This morning I went for just a short walk around the hotel area and stumbled upon a parade of child marching bands wearing a variety of brightly colored uniforms and absolutely out of unison – maybe age 8 or so – playing what I have google-learned since are called melodicas, little toy pianos that only operate when you blow into them through a tube, and also various sorts of xylophones, including ones shaped like a harp that you hold like a shield, and lots of drums. There were dozens of these bands marching down the city street, which was also, in the other two lanes, a regular city street in Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia, which is to say incredibly busy with cars and motorcycles and busses and, because it was Sunday in Surabaya, bicycle clubs, all of which were compressed now into two lanes instead of four to accommodate the children’s marching bands.  They were playing traditional Surabaya songs, which I knew because the police officer who came over to introduce himself to me while he waved the traffic along began singing loudly with them. It is the Muslim New Year this weekend, so there’s a lot going on. 

Ibu Umi found me in the hotel breakfast area later, and we met up with her contact, an English teacher from Sumenep, the city on the eastern tip of Madura Island where I am now. He had already driven about five hours with a driver, just to turn around and drive another five hours back with us.  Fortunately the road in Madura was very smooth, freshly paved, we learned, because the previous President, who went simply by the initial SBY, visited recently while he was still the president, and I was grateful.

You get to Madura by crossing a long bridge from Java, about five kilometers, and then strangely the climate becomes markedly different – still hot, of course, but now arid. It’s much less green and lush, though from the car in most other respects it looked a lot like rural Javanese cities. Madura has an odd reputation in Indonesia – it’s supposed to be sort of rough and rude, which after wandering around Sumenep this evening seems strange. It is one of the cleanest cities I’ve been to in Indonesia, and in the central park there are all these contraptions that are attached to motorcycles and will carry around passengers. There were dozens of them, and the outsides are hand made out of carved and painted foam into elaborate and really quite bizarre shapes. The park is filled with tightly pruned trees, and kids can rent miniature motorcycles and zoom around the place, which they do some quite quickly and with their baby brother sitting in the front often, and of course no one wears a helmet. And something completely unprecedented happened to me at that park, not only for Indonesia but for my travels anywhere: I bought some stickers from a woman – less than two dollars worth – and she gave me a discount, because I was a visitor. So far I haven’t seen the rough part.

That is my friend Umi standing next to a giant foam carved baby vehicle

It is very hot here, and humid, and quite devout as well, which means that I can’t buy a beer even in the Alfamart, which always can be counted on for beer.

Tomorrow Asadi from the school will pick us up – he said the ceremony begins at eight. Of course there is a ceremony, and there will be speeches and local dignitaries and snacks and handshakes and lots of pictures, and then I’ll meet with a group of students – about a hundred I am told. I asked Asadi today what they were expecting, and he began talking about how they need to learn the about where the predicate is in English, because they get it confused with Indonesian. “I hope it will be okay if I don’t talk about that,” I said. Tomorrow it’s just with students, and only for the morning. Tuesday and Wednesday are for teachers. Asadi asked me if I wanted to wear a sarong, which most other men and boys will be wearing, but I said no, because I imagined putting it on wrong and then having it fall off while I was talking, which there would be no way I could ever recover from. I do get to teach in bare feet again, which I never get to do in the United States…