In Salatiga

It's been a few days since I've been able to get an internet connection, and so packed, really, that it seems like 20. We're in a frenzy of activity and craziness here - I'll try to give you a sense.

We flew from Jakarta to Semarang on Tuesday (Indonesian Independence Day) on a full flight. (We were almost the only ones who ate our boxed snacks - everyone else saved them I guess until after sundown). We landed at the Semarang airport and were met by a staff member - Aka - from Satya Wacana, who got us and our absurd amount of luggage "up the hill" as they say here. It's about 40 kilometers from Semarang, and 2,300 feet in elevation, and I had envisioned a winding mountain road past idyllic rice paddies instead of a highway that went straight up and was full of cars and taxis and motorbikes and buses all jostling quite politely for position. There are 130 million people on an island 1/3 the size of Montana - 3rd most densely populated island, after Hong Kong and Manhattan - so there's not a lot of room, pretty much anywhere, and there was never a break in anything, even on the side of the road.

We are staying, presently, at the guest house of the university, and after we got dropped off there, and changed, the Dean of the Faculty of Literature and Languages came and took us out to dinner. He was incredible, generous, friendly, incredibly welcoming, and he put us all at ease. It was a lovely way to spend our 20th anniversary, I can say, in a little restaurant on a back road in Salatiga, and the food was great. I still have not tried the chocolate-avocado shake, but I will.

I'd pictured Salatiga as a sort of quiet city, which I think now is an Indonesian oxymoron, though maybe I am rushing to judgement. While G napped right after we arrived here, S and I went out and took in the sights, strolling through beautiful narrow alleyways until we came upon a central market area, which was packed with stores and people and little food carts. We had some delicious ayam goreng (fried chicken, they love it here, and KFC is the most popular American fast food place, with Pizza Hut a close second, I think - there's a food stand near the University that offers "Ayam Goreng ala Kentucky").  The main street was loud, busy, and fun, and everyone is patient and kind. Salatiga is well off the tourist track, which I think makes people friendlier because they aren't as prone to considering us easy marks.

One of my lingering anxieties about this year was the school where we are sending the kids, an International Christian School. It appeared very religious in much of the information we'd read about. I don't have a particular problem with that, but it makes me a little nervous. When we toured the school on Wednesday (a beautiful facility with lots of space and green) we were very impressed, and several of the teachers came in and greeted us and gave S the homework he had missed (school started here on August 10). The biology teacher's assignment was to cover the book and find three bible verses that had something to do with creation, and to illustrate one of them, and on her syllabus it said they class would (among many other things) explore issues surrounding "creation/evolution." This infuriated S - "These are the people who give America a bad name" he said - and caused no small anxiety in me as well, simply because the idea that there are relational issues between evolution and creation strikes me as silly and certainly well beneath the curriculum in a biology class.

Fortunately, parents night was also on Wednesday, and while we left still knowing that it was a very religious place, we also left thinking the teachers our kids had were for the most part very good, and S and G also felt a lot better about it too. S was most excited about the teacher of his Bible class - they are doing an Old Testament survey this year, and he said he thought his teacher for that class was brilliant, and I am frankly delighted that my son will spend a year reading the Old Testament. Maybe then he won't think I am so mean - I never smote anyone, though I have been smitten.

I also went to my first faculty meeting on Wednesday, where the main topic of concern was that student theses are taking on topics that are too trivial or too general, and how could we help them deal with that. I told them these were apparently universal concerns, since apart from the extraordinary greenery out the window, we could have had the same conversation in my faculty meetings.

We also saw the house that we will rent as soon as it is ready, a brand new three story house right around the corner from the kids school. It's bigger than our house in Bozeman, and nicer, and it's a little ridiculous how cheap it is, and how extravagant. The fact that we'll have a maid and a guard makes me feel a little like a Dutch colonial, frankly. I could do without the guard and am uncomfortable about the maid - what I am told, however, again and again (by Indonesians and ex-pats) is that if we chose not to hire a maid, rather than looking like self-reliant people who are not interested in having servants, we would look like incredibly wealthy people (which we are, obviously, given where we can easily afford to live) who are too stingy to offer employment to people who desperately want to work. And frankly, trying to negotiate the markets and get food without someone who could help right now seems like it would be debilitating and overwhelming. So it is. The house is in a quiet part of town, very green, and today I found a back route that I could use to ride the bike I will buy as soon as I can.

We went back to Semarang yesterday because we had to get a limited stay visa, but we didn't have the right letter of invitation, so they told us we had to come back next week, and I could see all the air and energy leave S when I reported it to him. He was mad and bored and didn't like Indonesia as much as Bozeman and just wanted to come home at that point. We had two other people with us - a person from the International office on campus and an ex-pat faculty member who offered to join us as a help for us, and we would have been helpless without them, absolutely unable to cope. So far, we have been met with such assistance in any minor or major hassle we've had to confront, and I can't say how grateful I am for it. When I told the vice-rector of the University that S was so dejected at having to miss another day of school and drive back to Semarang to get his picture taken, she said "Well, we'll just turn it into an excursion. It won't be about the immigration office. We'll make sure you go to several of the tourist sites in Semarang." When I told S that, he cheered up a great deal. That's the sort of place we are in so far - a place that would be difficult to negotiate but for the wealth of generous people who seem committed to helping us do it.