Apparently I only write in airports.
I’m headed back to Bogor after a week in language school in Jogja. We were nervous about how long it would get here on the bus, so we left super early, leaving me with several hours to kill.
|Bahasa|
means language. Monday-Friday, my new friend, Claire, and I sat six hours each day in a little room with an open window and a fan, at a table with a stack of coloring book quality paper, a little basket of markers and a teacher (each of whom was incredibly skilled at writing upside-down) and tried to cram as many words into our heads as possible. Nearly every word was as different from the one we know as possible. “Jam” means hour and “air” means water, and those are the easy ones. “Guru” means teacher, which is totally cool because we get to say, “Kami di Indonesia untuk bekerja sebagai guru, mengajar bahasa Inggris.” (We are in Indonesia to work as “gurus” teaching English.)
Other than the unfamiliarity of the syllables, it’s actually a very simple language to learn. It has no “to be” verbs, (which is surprisingly hard to get used to.) no tenses for any verb, no articles, and no plurals (if not already indicated somewhere else in the sentence by a word like “we,” you just say the word you want to pluralize twice.) It really is a lot like sign language. It has a beautiful, rambling, babbling quality, like water, since most words have several syllables (all of which are very similar) and very few of the consonants are aspirated (if pronounced at all. Nearly every ending consonant is dropped or just “shaped” but not vocalized. For example, to say “tidak,” meaning “no” or “not,” you close your throat at the end to stop the sound, but don’t actually vocalize the hard “k” sound.)
You learn some interesting cultural characteristics from studying language as well. As opposed to almost entirely gendered languages like French and Spanish, Bahasa has almost no gender distinctions, even for people. There is only one word for “he,” “she,” “his,” “hers,” “him,” and “her.” When speaking of siblings, instead of “brother” and “sister,” you have “older sibling” and “younger sibling,” and it’s up to you to add the gender distinction. I’ve been called “Mr.” more than once, but I’ve been assured that doesn’t actually mean I’ve been mistaken for a man.
It was amazing and kindof hilarious how much of my Spanish came back while studying Indonesian. It was like my brain registered “foreign” and just filled in any gaps in my Bahasa with the appropriate Spanish word. Claire had the same experience with French. Even still, my brain fills in missing “to be” verbs and articles with Spanish. It’s a funny habit to have to break.
Since we’ll be “guru-guru” to refugees, most of whom speak some English and very few of whom speak any Bahasa, I’ll have to be pretty intentional about keeping up what I’ve learned and expanding my vocabulary, but I am determined to belajar (study/learn) mas. (Hold on, “mas” is Spanish.)
|Jalan-jalan|
means to travel as a tourist. It literally translates “walk-walk.” Yep, sounds about right. I’m not a huge fan of being a tourist. I like living places. Settling in and making friends with one tiny piece of a place. Building a nest. Finding a yet more awesome (quiet, preferably solitary) place to sit and read. I got some spectacular pictures of some spectacularly breathtaking temples, but what the pictures don’t show are the hours waiting in crowded bus stations, the hours jostling flouncing along in crowded buses, the hours walking confusedly trying to find the damn things, the hundreds of thousands of kabillions of people already there when we finally did find them—every single one of whom feels that a white person (especially a pretty blond, like my friend, Claire) is a celebrity with whom he or she would like a chat and a photo. Indonesian English teachers bring their classes to tourist sights with the assignment to practice English with a certain number of westerners, requiring signatures or photos as proof. At first we tried to be nice, engaging in conversations, conceding to photos—but we quickly learned that while the first kid was focusing his camera phone, 19, 20, 35 more lined up behind him or just crowded into the picture with us and added their cameras to the stack. Each returned “hello” turned into a 45-minute sweaty photo shoot. Oh yeah, imagine all of everything I just said and add about 150 humid degrees to that image. Sweaty doesn’t begin to cover it. Fortunately this is Indonesia—a culture that values personal hygiene and good smells. I really might’ve passed out anywhere else. By the time we made it up the stairs leading up to the temple (not even the temple itself), we learned to play deaf, avoid eye contact, or quickly hurry around a corner when we heard the tell-tale whispers and giggles of a group of school children gathering the courage to talk to us. Even so we ended up taking many more photos, but only for groups of 2-4 and only after saying “Satu saja,” (Just one.)
|Borobudur|
was the first temple we visited, and is apparently a bucket-list worthy experience.
It’s Buddhist and more than a thousand years old, I think. It was mobbed like a ride at Disneyland, but even so, worth the hassle. It had 5 levels, each representing a layer of the human experience, building up to Nirvana at the topmost level. Every inch of it is covered in intricate relief, depicting Buddha and his disciples, and of course, hundreds and hundreds of Buddhas sit in corners and look out from the walls—most of them now headless.
Also, apparently Nirvana looks like many giant bells.
|Prambanan|
After the challenges presented by Borobudur, we almost couldn’t get it up to go see Prambanan, the Hindu temple about a half hour-45 minutes in a different direction from our starting point (about an hour and a half of actual travel, not counting the waiting at various stops) from Borobudur. In the end we did and it was a dramatically different experience. We arrived in lateish afternoon so the temperature had dropped a bit, and compared to Borobudur, the place seemed empty.
It was so gloriously beautifully tragic. Tall, stately monoliths, standing in formation, casting deep lonely shadows, surrounded by piles of ruins. Random pieces scattered like a half-finished game of chess.
A few of them still had gods in them. The biggest one, devoted to Shiva, was closed off to the public, but the dizzyingly steep steps of two others lead to small, dark, warm rooms where quiet, weathered gods waited, wondering if anyone ever came to pray anymore. They stood (a bit forlornly) in the narrow shafts of gray light that spilled from the doorways, and I hid in the heavy shadows beside them, wondering the same thing. The human heart’s greatest capacity for beauty is born of worship. How deeply sorrowful that such beauty is nearly always misdirected.
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|Things I Intend To Write About In the Near Future|
– The Long Story: How I Ended Up Here On This Little Island With A Big Volcano,
In The First Place.
– Pictures of Indonesia: Actual Pictures, And Descriptions.
– I Start Teaching In A Week: In Which I Freak Out A Little.
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Stay tuned.
P.S. I’m sorry the picture formatting is ugly. I’m still figuring this part out.
not all who wander 