now that i've seen what its really like. the cows i watched were lucky in the sense that it was lightyears better than a slaughterhouse death and they were actually fully dead before all the cutting began. but i watched a cow die. i watched its last minutes, saw the life fade from its big eyes. you can't come back from that. after the executions we went back to class like nothing happened while outside the students in osis, kind of like rotc, helped skin and cut up the cows. so glad i'm not in osis. i'm sorry. this is an extremely opinionated story. maybe if i wasn't already vegetarian, i would have seen it all differently. and i know its religious. its just...shocking. suddenly all the cows and goats that have been lining the streets for weeks are gone, and i know just where they went. but it was a really cool experience, and like just about everything else here, i will never ever forget it. i will also most likely never ever eat beef again.

so that was the holidays for now. i'm really curious to see what christmas is going to be like. i still love it here. its full into the rainy season now, which is so beautiful. almost everyday it rains. and when i say rains, i mean full out storms. usually its so hard the things in the distance are faded and blurred, i think of it as indonesia's version of a blizzard. and there's always thunder that sounds like a gunshot and lightning that, at night time, makes the entire sky light up. i love it. rain is already magical, but this is the most magical rain i have ever seen. overall things are great. again i'm so sorry for the huge gap in posts. this month i will try to post once every week or two. i really wish my friends and family could be here and see what i'm seeing. indonesia is such an amazing country. i can't imagine spending this crazy year anywhere else in the world. i love it with my entire soul.

Ants in my pants and confused faces

alright so first thing's first, school is exhausting. i like it, the kids are all really nice and most of the teachers are too, but just the strain of sitting there everyday and listening so hard to everything that's said, trying to make some sense of it, it really wears me out sometimes. today was awful because the power shut off halfway through our first class and did not ever come back, so the whole day i was so sweaty and hot. one of my friends let me borrow her fan, for the last half hour of school. oh well. i feel like i'm doing really well in school. i mean aside from the fact that my lowest grade is in english because the teacher grades me harder than everyone else, everything's going well. i'm starting to understand a lot more. my speaking is still painfully limited, but i'm working on it. so where i sit in class is right next to a wall where a constant string of ants is moving, i don't know where they come from and where they end, but they're always there and usually we scoot the desks away from the wall so if we sit back the ants won't crawl on us. a couple days ago my desk was a lot closer to the wall then i realized and my friend olive told me to move, but i didn't want to do i said i'd be ok. oh man i was wrong. that day after i came back from school i had 13 ant bites all over my legs and 5 on my arms. i didn't even notice they were there! ahh i hate ants. it seems like the ants in america are usually tame, and they don't bite unless they feel especially vicious that day, but here they're just malevolent beasts. any time you find an ant on you, chances are its already bitten you at least once, and all its friends are on their way to bite you too.

i'm finally feeling the full swing of life here. for the most part i haven't been missing school for whatever reason and i dunno, just getting used to how it all flows. i still have the social skills of a peanut, but i'm working on that too. two months has really flown by, but at the same time taken so long i can hardly believe it. do i seriously only have 8 months left here?! that can't be! there's so much i still want to do and so much i have to see and learn, can i possibly fit all that into 8 short months? i better be able to.

a couple weeks ago all the YES kids went to yogya for a big YES alumni conference there for 3 days. it was so much fun! me omar and jillian took the train, which was really exciting. in my head i saw it more as the hogwarts express, but in reality it was just a regular old train. it was really fun to catch up and see each other again. there were a lot of sessions in yogya, mostly all for the real YES alumni, so we only had to go to some, giving us lots of free time. one day we went to a big traditional market and it was so cool. its so weird to me that i bought so much stuff and in the end it all cost me about $15. also one night we went and did karaoke, which was hilarious. i took some videos, and if i can figure out how i'll put them on facebook sooner or later.

so now on to the rest of my title. one thing i think all foreign exchange students have in common is the want to find ways out of doing stuff. even if the alternative is just sitting at home all day, nothing beats the satisfaction that you found a way out of doing something maybe you weren't too keen on doing. the biggest thing i find myself doing is pretending like i don't understand what people want. this only happens in school though. a lot of the time my friends will ask me to give my opinion of one of the kids sitting right next to me or a teacher will want me to just write something simple about the topic they teach instead of taking the quiz with all the other kids, and i don't know what to say or just feel too plain lazy to do it, i make my confused face. mostly it consists of me looking like i'm trying to understand what they want and looking back and forth, from person to person or from person to paper, trying to draw some connection between them. or i just furrow my brow and try to look like i'm very deep in thought, and i can't seem to figure out what they want from me. it works like a charm. i fully intend on using it up to the point when its just plain ridiculous that i can't understand what they want. this means i probably only have a month or two left. because if not sooner, i know that by christmas i'm going to know and understand everything. i'm trying to make it sooner though, because nothing frustrates me more than not being able to speak or understand everything. at this point, i understand 50% of what is said. which i think is good progress, i mean i didn't exactly try as hard as i should have to learn bahasa before i got here, so if you think about coming to a place with only the very most basic knowledge, i'm proud of myself. but i know i can try harder, so i'm going to.

knowing that where i come from the seasons are changing and seeing the same sunny sky or rain storm everyday instead of the colorful leaves and the brisk temperature is so strange. its weird to live in a place with no seasons. i mean there is the rainy season and the dry season here, but other than more frequent rainstorms you can't tell the difference between them. i miss seasons. the feeling, the sights, the smell. its something you never think about until its gone. that seems to happen a lot, i suddenly find some small thing that i didn't think twice about in america and here it seems so monumental, so huge i can't believe i ever took it for granted. i'm curious to see what ends up happening during the holiday season here. i know that the us embassy is setting something up for the YES kids for thanksgiving, but other than that the rest seems up to fate. hopefully, if our ramshackle plans work out, the YES kids will be able to hang out on halloween. i wish desperately that we could go trick or treating, but i dunno, kind of seems like that wouldn't fly too well for some reason ;)
until later, cheers