I have a lot more sympathy for students with long days of classes now! Fulbright was willing to cover two weeks of language for either 4 or 6 hours per day. I chose to have the full six-hours per day. And they gave me the option of trying to find someplace in Bali to take classes, but nothing looked like it had the same reputation or design as the Yogyakarta classes (Bali was mostly taught in your own hotel or house at some of the resort towns, Yogya is formal classes in a school setting with a number of students and teachers).
I would have liked to have taken classes earlier but all of the 8am slots were taken so I opted for 10:15-17:00 Monday through Friday with a 4-hour fieldtrip on the first Saturday. In retrospect, I think that four hours per day is probably the most effective thing to do. (4/day for three weeks would have been great :-). I took my classes from Wisma Bahasa which has it set up with four sessions per day (approx. 8-10am, 10-12, 1-3, 3-5, and 5-7pm). On any given day, each class is taught by a different teacher so you get different perspectives and teaching styles which I liked. Tim and I took classes in Session 2, 3, 4 with a lunch break between #2 and #3. I sometimes felt that I was actually speaking less Indonesian by the last session that I was at the first -- just completely brain-dead after that much time in the classroom, I felt sorry for that last teacher. But despite that bit of whining, it was actually really great. I learned a lot and have a lot of notes to go back to and study the words that I wrote down but still can't actually remember in the course of conversation. Wisma seems pretty well-known. Even when we were miles away from the school, when we mentioned what we were doing in Yogya, we were often asked if we were at Wisma Bahasa and people seemed impressed that we were.
Tim and I chose to take a Wisma Bahasa tour to Prambanaan Temple and talked our teacher into taking us by Plaosan Temple too on the way home (more on that below). We also signed up for a cooking class that replaced our morning session on the first Friday. It was a really great learning experience -- one of the teachers (Guru Ana) did the class and it was a really good chance for us to learn while doing something at the same time (and learn vocabulary that will help when I'm shopping!). Another lesson in why active learning is so important. After that class, one of the teachers (Guru Isna) suggested that we sign up for the batik class also. Tim felt like he needed to stay in class but I thought it sounded like a good idea and paid the extra for that class. It turned out it was a three-session (one per day for three days on the second week) course taught by an outside batik expert and his disciples. Really interesting although the vocabulary won't be nearly as useful as that from the cooking class.
After the first few days we started feeling a little sorry for ourselves because most things don't open until 8:30 or 9am and close before 5pm. So our schedule left very little time to see things like museums that we had hoped to visit. We got to the main archaeology museum in Yogya on our free Sunday, but I also really wanted to go to the zoo -- I have fond memories of hanging out with the orang-hutan when we lived here in 1982 and wanted to see how the zoo had changed. I talked to the Wisma administration and they were able to push two days back to starting after lunch and running until 7pm. Which was going to give us time to see the zoo on one day and get to the market to buy a flat sheet on the other (Indonesians sleep under quilts and while fitted sheets are everywhere, flat ones are nowhere to be found and we were dying in Payangan -- too hot for us to actually sleep, but too many bugs if we weren't covered by the quilt). BUT! When the teachers found out I'd switched to a 7pm finish they were horrified and two of them tried to talk me out of it. Finally Guru Roro (my main teacher) came up with a plan. I would have class from 10-5 as usual, but we could go to the zoo as part of my final class, and I could get up early (have to get up early so as not to miss my great hotel breakfast!) on one day, take a taxi to the market, find a thin blanket and be back to class by 10am (she actually tried to talk me into going to the market for one of my classes too, but I nixed that idea). Most students were only their in the morning, a few until 3pm, and often only Tim and I left at 5pm. The teachers really didn't want to be there until 7pm.
Cooking Class
Saturday Fieldtrip!
Candi Prambanaan is a Hindu temple built in the 9th century and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There's been a lot of reconstruction, but there are still a ton of stones sitting around the periphery that no one can figure out where to put. And a lot of the stones in the temple today have been reconstructed. It is a Shiva temple (so Shiva gets center stage) with three large temples for Shiva, Bramha and Visnu, smaller temples for their rides, and then a ton (originally over 200, I read) of smaller structures in the compound. There is a great story about the ruler falling in love with a girl (who was decidedly not interested) who agreed to marry him if he could finish the compound by daybreak. He had a bunch of demons helping out and when it looked like he was actually going to finish in time, she sweet-talked a rooster into crowing early and was thus able to avoid a really bad marriage! :-) You go! Rooster!
There must have been 5,000 school tours at Prambanaan that Saturday. They were from all over the county and every.single.class had been given an assignment to interview a foreigner. At first we kept stopping to answer their questions and be on their video interviews, but after about the fifth interview and the realization that we'd never be able to see the temple, we had to start saying 'no,' although it made me feel really guilty.
Making batik!
Batik class was a lot of fun and fascinating because we used natural dyes and mordants. They let me cheat and trace a simple pattern onto some white cloth with a soft pencil. I then used the canting ('chan-ting') to dip in hot wax ("malam," a mix of beeswax, paraffin, and resin) to trace the pencil. I am pretty bad at this so had to also turn the fabric over and re-trace on the backside to ensure that the wax wasn't just on one side of the fabric. The images were pretty simple outlines and I got to use my imagination to decide how to fill them in. On my work there was a lot of dripping of hot wax (you have to remember to clean the gegang or arm of the tedi or canting each time you fill it; I was not capable of remembering that. And you have to hold the tedi at an upward angle (the reverse of holding a fountain pen) so that the malam doesn't pour out of the nyamplung (chamber) and get into everything. From experience, hot wax on tender fingers and palms kinda hurts. |