August 1st-20th: Orientation in Bandung or extremophile bathtub superpowers

August 1st – 20th

Ahhh what to say about the orientation in bandung (in West Java, 3rd largest city in Indonesia)? Ridiculous??? So there are 36 or 35 ETA’s from across the country and they are good amazing people. We are all put up in a fancy shmancy hotel, own huge rooms, beds big enough for at least 3 people comfortably, gazing down from top floors on small shacks and shopping malls on street below. 3 weeks, lectures 8 am – 4:30 or so everyday except Sunday and only half-day Saturday.

Mmm this experience was good good talks, not so much sobriety, sleep-deprived, drink coaster doodling during lectures, singing spice girls outside the atm with a very tall boy and a very skinny boy, avocado juice, poolside and bedside guitar jamming, action cat! beers in the bathtub, call to prayer kite soaring sunset serenades, thirty-finger massage, too much time in elevators, daring motorbike dashes to and from cloud 9, snakeskin fruit seed puppets, birthday cakes for obama and boats for friends, delicious warung food, world peace through angklung, swimming lessons, shotgunning beers in front of the circle K across the street is keeping it classy, musical melodicas, bad jokes aplenty, ginger tea, team extreme! nonexistant gay bars, much unpleasant pooing for many, super xtra hot ramen heroes, ridiculous rolling stones cover band, dancing with children, big beautiful whale wives and pocket monkeys, novotel indonesian idol, confessions, fiending for hotel mints, planet earth, traditional bamboo instrument rendition of i will survive by indo high schoolers, fruit bat penises, crazy alien lake complete with actual alien playing the zither and superpower mud, and so much more.

Will elaborate a little on last three:

One day we went to different local schools to get more of a feel for what our homesite schools would be like. There are several different types of schools that we were placed at. SMA’s are public high schools, pesantrans are private Islamic boarding schools and SMP’s are public trade schools. I am teaching at an SMA NU, the NU means it is a public Islamic highschool. Myself and some others teaching at SMA’s went to visit an SMA in Bandung and were enthusiastically received with local snacks, ten thousand pictures, and a student musical performance! See videos if was able to upload them

Kevin, Erica, Erin, Dan and I escaped our suffocatingly shmancy surroundings and traveled by several angkots (small minibuses that swallow passengers until bulging and legs and arms are dangling out of mouth) and buses (some more frustrating than others) to an eerily turquoise alien volcanic crater lake. We rushed past an alien playing the zither in our excited arrival but regretted it later because he had quickly vanished. After some highly rigorous scientific analyses were performed to quantify our possible survival if we were to touch the water or surrounding mud shore (these involved sticks being tossed in and observed with much scrutiny) i fell into the sulfuric alien mud! Though both extremely startling and smelly, it was a small price to pay for the incredible superpowers i now possess. i did not wake up hovering several feet above my high-count linen bedsheets as i had predicted, indeed my superpowers are more of a more subtle variety but super nonetheless.

Oh and we became TEAM EXTREME in honor of the intrepid extremophiles inhabiting the otherwise inhospitable waters.

We also saw a really great performance at an arts center, Saung Angklung Udjo, where they perform traditional Sundanese cultural arts; with traditional circumcision dances (sans the surgery), fierce pupperty, a gamelan orchestra, and ridiculously cute little children who at one point pulled us in to dance with them and together we “promoted peace in the world through angklung art performance”. The angklung is a Sundanese bamboo percussion instrument. They can range from simple single note angklungs to giant ones with many notes. The cute young children played the single note angklungs and at one point handed these out to the entire audience so that we might all play together. this was fairly silly and immensely enjoyable. Songs were perfomed that ranged from the traditional Sundanese to the doe a deer, a female deer, ray a golden drop of sun from Sound of Music, to Josh Groban. The world felt more at peace.