In the End It Will Be Known

On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I teach my favorite students -- all 4 of them.  This class is Academic 1, but I had these 4 students (plus 2 others, who sadly couldn't continue due to schedule conflicts) last session in Business 2, and 3 of them the session before that, in Business 1.  I absolutely adore these guys, and not just because we've been together since September -- they are hilarious and kind, hard-workers and engaged learners, and take me seriously (but not too seriously).  Basically, I can't imagine a set of students more baller than this.  When my American boss was doing site visits in November and observed one of our Business 2 classes, she said it was one of the best EFL classes she'd ever observed on the Asian continent.  And as much as I would have liked to take credit, I had to admit that it was really all them.  Because it is, true fact.

This past Wednesday, the pre-determined syllabus dictated an "Extra Class," which happens at the end of every unit in this workbook and means I get to ditch the book for a day and do whatever I want.  "Extra class" is basically synonymous with "Game Day," so obviously it's everyone's favorite, and this week I decided to bust out an improvised version of one of my favorite board games from the States: Wise and Otherwise.  The game's catchphrase -- printed on the front of the box -- reads: "The game where the beginning is half the whole, everything with a crooked neck is not a camel, & in the end it will be known who ate the figs."  With a motto like that, how could this not be the greatest game ever?

If you are not a member of my immediate family, the unfortunate truth is that you are probably not familiar with Wise and Otherwise (nor will you fully grasp how awesome it is that I have now brought this game beyond our living room and into the classrooms of Indonesia).  It's a lot like the game Balderdash, and the premise is simple: written on hundreds of cards are the first halves of proverbs and sayings from all over the world.  The moderator picks one and reads it out loud, and each player must then write an original ending -- in effect, finish the proverb.  The moderator then gathers all these potential endings and reads them out loud, and everyone must guess which proverb they think is the real one. You get points for guessing the right answer, and also if people guess your ending as the right answer.  Bite-sized chunks of (sometimes truly comical) wisdom were never produced so readily, nor so enjoyably.

In my EFL version of this game, my students had to finish well-known English proverbs, and the results were by turns hilarious, clever, and totally lovely.  Some of the gems:

If you fall down seven times ... you are unlucky.

You can't kill two birds ... without trouble.

Home is where ... you spend your life.

One man's trash is ... a woman's trouble.

No man is ... nothing.  

The apple never falls ... in love.

I mean, come on.  Can you believe these guys?  Like I said, I have the ballerest students you will ever meet.

But on my token cheesy-ending note, this past Wednesday was probably one of the most enjoyable classes I've taught during my time in Indonesia, and it really is all thanks to those students.  Lately I've been in a bit of what I imagine is a half-time slump, feeling adrift in this experience and questioning what it is I'm really doing here, and it's on days like this when I remember the answer to that question.  After all, there's nothing like re-writing ancient pieces of English language wisdom with 4 amazing young Indonesian adults to shake away the mid-year blues.  Coming up on month 7 out of 12 here, half the whole has already passed, but I'm just holding out that in the end, it will be known that what I did here mattered.  I really hope so.  Whether or not we ever figure out who ate the figs. 

Yum City, Indonesia

Guys, this is yum city.

-- my friend Lolly

Sometimes, tempe bakar (grilled tempeh) and sauteed kangkung (water spinach) are all a girl could ask for in the culinary department of her existence.  And most of the time, these delicious Indonesian dishes suffice.  But variety is the spice of life, is it not?  Sometimes, a girl asks for more.  And this past week, she received.  Watch and observe, O ye of little faith, and you will learn what can happen when a bunch of creative twenty-somethings living abroad in Asia get a little too tired of rice:

Sunday, 14 February 2010  Valentine's Day Potluck at Lolly and Megan's.  Where do I even begin?  Lolly found some whole-wheat linguini in the cupboard of her homestay's communal kitchen, which was pretty special since none of us have seen whole grains in months (Indonesians like their white white Wonderbread, wouldn'tchaknow), and tossed it with whole garlic and broccoli which she'd bought fresh from the pasar that morning.  Megan baked eggplant with some amazing tomatoey sauce she'd whipped up, and Colin pureed carrots with basil and yogurt for an exquisite thick orange soup.  Emma and Cyrus pulled through, as always, with an Indian potato-and-vegetable curry incorporating spices they'd brought back from their holiday travels in India, and Luna showed up with a small barrel of mashed potatoes (half 'n half regular and sweet).  And my contribution?  Banana chocolate chip pancakes, courtesy of the Bisquick hand-schlepped from the USA first by my father and then by my mother, for dessert.  Heart-shaped, of course.

Monday, 15 February 2010  Day-After-Valentine's-Day-Potluck leftovers at Lolly and Megan's.  Just as delicious cold.

Tuesday, 16 February 2010  Cyrus' tourist visa ran out last week, which meant he had to leave the country and re-enter to get a fresh visa.  So while he was in Singapore for 24 hours, he picked us up what he thought were black beans -- black bean burritos, here we come!  And just as our fantasies of homemade Mexican food were getting too delicious to be true, reality reared its deceptive head and revealed that, as it turned out, these were soybeans.  Soybean burritos, here we come?  Exxxxactly.  Whipping some culinary magic outta his back pocket, Cyrus boiled those little beans down, added some veggies, and thanks to Emma's prowess with cake flour and oil, we had ourselves some mean soybean burritos that night.  Best Mexican-Asian fusion south of the equator, I swear.

Wednesday, 17 February 2010  Luna brought over some tiny round eggplants, which we sauteed and added to the leftover soybean burrito filling from the previous night.  I whipped up some Southwest-style guacamole (avocados can be good for other things besides avocado shakes, it's true) and we had ourselves Mexican-Asian fusion Night Two, with dragonfruit for dessert.  Doesn't that color make you want to dance?  Or maybe just eat dragonfruit?

Thursday, 18 February 2010 Deciding to play it easy, Emma, Cyrus and I settled on a simple gado-gado style pasta and peanut sauce dish for this evening.  It was shaping up to be heartily peanut-y, if a bit bland, until Cyrus dumped about a quarter cup of chili sauce from Makassar into the mix.  I still maintain it all ended up great, though we did spend most of the meal with tears streaming down our faces.  Better bawling than bland, right?

Friday, 19 February 2010  Friday night is jazz night at ViaVia, a tourist cafe downtown, so E, C and I took a break from the kitchen and headed down for some good eats and good music.  (ViaVia, it should be noted, also serves Storm, a Balinese beer that, frankly, knocks Bintang out of the park.)  Over a round of Storm Golden Ales, we enjoyed lamb curry, goat cheese salad, fried tempe and calamari.  Over another round of Storm Golden Ales, we enjoyed the jazz, and over yet another round of Storm Golden Ales (though only for Cyrus), we simply enjoyed the existence of Storm Golden Ale.  It wasn't cheap, but hey -- every once in a while, I'd say we deserve to splurge on brews with more kick than our usual 5% Pilsners.  Bintang's fine and good, but sometimes fine and good just doesn't cut it.  

Saturday, 20 February 2010  At around 1:30PM on this day, out to lunch with Lolls, Cols and Meg, I had my first taste of sushi in at least 7 months.  Swoon.  We were at a restaurant that serves not only Japanese food, but also Korean and Chinese food as well, so I guess I'll have to go back for kimchi and dimsum at sum point.  It was no Osaka (Western Mass represent!) but it was a Spicy Rainbow Roll -- which are hard to come by in this town -- so I'll take what I can get.  It's easy to forget sometimes, but a life without wasabi is really no life at all.

Sunday, 21 February 2010  This morning I slid back in to home plate from my week of culinary revelry the same way I started out -- with pancakes.  I wanted to experiment with coconut milk, so I just used that in place of regular milk in the batter, with favorable results: the pancakes did have a vaguely coconutty flavor.  And anyway, it's really kind of impossible to go wrong with Bisquick.  Thanks mom and dad!

So as you can see, with a few imported goods and a little ingenuity, the great eats of the world can be had, well, anywhere in the world.  Hungry yet?

When it Rains ...

... yep, you got it.  It pours.  No, but like -- it actually pours.  Such that, though one rode one's bicycle, Maurice, to work, one nevertheless finds it necessary to swim home.  With Maurice.

So, it seems that the much-anticipated Rainy Season, though unfashionably late, has arrived.  For realz.  It's been raining pretty regularly over the past few weeks, which means that sometime during the early or late afternoon clouds gather, the sky turns ominously black, and an ocean of fresh water pours forth from the sky in the form of nine gazillion fatty raindrops.  Somehow, up to this point, I've been able to avoid having to go out during the worst of the monsoons and have successfully limited my transit necessities to times when it is only drizzling.  Mission "Don't Let My Work Shoes Start Molding" thus far accomplished.

Today, sadly, this was not the case.  (I should have known, since it hadn't rained in two days and when I woke up this morning to check the weather, my iGoogle gadget informed me that it was about 88ºF with 91% humidity.  Great.)  The rain started as I walked in to teach my 1PM class, and by the time I dismissed my students at 2:45 and gathered my things to go home, the tropical thunderstorm was in full swing, complete with dramatic flashes of lightning and show-offy cracks of apocalyptic thunder.  My choices were few: 1) stay at school and wait for the rain to stop, or 2) go home in the rain.  It being Friday, I was in no mood to hang around the office, and besides, this was always going to happen sooner or later.  Time to face the music, Fiona, and pull out those flippers.

Preparing to go home in the downpour, of course, was a full operation.  First, I rolled my sleeves up above my elbows and rolled my pants up above my knees, to minimize the square inchage of clothing that would get completely soaked.  Then, I took off my work shoes, put them in my backpack, and changed into my Old Navy flip-flops that I carry in Maurice's basket in a plastic bag in case of this precise situation.  Finally, I donned my bright blue one-size-fits-all poncho, complete with reflector stripes, and fitted my helmet over the hood on my head.  Outfitted thus, I was ready to brave Noah's Ark Take Two.  Yogya doesn't have the best drainage system, so most of my ten-minute bike ride home was performed through one continuous lake of varying depths.  The better moments were when the lake was only a few inches deep; the worse moments were when the water came to pedal level, halfway up Maurice's wheels, and I wondered if we might just kind of tip over and float away.  It didn't help that I couldn't see much since Mother Earth was giving my exposed face a good raindrop scrubbing, but Maurice and I made it home without any hydroplane mishaps and surprisingly only mildly soaked.  And after I changed my clothes and toweled off my face and limbs, you almost couldn't tell I'd just invented a new water sport on my way home from work.  

Best of all, of course, was that my work shoes (in my backpack and under my poncho) stayed dry.  No mold for those loafers today!  But I'm not going to count my chickies before they hatch -- I've heard my share of mold horror stories, and with weather like this, you just never know.  It's the tropics, after all.  Stuff molds. Whatcha gonna do but keep the fan on and your fingers crossed?  And wear all your clothes as often as possible, I guess, so they don't stay stationary.  I've heard that helps.