Solo Photos

Here are my pictures from a trip to the city of Solo for a Rotary conference. A post about my time there is in the making but I just got home and I think I'm taking a nap first :) 

The top two photos were at an eco park and are made entirely out of recycled materials. 

The other photos are of my walk around the city of Solo with my friend Lucie and spending a day visiting a batik factory/store. 

More Lombok Photos

I finally found my missing memory card from when I was in Lombok a few weeks ago with my host family. I know that I haven't quite gotten around to seeing all 18,000 islands in Indonesia quite yet, but so far Lombok is in the running to be my favorite. Enjoy the pics! Nykmati! 

"You yourself are the eternal energy which appears in the Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean." 

-Alan Watts

Aku Sudah Lancar Bahasa Indonesia, kan?

A few of my Indonesian friends who've seen my blog asked me to do a post in Bahasa Indonesia, so here goes. 

Halo! Haha lama sesudah teman-teman saya bilang, "Katie, kamu harus coba tulis satu pesan di blogmu pakai bahasa aja!", trus, sekarang saya coba. Saya ingin waktu saya naik pasawat ke Indonesia dari Chicago, U.S.A., saya coba baca buku saya yang namanya Indonesian for Beginners. Saya coba baca, tapi, sangat susah untuk saya! Stress sekali! Sebelum saya datang ke Indonesia bulan Agustus, saya bisa bilang halo dan terima kasih aja. Itu aja. Tapi sekarang, saya masih pelajar Bahasa Indonesia setiap hari, tapi ada banyak orang Indonesia yang bilang sama saya "Adu! Bagaimana kamu sudah lancar Bahasa Indonesia, bule?!". Saya masih punya salah dengan grammar, mungkin itu karena saya belum ikut kelas Bahasa Indonesia, saya pelajar dengan teman-teman dan di rumahku di sini aja. Dan sekarang, mimpiku pakai Bahasa Indonesia! Haha, betul, saya masih orang bule, tapi hatiku sekarang dengan Indonesia, bukan negra lain. Setiap hari, kalau saya punya waktu, saya pergi jalan-jalan dan bicara sama orang Indonesia tentang budaya Indonesia, ato saya tanya mereka tentang ada apa yang beda di Indonesia dan Amerika (semuah!). Sebelum saya ikut Rotary di sini, waktu saya masih di Amerika, saya ingin saya sidikit takut. Saya belum perna ke Asia! Saya belum punya teman-teman di Indonesia! Saya bisa makan apa?! Tapi sekarang, saya pikir berpikiranku jadi Indonesian, bukan Amerikan! Begini, di Chicago, saya selalu pikir sendiri aja. Seperti- acara ini bagus untuk aku bagaimana? Aku mau ini, aku mau itu, ada apa yang terbaik untuk aku? Tapi di Indonesia, saya lihat ada komunitas di sini. Sekarang, saya pikir tentang keluarga saya di sini pertama, teman-teman saya kedua dan saya terahir. Dan- saya lebih senang! Haha. 
Saya tahu, pasti, saya rindu Indonesia nanti waktu saya harus pulang ke Amerika- (saya malas pulang! Tapi jangan bilang itu sama orang tuaku di Amerika!) 
Nanti waktu saya sudah selasai kolia di universitas di Amerika, saya mau kerja di Indonesia. Mungkin aku bisa berkerja di EF seperti guru bahasa inggris, ato dengan seswatu di alam ato di huntan di sini dengan konservasi. 
Dan mungkin karena saya dari kota besar di Amerika, tapi saya lebih senang kalau saya di kampung. Saya suka sekali hidupku di Surabaya, tapi, saya lebih suka komunitas di kampung. Mungkin saya bisa tinggal di Lombok ato kota kecil di Bali... 
Sekarang, saya sudah janji adiktku saya bisa ikut dia nonton film yang baru, namanya Oz di bioskop. Trus, sampai kita bicara lagi! 
Damn, aku cinta Indonesia! :)

Sibuk

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I cannot believe how fast time is going by for me right now. I checked my calendar this morning and I literally could not believe that I was left with only 8 weeks left in Indonesia, which also prompted me to put together an itinerary of everything I have left to do with the time while I'm here. A really good friend of mine, Sam, invited me to join him and his family around Bali while his parents are visiting all the way from Wisconsin, so I'm crazy excited about getting to do that soon. And even though the feeling of going home soon is a little overwhelming, I have a feeling that somehow it won't be goodbye forever once I get on the plane and head back to Chicago in June. 

But! I'm still really enjoying my classes at the art/fashion school of Surabaya and I've managed to make a lot of friends there already, which makes my days there of sewing traditional Indonesian ceremonial clothing , going through the boxes of material for new dresses and gossiping about boys make it feel more like a summer camp than a school. But I really do love it. I think that going to that kind of school has really helped me to explore and learn more about Indonesian culture in a way that I wouldn't have been able to had I been sent to go to just a regular old high school. 

One thing I've been meaning to mention is how difficult it is to say the word 'you' in Indonesian. In English, we use the word 'you' when speaking to everyone, from babies to our grandparents. In Indonesian, however, there are so many things to think about while you're using the word 'you' because how you say it will imply the level of respect that you are giving to that individual, and respect is a huge part of Indonesian (and pretty much Asian in general) culture. When I first got here, I pulled out my little Indonesian phrasebook and was presented with only two forms of the word 'you', kamu and anda. Anda, I thought, was for adults and kamu was for close friends and children. I've been using just these two forms, and getting along just fine, but it wasn't until about a week ago that a friend told me that I'd in fact been making a huge mistake with my Indonesian for the past 8 months in using just these two forms. She supposed that no one had bothered to correct me because they still understood me, but because I'm a bule (white foreigner) they didn't want to embarrass me and tell me I'd said the wrong thing so they probably waved it off and went along with it. But seriously! I've been here 8 months! She said not to worry about being disrespectful, but was kind enough to tell me of the other forms of 'you', and how they should all be used. I now know that there are about 8, but if I was in a place like Bali or I was speaking Javanese, that there would be even more depending on the caste systems that those areas have in place. Its helped me immensely, but I still feel a little embarrassed at how I've been addressing people since I've gotten here. Sigh. I guess that's what I get for never actually taking a class of Bahasa Indonesia here or in the U.S., instead just kind of picking it up as I go along. Luckily right now I do feel really fluent, and I can't wait to see what another 2 months will do. 

I'll be crazy busy this month, especially with my Rotary district (3420) conference coming up in a couple weeks in Solo, Indonesia, but I'll be sure to post a lot more pictures soon. Oh! And I officially accepted a teaching position in Panama for this summer. I know I won't get to be home in Chicago for as long as I would've liked, but I am completely thrilled at this opportunity. Now to find where I've left my Spanish dictionary... 

The picture I have up is of a sunset near a beach about a two hours' drive from Surabaya that I joined my host mom on this past weekend while we were attending a wedding. 

"Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves." -Henry David Theroux 

Malang

A Rotarian recently invited me along with her family to visit the city of Malang and afterwards stop by the beach for the day! I had a great time and have been feeling so welcomed into my new Rotary club here in Surabaya. I've been really, really busy dealing with getting ready for college and scholarships and what I'll be doing this summer when I return, but it's hard because all of that just feels so far away to me here! I''ll keep taking pictures and will write another post in about a week or so. 

"The two most important days in your life are when you were born and the day that you discover why." - Mark Twain 

Epoch

An 'epoch' is defined as an event or a time marked by an event that begins a new period or development, according to Mirriam Webster. For me, my latest epoch has been moving to Surabaya for the remainder of my exchange year in Indonesia. I cannot believe that I only have three months left in Indonesia. It still feels like yesterday, my first morning waking up in Gowa to the sounds of motorbikes, roosters crowing and the bakso (meatballs covered in spicy sauces served on a stick) being sold by the street vendors alongside the road. Now that I've got a new change of scenery in Surabaya, I know that these last few months are about to fly by. 
To start, I absolutely love my new family. I was really happy living with my second family in Makassar, but the contrasts between the two are starkly different. My second host mom got married when she was 19, had a few kids and has since spent her life taking care of her home and her children. We'd spend time together cooking dinner, giving baths to my youngest host sister, going to the pasar (traditional market) together and pretty much doing everything at home. My second host family was also, like most Indonesians, very religious and I would often see my host family praying at least 4 or 5 times a day. They had a modest income, but always so generous and invited me to any family gatherings at the village where we would all come together for food and music. 
My third host family could literally not be any different. I had to double-check that I was still in Indonesia. I mean, they're absolutely amazing and I couldn't be happier to be a part of their family, but oh my god. For starters, my host dad works for a Japanese company that has its headquarters in Jakarta, so he goes there every week for business. My host mom is such an awesome woman, but so totally different from anyone I've met in Indonesia. She writes books, designs clothes, goes bungee jumping, has been around Africa, lived in Paris, Edinburgh and is SCUBA diving certified. It's so great to see an Indonesian woman push the cultural boundaries a little and to have so much success in doing so. I also have a host sister, Salsa, who's 12, and a host brother, Paris, who's 7. I'm also really thankful for living in Makassar for 7 months before I came here because I know that if I didn't, I probably wouldn't have been able to learn Indonesian, especially living with the family that I am now. They all speak fluent English, and so do a lot of people that I've met in Surabaya. They'll begin the conversation in English with me, and once I keep responding in Indonesian- they'll switch to just Indonesian. I think that if there wasn't the necessity that I learn Indonesian while I was living in Gowa and Makassar because no one could speak any English, I wouldn't be nearly as proficient as I am now. 
So last week my host family took me to Lombok and Gili. I posted the pictures already, and as you can see the place is gorgeous. Completely unreal. We went out snorkeling all day, sunbathing and shopping around the islands. Lombok is what Bali used to be like before all of the Eat Pray Love hype and Australian tourists got there. Most of the people still live very traditionally with a sense that they want to preserve the land through sustainable conservation practices. 
Maybe once I finish college I can come back to be an English teacher or work for an environmental group over there... 

The biggest contrast to me with Surabaya and Makassar is the level of education that I've noticed in the people that I've met. When I was in Gowa, my neighbor asked me where I was from. I said that I was from Chicago, in the United States. He said, "Oh, Chicago. Okay. That's next to Africa, right?" and I replied "Um, no... that's actually really far away from Africa." And the guy was so confused, because he showed me a picture of the Chicago Bulls team and pointed out that a lot of the players were black, so I must live close to Africa. I tried to explain that America was a country made-up with people of all sorts of different backgrounds and nationalities, but thought that I was trying to trick him or something. When I was in Makassar speaking with my friend Lucie from France, we used Spanish together because we both had about the same proficiency level with it and it was kind of fun to speak a language that very few people there would've been able to understand. If one of our Indonesian friends would ask us what language we were speaking, and we replied Spanish, they would say "Oh, okay, so they speak Spanish in France and America, yes?" And we would say no, French in France and English in America, but we can learn Spanish in school, and our Indonesian friends would just get really confused. Another time I showed a map of the U.S. to some kids in Gowa, and it showed the continental U.S. with Alaska and Hawaii in the corner. When the kids were through looking at it, they asked me questions like where is the hottest/coldest place in the U.S., and I replied that while other places can get really warm, Hawaii is the place where it is usually the warmest year-round and Alaska being the coldest. They replied that that would be impossible, because of how close Hawaii and Alaska are to one another. On the map. It's not that any of these people are unintelligent, not at all, it's just that the education system in South Sulawesi isn't really that great until you get to college, and college is a far-off dream for too many people because it would be way too expensive, and most parents would rather have their daughters married off and their sons to go straight to dentistry school or something. 
When I mention that I'm from Chicago in Surabaya, people have given me responses like "Oh, the Windy City!" or "The Blackhawks are doing really well this season, congratulations!". They're up-to-date on most current global affairs that I wasn't even aware of while I was living in Makassar, which surprises them even more than it does me. People here are a lot more politically and globally aware, which is really neat but honestly it does feel like a bit of a culture shock to be here. 
Oh! And I'll also be starting school next week at a fashion designing program, which'll be kind of neat because I can practice drawing and brush up on my sewing skills a little bit. It's a pretty nice deal, because I'll be doing that for 4 hours a day, and afterwards taking yoga classes at the gym with my host mom. Not bad, huh?
Another really big thing for me here in Surabaya is that being a white person (a 'bule') isn't so unheard of here and my presence isn't something that people really take a lot of notice to like people did in Makassar. When I went for a walk one of the first days that I got to Indonesia, I didn't get 10 feet before people stopped driving their motorbikes and cars to take pictures of me, shouting "Hello, Mister!" and "Bule! Bule!" at me as I tried to put my hood up over my head as quickly as possible. Needless to say I didn't get out a whole lot if I wasn't with my host family or friends to kinda shield me from that. When I went to a mall here in Surabaya last week with my host mom, I braced myself for what I thought would be an incessant stream of having to take pictures with about every other person I passed, but no one asked me for even a single photo! Very few people even took a second glance at me as I walked by the different storefronts. I feel so much more comfortable here because of that. I mean, I really enjoyed the experience of being one of the first white people that a lot of people have seen, and I defiantly understand why people would be interested in me because of that, but I finally feel like I'm not in a zoo anymore. 

Makassar is only an hour flight away, but I feel like I could be in a whole new country. I feel really blessed to have been given these different perspectives of Indonesia that not many other students are able to experience. I can honestly see myself living here for a little while once I finish my degree. My host mom wants to take me to Yogyakarta this month with the family, and to Borneo the next! I'm a pretty lucky kid. I also just got a job offer for the month of July as an English teacher in Panama. I think I'll wait until the end of the month to make up my mind about that, just because I've been away from home for so long, but it would be a really amazing opportunity. 

And a note on my new Rotary Club! I'm being hosted now by the Rotary Club of Surabaya Kaliasin. The best part is that it's a woman's-only club! All of the members are really excited that I'm there, because I'm the only inbound exchange student, and I think because I'm a girl, too. A lot of members have offered to take me out to lunch, go to museum and to travel with them and their families. 



The first pic is one at a beach in Gili Trawangan, The second is of my two host siblings and the last is a selfie that I took the other day here in Surabaya. 

Enjoy a song that I've been listening to on repeat a lot these past couple of weeks! 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwLyk3rxp_8