I taught my third class on Friday, and the first in my life barefoot. My Critical Reading Class (Monday, 12-2) and my Public Speaking Class (Thursday, 2-5) are in traditional classrooms, but the Academic Writing class (Friday, 11-2) is in a computer classroom in the library, stocked with an array of old Samsung PCs two to a table and three rows of tables across.  Before entering, my students and I removed our shoes and put them in a little cubby right by the door, I presume because the room is carpeted and rain here comes not as raindrops but apparently from endless faucets turned on full blast in the clouds and leaving on your shoes would ruin the carpet, much the way carpets quickly get ruined in the muddy springs of Bozeman. There was something delightful about teaching barefoot, I have to say, though I can’t quite figure out why I found it so pleasant.

            I also found the air-conditioning in the computer classroom enormously pleasant as well, because it staved off the cosmic outpouring of perspiration that joined me as I began my other two classes. It was like I had spent the previous 30 minutes sprinting in circles in a steam room, and then gone to teach. Some of this is the humidity – I’ve figured out that I need to wear a different shirt than I ride my bike to school in, and that I need to have a small towel at my desk to help me recover from said ride – and some of it was no doubt from the excited energy of my first classes in a brand new place, but it was a little ridiculous, my skin shiny, little beads of perspiration dripping down my face, a hulking hairy sweaty bule whose attempts to pronounce his students’ names were likely the comic highlight of their week. (That damn “e” sound – it kills me the way the sound at the beginning of “Adel” and “Abeer” struck me down when I worked with my students from the Middle East. The biggest laugh came when I pronounced as “wahoo” the name correctly pronounced “way-hugh”.)

            I had been warned by both teachers and students that my students would be incredibly resistant to speak, and that perhaps my expectations for a dynamic classroom with lively discussion were too high. I made it pretty clear that they’d have to talk, mostly because I didn’t come halfway across the world to hear my own voice some more, and they appeared no less willing to talk than my college students anywhere else – that is, they don’t expect to be asked to speak a lot, and when they are, they aren’t sure you really want them to, so it takes a little time. “You have this in common with my students from Montana,” I told them, about the apparently universal habit of immediately looking down and pretending to be busy when the teacher asks a question and no one wants to speak.

            There are more demands on my time as a teacher than I wanted there to be, and sometimes I get a little annoyed about that, but by the same token it’s not hard teaching, and I have two kids in school 5 days a week so it’s not like my classroom is keeping me from traveling. My university has no problem with me rescheduling classes when my kids have breaks, so we can go travel – we’re planning a trip to Bali in October. (This will be a very serious scholarly sort of Balinese junket, just so you don’t think I am being frivolous.) I was told by Tina, the woman in Jakarta who helps arrange all these things, that  this was not a job, it was a grant, but it’s feeling pretty joblike at the moment. However, I am also grateful to have extended contact with a group of young Indonesians because I know they will be a gateway for me into an incredible perspective on the place where we’re living, and I can already tell that it will be fun to teach, even with the frustrations. 

            Also, all of the classes are taught in sort of blocks, five or six teachers doing different sections, and all of the students have the same textbooks and are supposed to be on the same schedule and do the same assignments, in a much more rigid way that any writing program I have ever worked for or run. Anyone who reads this and who knows me as a teacher will likely find that funny, since I cannot even keep to syllabi and schedules that I create for myself as a teacher, but it does make it easy to prepare for class, and it looks like there won’t be an inordinate amount of time commenting on things. Truthfully, in these regards I am feeling like a glorified lecturer and like free labor for the University, but (another but) the same University paid for my family lodging for the first two weeks while our house was in final preparation, and they hired cars for us twice to Semarang and three times for errands around town and lent us a bunch of furniture and found two magnificent student translators to accompany us and bought us meals and paid our entrance fees to tourist sites and on and on with their generosity, all of which makes me feel a little petty about complaining because I am teaching three classes. The dean is teaching three classes. I have said, politely, that I wanted to talk about this more fully for the spring semester, but I might be as effectual in that as I was trying to bargain down the batik merchant in Solo (who laughed and rattled off a long bemused refusal, the only part of which I understood being “No, bule”).

            We’ve also moved into the house, which is a little ridiculous. There seemed to be some pressure to take the house we were offered the first go around, and we kind of gave into it; in retrospect we should have waited a little bit, because we ended up with a giant unfurnished house (three stories tall, brand new, much larger than the typical Javanese house), and now it’s a giant unfurnished house with three beds and a bunch of loaner furniture and a guard we don’t need. That part is a little frustrating – the gate closes at night and it feels a little like a bunker, and there are echoes when you speak. I’ll get used to it, I suppose, but I wish we had held out a little longer and looked for something smaller and furnished. My mission, now, is to not be the bunkered in ex-pat who lives in the rumah besar baru (giant new house) and yesterday afternoon we went as a family to a couple of the neighbors with some cookies and introduced ourselves and they invited us in and politely tried to make the limited conversation we are capable of making. Still, we learned their names, and they ours, and it felt less isolated already. Graham and I rode our bikes yesterday in the back alleys around our house – they go way back into the country forever, and we ended up outside our maid’s house because she lives next door to one of Graham’s friends from school. Her husband, Pak Jono (Pak is the honorific for men) invited us in an chatted with us and Ibu Kasom (Ibu, for women) came out and greeted us as well and the neighbors (Americans we met through the school who are here, like most of the ex-pats in the ‘hood, on mission work) came over and helped us translate. Pak Jono invited us over for an Idul Fitri celebration to mark the end of Ramadan next Sunday, which was a wonderful invitation and we of course accepted. I know enough Indonesian to ask “What can we bring?” which I learned was not the question to ask, though not in an uncomfortable way. Brian, the American man from next door, explained that they were embarrassed to answer the question, because they would of course say we should bring nothing, but that we should of course bring something, snack foods, perhaps a pound of sugar, things that would help them entertain the guests that would stop by during Idul Fitri.

            Also marking the end of Ramadan is a steady increase in noise. It seems like the calls to prayer have gotten louder and longer, and last night, at 3 AM, a procession went down the alleyway banging a loud drum and playing some sort of chimey thing and singing. It sounded like they were storming the compound, a little, but according to Ibu Kasom, they were just celebrating the end of an even longer fast, and we can expect it tonight and tomorrow night as well. I think this means that when Ramadan is officially over – not sure if it’s Wednesday or Thursday night – the noise will be even crazier: fireworks for hours, endless loud processions, great celebration which of course makes sense because after a month of fasting the return to normal daily life is a reason to party. We’ll see how that goes. Seamus will be off at a retreat to the school (This year’s theme: “Step Into the Light”)  for a couple of days at the end of the week, and I hope he enjoys that. He’s doing well at the school, making friends, keeping his head down, only saying a couple of controversial things (radical comments such as “I like Ellen Degeneres”), and generally doing well. Graham is a little nuts right now, either wholly embracing the experience, as yesterday when we cruised around on some single tracks through the jungle, or collapsing completely at the smallest of upsets, like he did this morning when we didn’t have the right tabs for his notebook, which took us 45 minutes to back him out of, a long depressing fit that is more about his disorientation than about school, I think.

            I have to get ready for class, my last for 10 days because of the Idul Fitri break, although we can’t really travel because there are so many millions of people traveling. Even the streets of Salatiga this morning seemed vastly more crazy than they have been, which will be the state of things for the next week. We’ll be able to explore the back roads outside of Salatiga, I hope, over the next week, and perhaps hike up some of the mountains (the one next to us hits 10,000 feet, which seems extraordinary to me, given that we’re 30 miles from the ocean here).

            Here’s the Jakarta Post reporting on protests about some buffoons in Florida:

Quran burners