Bandung’s birds, bats, and bugs
There really aren’t many mosquitos here, and Billy and I’ve both been surprised about that. We went out one evening to the Bandung Electronics Center, a 6-floor mall with just electronics, including a couple of floors just for cell phones. It’s insane! When we were walking back to our hotel it was just about dusk, and there were a bunch of birds (swallow or swifts?) flying around like crazy, swooping to get any bugs, and coming pretty close to us. I watched them a bit, and noticed there were actually some small bats mixed in with the birds. Between the bats, the birds, and the geckos (Yay Lizards!), it’s no surprise there’s such a low mosquito population.
There are a lot of dragonflies around here, and so many different kinds of butterflies it just amazes me. There are little bright yellow butterflies, and HUGE black butterflies that are the size of small birds. I love it!
The “rainbow house” has a good-sized balcony with a bunch of potted plants. The balcony extends under a bedroom window along the front of the house. There’s a little place with big strawberry plants just up the hill from the “rainbow house”, and it looks like they’re doing well there, so I think I’ll try to grow some strawberries on the balcony. I can’t wait to lure some of the butterflies to my potted plants, and take pictures of them to share with everybody.
Oh, and there are apparently fireflies up in the hills of Dago. Yay! I haven’t seen any yet, but I haven’t been in Dago past dark, so it’s no surprise. An interesting little myth one of the local Indonesian teachers told me… He said that in Indonesia it’s believed that fire flies are the fingernails of the dead, coming up from their graves at night… so, many children are afraid of fire flies.
Filed under Living in Bandung, The Adventure begins | Comments (3)I can’t believe I’m a teacher
I’ve taught 4 classes now, and I’m surprised how comfortable I’ve actually been in front of the students. The first class I taught was a teen elementary-level class. They were pretty excited about having a teacher from America. There were a few points were it was a little overwhelming having a room full of 13 year olds, but after I had them play a game they settled down a bit.
The students here are great. Most of them are really eager to learn, and have great attitudes. Every class seems to have some kind of “class clown”, but they’re managable, and entertaining (at least so far).
I only have one class today, and it’s not until 6pm. As many people know I’m not a morning person, and I’ve been enjoying the fact that the school doesn’t usually have classes start until 2:30 pm, and the latest classes are done at 9:00 pm. Right now it’s taking a couple hours to plan each lesson, but as we get more comfortable, they should take less time.
As far as housing… this morning we went to look at the “rainbow house” again. The owner was out, but his daughter let us in to have a 2nd look at it. It’s pretty rustic, but has a lot of potential. We spoke with my boss’s maid (my boss will live just a few doors away), and she told us that the owners are considering putting in a second bathroom with a western toilet, and that they’d be willing to rent it for 12.5 million rupiahs (roughly $1400 USD for the whole year). Billy’s boss is going to call the owner for us tonight to discuss everything, and we might be able to move in as early as Monday. It’ll be nice to have our own place.
Filed under The Adventure begins | Comment (0)Photos of flowers in Bandung
My Mom emailed me and asked for some pictures of the flowers here. Here are a few I’ve taken so far. Once we get our house I’m sure I’ll have a lot more pictures, as it’s really lush up in the Dago area.
First weekend in Indonesia
We found another Wi-Fi hotspot at a Sundanese restaurant not far from our hotel.
To follow up on the shower situation from my last post… One of Billy’s co-workers told him that there’s a trick to get hot water at our hotel. You need to turn the water on, and let it run for 5-10 minutes for it to warm up. It works, and we’re getting hot showers now. Yay!
We went looking at houses yesterday. They were all very rough around the edges, with most not having Western toilets, or hot water. We’ve talked with other teachers, and found that you can add a western toilet and a hot water heater relatively cheaply here, but I’m not sure how long it would take. One of the places we looked at is close to my boss’s house, and another co-worker’s house. We nicknamed it “the rainbow house” because the walls inside were painted every color of a rainbow. Mint green, bright pink, yellow… you get the idea. The owner of the house said she’d have it painted any color we’d like (white maybe?), and add white floor tile throughout if we want to rent it. The price would be around 14,000,000 IDR, or $1564 American for 12 months. It’s crazy how inexpensive everything is! We’d planned to spend more to get a house that was a little more cushy, but it seems that there aren’t many mid-range priced homes. They’re either cheap (around $1500/year) or expensive ($6000/year). I know $6000 for a year doesn’t sound like much back home, but we’re on teachers’ salaries now, so we’re not making a whole lot of money.
We’re not totally sold on “the rainbow house” yet, and we’re going to continue looking around. We might end up renting a room in an apartment complex type place for a month, as it would cost about the same for a month as it would cost for a few nights at our current hotel, and would give us more time to find a house we really like.
Last night was our first Friday night in Indonesia. One of the other teachers invited us out for a couple beers. We were tired, and not sure we felt like going. We had to hop a taxi to get there, and the driver didn’t speak any English. It was a little rough, and he had to stop to ask someone for directions. We finally got there around 10:30 pm, and we’re glad we went. We met some other great expats from England and Ireland, and got to relax and shoot some pool. I saw my first Indonesian cockroach running across the floor, and turned to Billy to point it out to him, then felt it climbing on my toes. EEK! I kicked it across the floor, and a native Indonsian in our group ran to get away from it. Billy smashed it with a flip flop that the Indonesian guy left behind when he ran. We had a good laugh over that. Our friend from work gave us a ride back to the hotel, so we didn’t have to speak broken Indonesian to another taxi driver. It was a nice night.
After a few days of observing other teachers, I’ll start teaching my first classes on Monday. I’m fairly nervous, and took books back to my hotel so I can work on the lesson planning this weekend. Thankfully my first class on Monday isn’t until 4pm, so I have a lot of time to prepare.
I met some of my students yesterday that I’ll start teaching on Monday. They’re mostly 13 years old, with one 15 year old in the class. I introduced myself and we had some time to get to know each other before I gave them back to their current teacher. They seem like great kids, and thought it was cool that I came from America. They’re pretty blunt with the way they put things, which can be pretty entertaining. Here are some questions they asked me:
“Why is your skin so white” (I blamed it on the lack of sun in Seattle)
“What are your bad habits?”
“Why are your legs so big, are you a runner?” (ouch)
“Are you married?” (they said they could see it in my face that I’m happily married)
“What’s your husband look like?”
“Why did you come to Indonesia?”
“What do you think of Bandung so far?” (I introduced a new vocab word for them here… chaotic)
I also asked the students to tell me about Bandung. Here are some of the things they told me:
“It’s okay to wear a tank top, but you shouldn’t walk down the street in a bikini.”
“It’s okay to hold hands and hug your husband in public, but no kissing or ‘touchy-touchy’”
“You can get arrested if you kiss in public because it’s pornographic.”
“People spit everywhere.”
“Everytime there’s a football (soccer) match, the people get crazy and destroy everything.”
“Never go see a match at the football (soccer) stadium unless you want to die.”
“People in Bandung burp a lot.”
I’m still trying to get the cell phone figured out. I brought my Motorola RAZR with me, but forgot to get it unlocked before I left, so the SIM card I bought here won’t work. Hopefully I’ll get that figured out this weekend… but things in Indonesia tend to move slowly, so I’m not sure.
That’s all for now. I think there’s a storm brewing here, as the sky has grown a little dark and the wind has picked up. It’s still probably 70-75, and feels great!
Filed under The Adventure begins | Comments (8)We’re in Bandung!
We arrived at the Jakarta airport on Tuesday around 1 pm local time. We had a nice flight from Taipei to Jakarta, in a much newer and more comfortable plane that our first flight. A driver picked us up at the airport, and drove us to Bandung. I’m not sure how long the drive was, but the traffic was crazy. The driving in Indonesia seems more organic than the driving in the West… Turn signals are optional, and the shoulder is used as a passing lane (even when there are pedestrians walking on the shoulder). Cows, goats and sheep all graze along the side of the super highway that connects Bandung and Jakarta. There are lots of rice paddies, and getting closer to Bandung the scenery becomes ever greener with tea plantations on the hillsides. There is a lot of poverty, but also a lot of beauty.
We were greeted at the hotel by a couple of guys from the school. They gave us little welcome bags with big bottles of water, bananas, apples (from WASHINGTON!), and a can of an indonesian soft drink called “Pocari Sweat”.
After traveling for what seemed like an eternity, we were both hoping to take hot showers in our hotel room… Turned on the hot water, and it was almost ice cold. Desperate to feel clean I took a cold shower, but opted not to try washing my hair, as I wanted to get out of the shower ASAP. I had a little breakdown after that as I tried to figure out what to wear, and realized that I hadn’t really put together outfits with the clothes I’d brought.. Nothing seemed to go together, and I nearly burst into tears. I’m so thankful I’m not doing this all completely alone, as Billy was a great comfort to me.
My boss came to our hotel on Tuesday evening, and took us out to dinner. We walked down the street about a block or so from our hotel, and hopped onto a little mini-bus to go visit my school. It’s roughly 10 minutes from the hotel where we’re staying. We went out to a restaurant after that, and had some great indonesian food. I had some tofu that was grilled with a sweet sauce, and Billy had nasi goreng (fried rice).
Yesterday Billy and I walked around town and explored. We stopped by a couple of clothing stores/factory outlets. I bought a couple of nice shirts for about $5-$10 each. The prices on the clothing are unbelievable! Billy found a cafe in the top of one of the stores and it offers free wi-fi. We didn’t have our laptops with us yesterday, so we came back today to have breakfast and logon. We’re in a kind of a courtyard on the top level of a 3 story building, with a huge koi pond, and water feature thing. The sun is shining (of course), and it feels wonderful. It’s fairly humid and maybe around the high 70’s at 10:30 am.
Yesterday was the first day Billy and I worked. We just observed classes and met the other teachers. Everyone’ incredibly friendly and welcoming. The teachers at my school are all around my age… 20’s and 30’s. I think there are roughly even numbers of native English speakers (mostly from the UK), and local Indonesian teachers. The rest of the week I’ll continue observing other teachers in their classes, and on Tuesday I’ll teach my first class. The students in a lot of the classes are junior high and high school age and pretty eager to learn and speak English.
Billy and I are both feeling really great with our decision to move to Bandung. It’s a great city so far, and everything we want or need seems to be available if we look hard enough. We’ll be staying in a hotel for a few more days, but Friday we’ll be heading out to the Dago neighborhood to look for a house. Dago is where the majority of the teachers live, and it’s a little higher up the hill, so it’s a bit cooler that the heart of Bandung… it apparently also has more “creepy crawlies” than the downtown area… giant roaches, but also fireflies, and all kinds of lizards.
We’ve been fortunate so far with our health, and haven’t been the slightest bit sick… though I understand it’s inevitable to have digestive issues at some point when we’re here. I haven’t gotten a single mosquito bite (Billy got his first this morning), and have been careful to apply sunblock so I haven’t gotten sun burned.
Today we’ll be heading out to get cell phones. It’s been strange not having one.
That’s all for now. Today we got signed up for all the free wifi hotspots in Bandung, so we’re hoping to be able to check in on a daily (or almost daily) basis going forward.
Filed under The Adventure begins | Comments (2)The world’s longest flight…
Just arrived at the Taipei airport after a very long 13 hour flight. For some reason the air-conditioning was blasting the entire time. The seats were really uncomfortable, so I didn’t get much sleep, but I feel surprisingly well.
We get to hangout in the Taipei airport for a couple hours until we hop our flight for Jakarta. I can’t believe I’ve finally made it to Asia! Yay!
Filed under The Adventure begins | Comments (3)Goodbye Seattle
The day’s finally here, and in about an hour I’ll be on the plane bound for Indonesia. Wow. Everything feels surreal… of course that could be in part due to sleep deprivation (up ’til past 4 this morning trying to clean the old house, after getting about 3 hours of sleep the night before). Billy and I have the majority of our remaining belongings in a 5′x5′ storage space. It’s a very strange feeling when you can sell/give away/throw away enough of your belongings to fit the things that matter to you into a space that’s only 25 square feet.
We have a 13 hour flight ahead and a 3 hour layover in Taipei, then a 3 or 4 hour flight to Jakarta. The school is sending a driver to pick us up at the airport in Jakarta, then we’ll have about a 2 hour drive to Bandung. We’ve got a long night/day ahead.
Filed under The Adventure begins | Comment (1)