Saya suka ini

So many exciting things happened to me today that I realized that I needed to make a post. First, I got the best massage in my life from a transexual man (woman?) who loves Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez. Then I helped my host sister's mother-in-law on her organic farm (the first in all of Indonesia, she's a professor of environmental studies at the local university) and I was really excited to see that she even had a compost going and solar panels installed. Afterwards, I went snorkeling and was lucky enough to see a bunch of different types of fish, mostly ones that I've never seen before, and really beautiful purple coral. I met a volunteer at the farm from Canada, a grad student from Middleburry, and we both realized that at first we were speaking in Indonesian instead of english because we are both so used to using Indonesian when taking to other people here. A note on Indonesian, it's really easy. There are no tenses and the words are all phonetic. I don't think it will take more than one month for me to feel very comfortable speaking solely in Indonesian. There are two maids at our home (we call them our aunties), they make the best food, and they've both invited me to go to their home whenever I like. One of them, we call Tantu, saw my Bob Marley t-shirt and said (in Indonesian) "Bob Marley good man! Rasta!". They're both really, really nice. I remember going to a Rotary meeting for the outbound students back in February, and we were all grouped by the regions of the world in which we were going, and hearing about how generally, asian culture doesn't really promote individuality, how the people aren't 'touchy', and that the people are very serious. Indonesia is the total opposite of all those things. Maybe its good that I didn't come here with crazy high expectations of what my exchange year would be like because now I couldn't be happier with where I am!  Even though I was a little bit concerned about going to a place like Indonesia because the culture is so different than in America, I don't think that there's a better place in the world for me to be right now.