Japan Joins the Fun

     About a week ago, a group of Rotaract members from Japan came to visit Yogyakarta for a weekend. To start, for those of you who don't know about Rotaract, it is a division of Rotary from university students and young professionals. Having people usually between the ages of 20-30, the structure and goals are generally the same as Rotary clubs and all have a parent club. There are three Rotaract clubs in Jogja and they hosted the Japanese guests together, taking them to Borobudor and Prambanan Temples and I, along with three other exchange students, got to tag along.

     I couldn't make it to Borobudur in the morning because I have school on Saturdays (real fun, I know), but I met them at Prambanan in the afternoon, which was my first time being there. Needless to say, the temple was spectacular in every way, especially since we were lucky enough to be there during sunset, making for some mediocre pictures due to poor lighting, but some amazing views such as these:

 One of the side towers, I never got a good shot of the whole temple complex but it consists of a large central tower and several smaller ones around it. The central tower is in the foreground.

 Probably my best shot of everything, you can see the large tower on the left with a few of the others on the right.

 With the sun setting, the eastern towers were lit up beautifully.

My camera definitely couldn't do justice to the silhouette of the temple as we were leaving.

     The central tower is surrounded by a fence and you need to get a helmet in order to go in because rocks because loose after the earthquake in 2007(?) and apparently fall off from time to time. Other than that though, the temple is incredibly well preserved. Some of the carvings are replacements but the vast majority are not. The carvings depict the entire Ramayana, which is a Hindu epic poem that explains the duties of relationships and outlines the ideal father, ideal brother, ideal servant, ideal wife, etc. If you don't know a lot about Hindu epics, there are two of them: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These are as close to holy texts as Hinduism gets, not having a single book like the Bible or the Quar'an, because they were written by Hindu sages sometime in the 5th or 4th century BCE. Its something like 24,000 verses so there was a lot of carving to be done. Here are some of my favorites:

 I am in no way qualified to speak about just what these steles are off, but based off my limited knowledge of the Ramayana and the prominence of this figure, I'm pretty sure this is one of Rama, one of the avatars of the main Hindu god Vishnu

 Again, not a scholar, but this is probably Rama (just left of center) again seated with his wife Sita (just right of center) who will go on to be abducted Ravan, king of Lanka.

 Can't really speak for this one, just looks really amazing.

Extremely unsure about this one as the central figure doesn't resemble other depictions of Rama at the temple. Maybe this is Ravan, but I can't be certain in any way.

     After visiting Prambanan, we had a pretty fancy dinner with all the Japanese Rotaract members, Rotaracters from Jogja, as well as several Rotarians from Jogja. We got to chat with some of the people from Japan and later on in the night, we from Indonesia performed a very popular little dance that I can't recall the name of but think of it as the Gagnam Style of Indonesia, which was followed by a dance from Japan by all of the men from Japan and then another from all of the women. Lesson from that night: Asian people can't really dance, but they definitely try harder than anyone else I know.

     The next day, Sunday, we met them for lunch, snagged a bunch of pictures (none of which I actually have because my camera was dead from the day before, plenty are on Facebook though if you check out "Pictures of Jason" which are ones that I'm tagged in), then saw them off at the airport. From there, we exchange students took a bus into the city since it only costs 3,000Rp (about 30 cents) as opposed to a taxi which is 100,000Rp (about $10). It took roughly forever because there were so many people at the bus stop by the airport and the bus system just isn't very good. And then of course once we arrived in Malioboro, it began to rain.

     A few weeks ago marked the start of the rainy season here in Indonesia. It includes more clouds, slightly lower temperatures, a reduction in dust due to the rain, and daily torrential downpours. At least once a day - sometimes twice, sometimes four times - the skies become dark, a very slight drizzle commences which can last for ten minutes or for thirty seconds, then the sky unleash absolute furry. There is no in between, it is either barely noticeable or you feel like a flood is about to take place.

     As I write, it is downpouring, and has been for around and hour now. Sometimes the rain lasts for ten minutes, sometimes it will start at 6pm and still be raining as you go to sleep at 10pm. As far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or reason to this weather other than the inevitability that it will rain at some point today, so I suppose in some ways I never left Wisconsin.

I'm currently lacking the creativity to make a funny title

     Two weeks ago, November 15th, was the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha (pronounced "eed all-odd-hey") which translates to "Festival of the Sacrifice". It is a celebration of Abraham's faith and willingness to sacrifice his own son by God's command which wasn't carried through (also by God's command, God wasn't actually trying to get Abraham to kill his son it was a test of faith) and a goat and cow were sacrificed instead. All over the world, Muslims everywhere sacrifice cows and goats in a traditional fashion. They animals are then butchered and half of the meat is to be given to the poor while the other half is to be prepared for a feast with family and friends. Not everyone buys an animal to be sacrificed, but it is common for a group of individuals to pool their money and then share the meat afterwards.

     I went to a rather large Mosque near Kraton with another exchange student, Samantha, and a couple of my friends from school to see the sacrifices. We showed up a bit late so all of the goats were already finished but there were still about ten of the twelve cows remaining. The sacrifices went something like this: the cow had some ropes wrapped around it while it was still standing, most were decently calm but a few seemed to know what was up and were pacing and mooing like crazy; the cows were then toppled over and hog tied so that their movement was almost completely restricted except for their heads; after about five to ten minutes of tightening ropes and assuring that the eight or so men had a handle on the cow, a shallow wooden box about three feet by a foot and a half was placed under the cow's neck to collect the blood and the cow's throat was slit.

     The amount of blood contained in a cow is, needless to say, a lot. even after the cow was dead, usually a minute or two, and the involuntary muscle spasms ended, about five minutes after cutting, the blood would still be flowing for a total of eight minutes or so. After the blood finished draining and the men moved on to another cow, a new group of men would come and behead the cow, skin it, and butcher it in large pieces to be taken over to the women working to more appropriately butcher the meat to be divided amongst those who bought the animal. We stuck around to watch about three of the sacrifices before the smell of blood became a bit too oppressive.

    I have a lot of pictures and a couple videos of the actual sacrificing itself but I don't want to put them up because they are pretty graphic to say the least. If you are curious and want to see pictures and/or video, shoot me a message on facebook and I'll share that with you.

     That same week, I finally changed classes. I had spent my first month and and half with an animation class and now I'm with a textile class. It's been pretty great to learn about the batik making process which isn't so much a difficult process as it is one that is extremely tedious and requires a steady hand (which I really don't have). I'll get some pictures up once I have some finished pieces; I'm still working on my first article, a foot and a half square bandana.

     The most interesting part of my new class, however, isn't the Praktek (that's what all of the shop or trades classes are referred to as) but rather the Theory classes (all of the academic classes). I'm in class three, which is the 12th grade but the third of three in high school, and was in class three also in animation. But the math I was learning in my animation class was integral calculus while my textile class appears to be only on algebra. The English in my textile class appears to be further along than animation which has lead me to believe that curriculum is either flexible, determined entirely by the teacher, or simply nonexistant, all of which are equally possible.

     Last, starting last Friday until Monday was the Inbound Orientation for District 3410. There, 33 exchange students from 16 different countries met and had some pretty sweet excursions. The Jogja students flew into Jakarta where we met the three students from Bandar Lampung and we began the bus ride to Bandung picking up groups of students along the way. When we were all on the bus, we passed around a mic and introduced ourselves in Indonesian. Of course, everybody was still carrying on conversations during this process because we were all so excited, so when I announced "Nama saya Jason dari Amerika", someone misheard me and replied "wait what? Your name is Jesus?". I was referred to as Jesus for the rest of the weekend, including many puns about my father, jokes about walking on water (we stayed at a camp with natural hot springs), and I was even doing a team blessing before paintball.

     Our first stop in Bandung was Trans Studio, the second largest indoor theme park in the world. To get an idea, there was an entire water raft ride contained entirely inside. They also had a parade right before we left, complete with a few different Indonesian cartoon characters, a Poseiden looking man, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Sparrow-esque pirate and crew, and scores more people dressed in various western themes. Sadly I don't have pictures myself but our chaperones took a ton so hopefully I snag theirs off facebook soon.

     After that we headed to the camp which actually was a camp, more or less. We stayed in tents (which we think were left over from tsunami relief years ago because they had the Islamic crescent and star beside a red cross leading us to believe they were donated by an Islamic humanitarian group) but they were on platforms which included a patio area and each tent had its own shower and western toilet. There was a lack of hot water, which was sort of terrible because we were up in the mountains south of Bandung and it would get as cold as 15 Celsius, or the extremely chilly 60 Fahrenheit; but after being used to 30 Celsius every day, 15 is quite a shock.

     The first day, we visited a tea plantation which was humongous and absolutely stunning. We could see for miles in every direction where more and more mountains and foothills were lying, and everywhere was lush and green. The air was the cleanest I have yet tasted in Indonesia and that was a beautiful relief from the constant smell of city here in Yogyakarta. When we were taking group pictures, Marin from New Hampshire and I spotted a worker and we snapped some pictures and watched as he harvested the tea leaves with nothing more than some garden shears and a big bag on his back.

     We also delivered our speeches as we sipped tea from the plantation here. Everyone had to deliver a speech, some told of their experiences so far, others something that has really surprised them, myself and some of the Jogja students talked about culture shock at the advice of Mas Gabe, a Rotarian and Rotex who is more or less in charge of the YEP program for all of Jogja. We are all at different levels of Indonesian, but everyone was definitely able to introduce themselves and get a few points across, so we are all on our way at least. They gave out awards for the top six speeches and three of the awards went to Jogja students: myself in fourth, Samantha in third, and Romane in second. Joao from Brazil who is living in Jakarta won overall. We like to credit our success to our week-long city orientation which helped us to both learn Indonesian and be comfortable and confident with each other and Indonesia as a whole.

     We also had a small group of professional actors and dancers come in and worked with us to right a very simple script which we then performed based off four traditional stories from different locations in Indonesia. Our lead, Kyla, won the award for best actress so we were all pretty proud of what we were able to slap together in only a couple hours.

     There were tons of more events that were great just to get to relax and enjoy each other, but being able to chat about our experiences so far and our lives back in our home countries was by far the best part of the whole camp. Over three nights, I slept a total of seven hours, and it was totally worth it. Now that we have all connected, I don't think it will be long before many of us will be trying to visit new places in Indonesia to check out all of the great things people had to say about their cities.

     I'm sorry I can't post any pictures right now, every time I try blogger crashes on me so I'll have to make a second post when the servers calm down. Stay tuned!

Selamat Ulang Tahun Yogyakarta!

     Yesterday, September 6th, was the city of Yogyakarta's birthday. How the people of Yogyakarta decided that this day is the official day of it's founding and just what constitutes that founding 276 years ago despite there being people here for centuries I never really found out. But nonetheless, September 6th is the day, and with it comes a few things.

     That night, Malioboro was closed to traffic and all street vendors (not food vendors, just the people selling knock-off goods and various cheap wares) leaving the places more open and subsequently filled with people. There were also a couple of stages set up however I only saw one band performing on one stage. I don't actually know why there were three except that one of them was used by XL, a wireless provider, and there a bunch of schools did this dance contest of sorts, mine included.

     First, every school was dressed how they saw fit. SMK 1 wore their gym class uniforms with crazy straw hats for example. My school made masks out of boxes that we painted, and then a bunch of people painted themselves white, pretty much just because they could. We looked a little something like this:

This is Gambit (not his real name but I honestly only know his nickname) who is probably the most ridiculous kid in my class.

SMK 1 standing beside us in their garb.

My class gathering in a circle for out chant.

     Once your school was up, you had to do your chant. I'm still not really sure why but everybody was pretty pumped up so there was a whole lot of energy which made it pretty cool.After that, you all faced the stage and performed maybe 40 seconds of this dance that we learned at school earlier in the week. After every school had gone through, each school went a second time, but instead of doing the dance we had all learned, each school performed their own variation of it. I, unfortunately, had missed this little lesson, so I learned the dance about five minutes before doing it. Needless to say, things went mediocre for me. In the end, I don't know who won because I couldn't understand anything the MCs were saying, but I'm about 99% sure it wasn't us.

     After the contest, I had to go get a shirt for the next day (will explain this in a moment) on the South end of Malioboro and then forced myself, along with some friends and other exchange students, through an exceedingly thick crowd to get my bike to finally get home. We finished dancing at about 8:30 and I wasn't leaving Malioboro until 9:35, so the crowds were pretty thick. Despite the crowds, though, we still managed to take a picture with the becok and horse carriage drivers:

     The next day at school, everyone wore various traditional clothes (that's where the shirt I needed to borrow comes in). My particular class wore the clothing of traditional Javanese farmers, so nothing too fancy:

Getting dressed at one of my classmate's homes who lives close to school.

     Other classes were dressed differently, most wore more wealthy clothing and they showed off a few different styles. What is most interesting, however, is that almost all traditional clothing from the area (and I think Indonesia at large, but I can't say for certain) mixes very old local styles with Dutch clothing. Typically, men would wear a 19th century Dutch military-style jacket and a jerek, or traditional Javanese skirt for men. Women would also wear a jerek (although it may have a different name for girls even though it seems the same) and then have a pretty ornate blouse of some kind. This half and half combination is found pretty much everywhere, especially among members of the royal family of Yogyakarta. That's right, Special Province Yogyakarta is still ruled by a sultan as its governor. How sweet is that? Here are a couple examples of fancier clothing traditional to Jogja:

     We didn't actually have any school that day, we just came all dressed up, walked about, hung out for a bit, then went to a classmate's house to eat. Nothing is more Indonesian feeling than eating a chicken and a huge pile of rice with your hands, on the floor, with about 30 people.

Bule on a Bicycle

     Starting this past week I have begun biking about the city of Yogyakarta and it has been wonderful. I bike the 4 or so kilometers to and from school everyday, which is pretty darn short, but usually takes about twenty minutes because: a) it's always hot so nobody rides a bike very fast except at night otherwise you will sweat profusely, and b) the traffic here is crazy which makes going anywhere a bit difficult.

     Speaking of traffic, I'd like to attempt to make you understand what I mean when I say "traffic here is crazy". First off, lanes are suggestions. Actually, lanes aren't even suggestions, they are just lines painted on the ground for the amusement of the government. Anybody can drive anywhere at any time. This includes using turn lanes to go straight, not having turn lanes to pull u-turns causing traffic to back up, and the "bike lane" existing simply as another car lane. Additionally, the motor (a term used for pretty much any two-wheeled vehicle with a motor, be it true motorcycle, scooter, moped, etc) to car ratio is about 5 to 1. Even fewer rules apply for motor and they freely whiz about, weaving between cars and slower motor drivers. Right of way as we know it does not exist. Pretty much whoever is going fastest and is most aggressive gets the go ahead. This is particularly true when pulling out onto roads, pulling u-turns, and backing out of parking. You just slowly creep forward until you block the entire lane forcing any oncoming traffic to stop, allowing you a chance to get out.

     Parking is another fun aspect of life her. There are rarely parking lots and the streets are by no means wide enough for a parking lane. Usually in front of all shops there is just a slab of cement that you pull into or sort of parallel park in so that at least you aren't in the middle of the road. Because the cost of labor is so cheap here, pretty much every place, be it a restaurant or a perfume shop, has a parking attendant. These guys helps you park as close together as possible and then yell at oncoming traffic, sometimes they even have whistles, to get them to stop and let you out. They also collect the 2000rp it costs to park a car or 1000rp it costs to park motor anywhere in the city. The price is standard for every parking space except at special events. By the way, 2000rp is only about 20 cents.

     Getting back to riding bicycles, I have also ridden down to Molioboro, which is the main shopping and tourist visiting street here in Jogja, which is only 15 minutes or so away. The best, however, is the Jogja Last Friday Ride. For the last Friday of every month, teenagers from all over the city gather at the stadium near the center of the city and go for an hour long bike ride. I'm talking hundreds of people with all different types of bikes, including these crazy 6ft tall bikes that everyone here seems to own, riding in a mob that occupies half the street they're on. This last Friday, a couple of my friends from school took Samantha from Brazil, Romane from Belgium, and I along for the Jalafara (Jogja Last Friday Ride). Sadly I did not snap any pictures because I forgot my camera, but I plan on going again next month so I'll try to remember then.

     As for the term "bule" which is something along the lines of the Spanish term "gringo" but a bit more endearing. It's used specifically for white foreigners I believe, but I'm actually not positive on that one. Sometimes when I'm with my family or friends, I can tell when a stranger is asking about me because they will usually refer to me as bule. I can't understand what they are saying about me, but at least I know it's about me.

     That's all for now, I'm just about to leave to visit Kraton, the Sultan of Jogja's palace, so expect a post about that soon-ish. Cheers.

It's been a while, let's have a chat

Alright, so first off I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up with this in the slightest. As of tomorrow I will have been in Yogyakarta for a month and I've only done one post since arriving. I've been exceedingly busy doing things that, quite frankly, I'd rather be doing than sitting at home on my computer. So here I'll just be posting some highlights of my first month. Maybe I'll dive into some cultural aspects along the way, we'll see.

One of the first events that I took part in was a part of this thing called "Hash". Now I've seen some banners that refer to it as the "Hash House Harriers" but I've done no research and still don't fully understand it. Regardless, it is essentially just a bunch of people who go on short hikes, 4-7 kilometers depending on how adventurous you are feeling, and then eat soto (asian style soup, as opposed to sop which is western style soup) with bakso (essentially meatballs but, well not exactly meatballs. I think they're made with chicken, which is why I think the have a texture akin to chicken sausage, but it's rather hard to explain) once you return. It's not like a group hike, everyone comes and goes as they please, but its organized as a group. Well, at least the first two to Merapi, the rather active volcano just to the north of the city, were like this:

 Pretty much all of the fertile parts of Merapi look like this due to the nutrient rich soil. Lush vegetation would be a bit of an understatement.

There are small roads up and down the mountain and plenty of people living both in the foothills (like this picture) and further up. Most of the people immediately around the volcano are taking advantage of the fertile soil and are farmers.

A week or so later, however, my host family took me as well as Samantha from Brazil, who is being hosted by the same Rotary Club here, to the Pan-Indo Hash. Apparently these Hashes take place all over Indonesia (possibly even many parts of the world, that was hinted at but never made clear) and once a year there is a single Hash in a single location in Indonesia and this year it happened to be right here in Jogja. For four days straight, right after school, we would go to some location and this time everybody was walking together; roughly 2000 people, sometimes wear the same clothes, sometimes not, walking beautiful routes right here in Yogyakarta:

 The first walk was down Molioboro, which is like the Champs Elysees of Jogja. There are an absurd number of shops, tons of street food vendors, and its full of tourists. Except on this day, there were too many Indonesians wearing red for tourists to get by.

Did I mention there were elephants walking down the streets with us?  Because there were. Samantha and I walked with these two for the second half and chatted with one of the zookeepers who works at the local zoo where these elephants are from.

 This photo doesn't do a sliver of justice to the awesome reservoir we started beside. We then walked across the dam and the through some of the hills further downstream.

 In addition to walking amongst hills we crossed a river that had only bamboo poles lashed together to form a bridge. It was shaky and bowed in the middle as anyone crossed it but we didn't see anyone fall in so I suppose it works just fine.

 The third day was at Ratu Boko temple, which is a rather old (think built in the 8th century) Hindu temple that is right next door to the better known Prambanan Hindu temple seen in the distance, slightly right of center.

This is the entranceway to the temple sight. It is actually a pretty large facility because it was also a bath house specifically for women. Most of the pools are still around even though most of the actual temple is gone.

 This is looking north of Parangtritis beach. The cliffs are pretty much gorgeous.

This is the beach itself. The waves are incredibly active and the sand is very fine and black. The whole place is absolutely beautiful and I can't wait to visit other beaches here in Jogja.

Since arriving, I've also had the opportunity to go to a couple of parties. The first was a birthday party for the daughter of a friend of the third host-mom. When I heard birthday party I thought, alright, sweet, a chance to meet some people and maybe other teenagers. Well I was right, but what I didn't know is that in Indonesia they have sweet seventeens, and this was a mighty sweet one. It was on the top floor of a very nice hotel owned by yet another friend of my third host-mom. There were fancy bartenders, the kind who flip around the shakers more than they actually make drinks but it looks really cool so no one complains about the fact that it took him six minutes to make a rum and coke; an absurd quantity of food that was all very delicious; a live band who almost exclusively played American pop music, American music is sort of a big deal here in general and usually I'll hear more English than Indonesian on the radio; and fireworks towards the end. The whole thing was pretty impressive.

The second event was a wedding reception which must have had at least five hundred guests and may have actually been a couple hundred more than that; the space was so huge it was hard to tell. The food was served at a series of stands, basically a cross between tapas style and a buffet. Of course everything was delicious, as pretty much everything here is, and there was more than enough for everyone.

Last week I had a bit of a change of pace and I attended the city-wide orientation for Yogyakarta. There are seven exchange students, including myself, in the city. For a week we studied Indonesian, learned more about Indonesia and Jogja, and just had fun. Most of the orientation was conducted by Rotex, former exchange students who all live in Jogja now and range from exchanging last year to exchange in 1997-98. There was also one guy, Max, who happened to be both a Rotex and a form inbound to Jogja. He exchanged to Indonesia two years ago, returned to Germany for a year, but decided that he'd rather go to university in Indonesia, so he returned and is in his second year now. Every day after several hours sitting in a room with copious amounts of snacks (if food isn't an obvious theme yet then it should be, I have never been this well-fed, particularly against my will), the exchange students, Rotex, and few Rotarians would go and do something such as:

Go swimming at Pak Candra's house, a Rotarian and all around nice man (fyi, Pak is not part of his name, the terms Pak and Bu, short for Bapak and Ibu which literally mean Father and Mother, are used in roughly the same manner as Mr. and Mrs.)

Go paintballing because it only cost $6 with everything you see here! And it's entertaining to try to communicate battle strategies when not everybody can fluently speak a single language.

Go to the local zoo and see some pretty sweet animals, including the native Komodo Dragon.

Celebrate the Chinese Mooncake Festival. I'll take advantage of this lineup to name the other exchange students I'll be seeing off and on throughout my stay here. From the left: Samantha from Brazil, Angelica from Columbia, Roman from Belgium, myself in a batik shirt from my host-family, Amy from Canada, Jiang-Wei (goes by James) from Taiwan, and Hideto from Japan.

To end it all we had a closing ceremony/party that was also a speech contest. Every day at the end of our Indonesian lesson, we had to write a short, four to eight sentence speech that was then filmed and would be watched the next day. So to cap it all off we had to write a two to three minute speech and present it to all of the host-parents, Rotex, and several Rotarians.

Another lineup with appropriate flags. Except James who managed to forget his.

I took second in the speech contest behind Romane and followed by Samanth. There were tons of host-parents there so there were tons of cameras, thus we all are looking in different directions, particularly away from this one.

Most recently, yesterday in fact, I visited Merapi once more and Borobudur. At Merapi this time around, I took a jeep tour through what used to be a riverbed, but following the eruption in 2006 is a barren ash valley. Before the eruption there were several rivers that led down the mountain; today there still are but in different locations than before. When the volcano erupted and the lava began flowing, it tended to follow the paths that were already laid out for it in the form of rivers. With the water being replaced but lava, the water was forced to redirect, creating the rivers that exist today. after the lava cooled, the riverbeds were nothing more than rock and ash. Today that ash is essentially mined and mixed with of dirt to create nutrient rich soil for farming. Here are some awesome pictures of all of that:

 Merapi in all its glory, although seriously this doesn't do the thing justice. Also, that is just a conveniently placed cloud, not smoking rising from the top of the volcano.

 Driving through a riverbed composed of ash.

 This is a bunker with Merapi in the background. The bunker was designed to protect those who could not escape the mountain fast enough but could get there from ash. Unfortunately for the three men who holed up in the during the 2010 eruption, it was not designed to protect from lava and the three were basically cooked inside. Morbid, but historically important. Also the people of Jogja are pretty superstitious and no one else in my group would actually go inside the bunker because ghosts remain there.

 The jeep that took us around along with some of my classmates who I went with.

Some burned out remains of homes.

After the merapi tour we went to Borodudur which is the largest Buddhist temple outside of India. Rather than bothering to describe how immense and beautiful it is, here are pictures:

 The approach from the East side

 A portion of one of about 600 reliefs, this one depicts Siddhartha Gautama attaining enlightenment.

 The view to the South. Pretty much every direction looked like this though, the entire surrounding area was gorgeous cliffs and expansive farmland.

 One of a couple hundred statues. Most no longer have their heads and all are in slightly different positions.

The statues on the top two tiers encased in cage-like stone structures. This temple was a sight for pilgrimage and you are supposed to climb the temple, pray, then reach in to the cage and touch the statue's hand to aid in your journey for enlightenment. Today people just say that if you can touch the statue's hand while keeping your feet on the ground you will have good fortune.

So that's what has been happening in terms of major events and sights. From here on out I think things will be slightly less hectic so I will be trying to post with some regularity. Cheers.

Home Sweet Home

     A few hours after my last post we met up with the Belgian exchange students and a few minutes after that the exchange students from France.We were able to chat a bit, exchange some pins and cards, and snap a picture. The bright blue blazers are the students from France while the navy blue blazers are both the Belgians and us Americans however you can tell us apart because the Americans have so many pins as a result of the epic pin swap at Central States Conference. Third from the left is Romane from Belgium who is also spending the year in Jogja.

After that we made our way to gate 41 and onto Jakarta, a nine hour flight.

     Stepping off the plane in Jakarta was equal parts exciting and terrifying. None of us were entirely sure how to get from arrival to domestic transfer, the poor French and Belgian students were speaking English as a second language to immigration officers who were speaking English as a second language also, and we had no idea where Mas Indra (the executive secretary for Rotary Youth Exchange in all of Indonesia) was and we were supposed to meet him. But at the same time, we had finally made it - we were actually in Indonesia!

     It was pretty obvious I wasn't in Wisconsin anymore. The warmth hit you as you stepped out of the door and everything was green and tropical looking. The walkways at each gate that led to the actual, physical gate to the plane, were glass and between each walkway was beautiful green space, like so:

     As we made our way through immigration and luggage claim, to customs and eventually domestic transfer, we realized things were going to be just fine. The workers at Garuda Indonesia, a domestic airline, were beyond excited to see us with our blazers full of pins. I think we had about 20-30 pictures taken of us with various staff members and security guards. With boarding passes in hand, although now separated into a few groups of two or three, we made our way to the domestic terminal, said a couple of goodbyes, and each of us went to our own gate.

     From there, I was on my own. The flight from Jakarta to Yogyakarta was about an hour, but even with a delay on the tarmac of about 20 minutes, the flight felt extremely short compared to the previous 13 hour and 9 hour marathon-like flights. Despite the flight being so short, it was apparently long enough to warrant a snack of bread filled with some kind of curried meat and a cupcake-esque pastry. Here is the first food picture of many:

     In Jogja, I was warmly welcomed by not only my first host family, but also my second host parents, my third host mom, and my club youth exchange officer and her husband. They had a banner, my 10-year-old host brother, Jovan, gave me a Javanese hat whose name I don't remember right now, and were just as excited as I was.

This isn't everyone, but from from left to right is my second host mom, Lili; my first host mom, Marissa; myself; my first host brother, Jovan; my Youth Exchange Officer, Lina; and her husband, Yohannes.

     From the airport we drove to a restaurant; well drove would be putting it mildly, we more or less did battle on a road in a car with all of the other cars and an insane amount of motorcycles. As far as I can tell, the rules of the road are roughly that there are no rules of the road. So long as you don't actually hit someone else, you can get as close to them as you want; car, motorcycle, pedestrian, you name it. But more on that in another post. At the restaurant, I met Amy, an exchange student from Canada, and my host club's president whose name I was never actually told. The food was good, all five different things they had me try, but with the jet lag my eating and sleeping schedules are so out of whack I couldn't eat a whole lot. From there we went back to the airport where we were supposed to welcome Samantha from Brazil who will begin by staying with my second host family, however her flight was delayed a few hours, so my host family and I left to go home.

     My new home is directly above the optical shop my host father owns. There are sort of three stories, but it is very open in the middle with stairs zig-zagging from one level to the other. From the garage you go up the stairs to the kitchen on the right, then more stairs take to to a main level with a family room area and both my host parents' room and my host brother's room, then some more stairs take you to the final level where my room is as well as a bathroom and a nice little terrace that is dominated by the clothesline. Hopefully some pictures will help to clarify what my words cannot quite describe:

This is the garage, which is openly connected to the rest of the house, from the stairs connecting the second and third levels. At the bottom left, is where the kitchen entrance is and that green line in the orange wall there is actually an opening above the sink.

This is from the third level looking onto the second level where you can see an orange sofa in the back and just behind that and a bit to the right is the door to my host brother's room. The last picture was taken at the top of the steps right in front of this one and ninety degrees to the left.

This is my bedroom before unpacking.

This is my bathroom which doubles as the shower. Yes, the whole room is the shower. Just to the left of the toilet you can see a little sprayer, that's your handheld bidet.

     So that's where I'll be spending the next three or so months of my life. And with a view off the terrace overlooking Mt. Merapi, I think that I will be just fine.