OK. And now it is time for a few photos.

Dinner with Sakti and Steve at their house!

Delicious homemade sambal (hot sauce)

Look at all that traditional Javanese food! The tempe was my favorite.

Weirdly shadowy picture of me, Sakti, Steve, and Jen.

Access Camp!!

Some of "my" kids (they were in my group) hanging out in the main building when it was pouring rain and we were all kind of cooped up.

It's a little hard to tell, but it's POURING outside. And yes, our campsite was gorgeous. And yes, there is a goose in the corner of that picture. I was kind of excited about the geese.

Another weirdly shadowy picture of me and Deirdre hanging out by the rain.

Jackie and Deirdre lead the campers in traditional American cheers. "One more time! Chicken style!"

Another shot of the gorgeous site. This was the (rather murky) swimming pool.

Jess teaches the campers (and me) a rhythm game called Boom Snap Clap.

Goofing around.

Jakarta!!

In Jakarta! After we left the camp, we came back to Jackie's apartment. She lives on the 26th floor in the heart of downtown. It was pouring rain at the time, so things look pretty foggy outside. And this is my attempted glamour shot.

Here's the REAL glamour shot--after we all got cream baths (a massage-conditioning treatment) and our hair blown out and pedicures. It was amazing. And it cost less than $11.

Then we put bags on our heads to walk back to the apartment because it was raining outside.

And we had entirely way too much fun squeezing four people in the back of a taxi to go out to dinner that night.

Jogjakarta!!

Skipping ahead past Native Speaker Day (I will try to steal someone else's pictures for that), this is Jen and I on the train to Jogjakarta. Sweaty but happy!

At Borobudur! They give us sarongs to respect the culture (I guess). It was hot, but beautiful.

With Deirdre and Christen

I just liked this face. Is it a dog, perhaps?

At the top of the temple, there are these things called stupas. Inside each one is a buddha. Kind of cool.

Deirdre meditates as Jon creepily watches.

I used this umbrella most of the time to keep the sun off. Perhaps the leopard print was a little disrespectful.

Cut to later in the day--Prambanan. Can you tell it was about to rain?

So awesome. As Holly said, it kind of feels like Mordor.

Deirdre, me, Christen, and Holly sitting among the ruins.

Today!!

And a total shift in gears: my Vocabulary class today! We were talking about protests and demonstrations, so I had them create slogans for bumper stickers (on the wall behind them). Then I made them all pose for a photo. I love these guys!

Is it December yet?

Yes, yes, it is (very nearly) December.

And this has been a whirlwind month. As lots of other fellows have posted in their blogs, November was crazy. (I just avoided saying cray-cray there, because I REFUSE to use cray-cray).

Anyway, I will provide a quick summary of my November:

1. Nov. 3-4: Go with English lecturers from another university in Surabaya on a 5-hour trip to Malang to do an English training for a very remote school, and then camp overnight on Sempu Island for the night, arriving back late Sunday night.

2. November 6-11: TEFLIN (Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia) Conference, which all of the Fellows had to present at, followed by a mid-year conference for the English Teaching Assistants in which we had to participate and share our teaching tips. And, oh yeah, the election happened sometime in there too. We managed to get everyone over to the Consulate to watch the results come in, which was a pretty awesome experience.

3. November 14-19: Fly to Jakarta to work as a counselor for the first (annual?) Access English Camp. Access is a State Department program that offers underprivileged high schoolers extra classes to improve their English. So this was basically a traditional American summer camp, which we tried to duplicate for 150 16-year-old Indonesian kids. Some of the elements were duplicated successfully (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, relay races), others less successfully (s'mores made with Ritz crackers instead of graham crackers, ultimate frisbee turning into a huge tackle-fest).  It was a lot of fun. The kids were great, the other counselors were great. After the camp ended, a few of us spent an extra day in Jakarta to attend Native Speaker Day at the Jakarta Police School, where Jackie and Jess work. It was great. We basically played one of those "myster dinnertime theater" games, but we were all suspects, and the police officers had to interview each of us and take notes, later accusing whom they suspected. Let's just say it ended with Jon and Adam being pinned to the floor with real handcuffs. Surprise!

4. Nov 23-25: Take the train (first time!) to Jogjakarta to celebrate a belated Thanksgiving (with no traditional Thanksgiving food, but oh well) and throw a surprise birthday party for Liz, one of the Senior Fellows here. Had a blast renting a tour bus and visiting Borobudur and Prambanan (two Buddhist temples from the 9th century) and finding a positively European reggae club to party at (how I've missed that vibe!).

So now it's November 29th, and I've been in Indonesia for over three months. The time spent here so far has been pretty great. I really like my students, my colleagues at IAIN Sunan Ampel, and of course, my fellow Fellows. At this time of the year for giving thanks, I am completely conscious of how lucky I am to be involved in this program, and have this kind of experience. And how grateful I am to have the great support network and of loving friends and family back home as well!

Rainy day in Jakarta

Back from camp, recuperating in Jackie's apartment before flying home tomorrow. It has been an awesome weekend!

Nasi Campur

Checked out of the Sheraton yesterday (kicking and screaming). Back to reality for two days before I leave on Wednesday for a youth camp in Jakarta.

I realized that I haven't posted many pictures of what I've been eating. This is a picture of the lunch I ate today (that I eat pretty much every day that I'm at work). It's called nasi campur (pronounced Nah-see Chahm-pur). The name translates to "mixed rice," and pretty much just means rice and lots of other random stuff that you select from the food cart.

As you can see, I selected green beans, lots of tempe, and a fried egg. A really greasy, pretty delicious, fried egg. Oh, and lots of "sambal," or hot sauce. It's pretty much unavoidable to get sambal with everything you order here. It costs 6,000 rupiah--the best deal around (that's about 70 cents). It's not a huge portion, but it keeps me filled up for a few hours.

Also--you may notice that I am using a fork to eat it. This is not the standard way of eating anything, really, in Java. Most people use their hands. I gave that a try for about two weeks, and then once the novelty wore off I decided it was just easier for me to stick with what I'm used to, and be able to eat more competently. I like to think people at least appreciated the effort. My coworkers are still impressed that I actually, truly like nasi campur to begin with. 

The week ain't over yet

But it's been a pretty great one so far.

Starting Monday night, November 5, all of the English Language Fellows converged on my little (OK, not so little) town of Surabaya to attend the 59th Annual TEFLIN Conference (TEFLIN = Teaching English as a Foreign Language INdonesia). We were all required to do a presentation, and to just generally show State Department support for the conference.

Although the purpose for the ELF gathering is professional, we have been having a blast hanging out together again, for the first time since Bandung back in August. We all get to stay at the Sheraton, which is a pretty freakin' awesome hotel (central air conditioning? Water pressure in the shower? King size bed??), and the Sheraton happens to be connected to the largest mall in Surabaya, Tunjungan Plaza, so we can all easily go out and get dinner together and socialize and just generally bask in the glow of spending time with other cool Americans.

On the first night, everyone came out to this sushi restaurant. It got a little rowdy.

Imitating how our students always pose.

We ordered one round of Bintang beers for everyone, and then the restaurant was sold out. As I have probably mentioned before, pretty much no one drinks alcohol in Indonesia. So we probably drank a week's supply of beer in one round! 

We also got to attend the "election party" at the Consulate in Surabaya. What better way to watch the results come in? They had a coffee barista on hand to make lots of fancy coffee drinks, cake, and some speakers spoke briefly about the electoral college and the history behind the donkey and elephant mascots.

 I got interviewed by some local news reporters. They initially began to interview Jessica, another Fellow, but she grabbed me and kindly pushed me in front of them, while she not-so-sneakily backed away and left the room. But I didn't really mind; I still kind of have some fun being interviewed (I don't doubt it gets old after a while--this is Jessica's second year in the country). The reporters asked me about Obama's and Romney's stances on foreign policy and the economy, and which candidate I preferred and why. I tried to give them super-super-simplified explanations. Which are about the only explanations I could provide anyway. 

Talking with some local university students while waiting for the coffee barista to make our cappuccinos. 

Me, Jackie and Jess posing with some local students and Consulate employees. 

It's been good times. But it's also been some work. On Wednesday afternoon, after making sure that Obama really was going to be our president for FOUR MORE YEARS!!!! I had to go straight to the conference to present a workshop on poetry (thankfully I was able to recycle my NYS TESOL presentation from last year). I think it went pretty well. The number of attendees was small because the workshop was held so late in the day (4:50pm), but the people who attended seemed to really want to be there to learn.

Anna (another Fellow who presented after me) introduces me. 

Monitoring attendees as they write haiku. 

I also had to organize my first official teacher-training workshop at my university, IAIN Sunan Ampel, for Friday (today). Four Fellows, including me, came out to my school to present on communicative teaching and project-based learning. We spoke to about 35 elementary, middle school, and high school English teachers from the community. We might have overwhelmed some with a little too much information packed into 2 hours, but I think most of the attendees got something out of it, or at least were pushed to reflect on their teaching style and how it might be improved or adapted.

Anna talks about the importance of  showing, not telling.

After our workshop. Gotta allow lots of time for photos! 

After our presentation, we were all starving, so I took the Fellows to a popular tourist destination (and pretty decent restaurant), called House of Sampoerna. It's an old cigarette factory. You can actually still watch the workers through a glass wall as they're rolling and cutting cigarettes. You can also pose inside of a "kaki lima" (food stall) as if you're selling cigarettes. That's my favorite part. Great for kids!

And that takes me up until now.  Because all I did after coming back from House of Sampoerna this afternoon was take a 3-hour nap. The best nap in recent memory. And then I had a bowl of tofu for dinner at the mall. 

I only have one more full day to spend with all the other Fellows, so I have to make it count! I'm not looking forward to saying goodbye, again since we won't ever all be together like this again. Thankfully, a decent-sized group of us are meeting up in Jogjakarta for Thanksgiving weekend. But I think we're all doing our best to enjoy our time together now, while we have it.

Wow, that last sentence could apply to life in general. Deep thoughts. And that is all for now.

Sempu Island

Last weekend (November 3rd and 4th),  I had the opportunity to join an English professor on a trip to a very remote village to carry out a teacher training workshop. It was a workshop on "classroom English." Apparently, the Indonesian government encourages all teachers in high schools (not just English teachers) to speak English in class as much as possible. This is a difficult task to achieve for a lot of more rural, poorer areas, because there just isn't that much English spoken out in those areas.
All in all, the plan for the training sounded pretty sweet: Saturday morning, drive out to a remote village near Malang, assist with a training, and then drive a little further to this tourist destination, Sempu Island, to stay the night and enjoy the beach the next day before coming home on Sunday night.

So, I invited Jen along--my fellow Fellow who is thankfully always up for anything! (Why this characteristic is important will become clearer later on in this post.) After about a 7-hour drive, with lots of stops to pick up food and get tents, etc., we reached the school.

 Introductions. Aliv, the trip coordinator, is sitting on the far left. The school headmaster is the one speaking.

 Just happy to be here! 

 About 20 teachers attended the workshop. Most of them spoke almost no English (only two were actual English teachers). 

"Performing" a role play (I just read my lines): I am the teacher, Jen is the student. 

The workshop finished later than expected, since it had taken us longer than expected to drive out there. Consequently, our trip to Sempu Island was delayed, and we didn't reach the boat that would take us to the island until it was almost dark out. Aliv asked me and Jen, "Is it OK if we reach the island at night?" Of course! No problem! we said. Little did we know, once we reached the island after a 20-minute motorboat ride, we would have to hike 1+ hours in the dark, over rocky, volcanic terrain and lots of roots to trip us up. Plus, it was freakin' humid. And Jen and I had flats on. We had been told that there would be camping, but that was it. 

However, it wasn't like we were gonna turn back now. We trooped through it--dripping sweat and fogging up our glasses and slipping around in our shoes.

 On the shore, waiting for the boat to take us across to the island.

 Pretty view from the boat trip. 

 On the boat, blissfully unaware of the hike that awaited us in 20 minutes. 

 Inadequate hiking shoes. 

At the end of the hike. Need I say more? 

So we survived it. The guys set up the tents, we ate top ramen for dinner over a tiny little propane camping fire (there is no fresh water or electricity or pretty much anything on the island--you have to pack everything in). And then we pretty much went to bed. Just on the floor of the tents. Apparently Indonesians don't use sleeping backs or pillows or mats when they go camping. This was something of a downer to discover, as well. But I still managed to get a pretty decent sleep.

And the next morning, we woke up to this:

 The tide was out, so people were climbing around on the coral. Live coral! Although it kind of grossed me out because I think it was the kind of coral called brain coral. Slimy and brainy looking. But cool! 

 Beautiful warm but not too warm water. 

 There was this neat hole where the water from the ocean came in during high tide. 

Hooray! (I went swimming in these clothes, and got to see one really cool fish--it was bright, electric blue, with electric yellow fins, and kind of a boxy shape. Anyone know what it might have been?)

We also saw monkeys in the trees right above us, thankfully not tame enough to come down and try to steal our food, but still really cute and fairly close. We spent most of the morning just lounging around, swimming in the water and finishing up the Top Ramen for lunch. (Yum. Just kidding.) Then we packed up and hiked out--it took us a little less than 2 hours coming back. I'd thought it might be faster coming back, because we had light this time, but it was so hot, we had to make lots of pit stops to hydrate and catch our breath. 

The guys traveling with us kept saying, "Es" and "Es degan," which means ice, and iced coconut juice respectively. We stayed focus on the delicious juice we could get once we got back to land. 

 Beautiful boat ride back during daytime.

 Es degan! Everyone refilled their cup once or twice. One of the guys had four glasses of it! 

 Delicious, fresh coconut juice served out of the back of a truck. 

Cheers! A pretty awesome weekend had by all.