Hello Java Jazz festival! Thank you, thank you! screeches the American singer.
It’s so good to be here!
Your city is so beautiful!
The last comment is met by a bemused silence from the Indonesians and handful of westerners in the audience.
She clearly hasn’t looked around the place at all, someone nearby says.
Probably thinks she’s in Bali, someone else jokes.
Jakarta is a disgusting place; it’s polluted and noisy. Overcrowded with people, rats, motorbikes. A browner-than-brown river of shit parades through the middle of the city. There are few pavements; instead at the side of the road is rubble, mud, tar and mystifying puddles that stay there when there is no rain. You could easily slip into the open, frothy sewers and in fact doing so seems to be a right of passage for new teachers (I haven’t yet). Everything seems half-built or half-demolished except the conspicuous giant shopping malls, like numerous palaces in a dark swampland.
And I absolutely love it. I already have a deep-set, illogical love for Jakarta.
Within three hours of my plane touching down in Indonesia I was backstage at a gig talking to a band and ended up going to their house/mansion for a jam and some beers. Also met an amazing girl who works for a magazine and she gave me and some other teachers free tickets to Java Jazz festival the following weekend. An instant social group on my first day. The band invited me back to their place any time to use their personal recording studio.
I think I might be in the right place!
I’m living in Kalimalang which is in east Jakarta and there’s not really a lot here. A main road runs past the school and it’s the most mental road I’ve ever seen. It tops anything I saw in Thailand. The most amazing thing about the traffic in Jakarta is the mutual understanding between all the idiots who are driving. A car pulls straight out into a stream of oncoming traffic and the mass of vehicles just somehow slot around it without any fuss. Moses wannabes in plain clothes stand in the middle of the road with whistles, flapping their arms and shouting, escorting vans out from the side roads, graciously and smoothly accepting tips from wound down windows of moving vehicles, one fluid motion of bribery. And as a pedestrian crossing the road, you simply walk out into the traffic with your arm out, palm outstretched as if you’re pushing the traffic back one-handed and sure enough everything will probably stop at the last second rather than run you over.
Travelling around can take anything from forty minutes to three hours. Jakarta is such a big place that sometimes even when the traffic is good it can take nearly two hours on the motorway to get to where you’re going, like driving from one city to another in England.
The options for public transport are taxi, onkot (kind of like a small blue van that everyone crams into the back of) or ojek (a motorbike taxi). I haven’t seen any buses and I don’t think there’s any kind of train line (there’s a half-finished bridge system which was abandoned due to corruption). The best thing to do is make friends with someone with a car, and have lots of patience.
My job is so different from my previous one that I almost keep laughing to myself. Little things, like being allowed to use a photocopier whenever you feel like it, not having to fill in request slips with all the book names, page numbers etc two days before each lesson. No one scrutinises your lesson plans unless you want some help and ideas. It doesn’t matter if a lesson starts a minute or two late (in fact it’s kind of expected because Indonesians are always late anyway). And no ridiculous amounts of paperwork thanks to the computer system where you record all attendance and quiz/test scores. The teaching syllabus follows the school's own course books, but teachers don’t have to use them religiously. The books are there as a guide of what you should be covering and some of it’s pretty dull so you have to jazz each lesson up quite a lot, but it’s great that there’s something substantial to work from in the first place. The main point of the lessons anyway is to have fun, and the older learners in particular are happiest if they can just have a big chat and debate about something in English for the last few minutes of the lesson. It’s so much easier than my job in Thailand and at the same time I feel like I’m teaching a lot more. It helps that the students are all respectful and sensible enough to just get on with what you tell them to do without any stupid battles. I don’t understand why it’s so different here but I’m not going to question it! If I could swap any of my students here for ones that I had in Thailand I would do nothing, change nothing.
The people in general I feel a great connection with. They have a good sense of humour, great taste in music, understanding of other cultures and huge pride in their own. In Thailand people would point, laugh and overuse the word “farang!” The Indonesian word for Westerners is “bule” but so far I’ve not had anyone shouting it at my face, instead they say “Good evening!” or something a bit more human like that. Kids chase me down the street just to say “Hello Mr!” And at a park in nearby Bogor we had to stop a couple of times so that some overexcited teenagers could have photos taken with me and my friend Will.
What a bizarre place. You can be walking home in the early hours, near-full moon overhead, large bats flapping around and the spooky noise of several mosques battling with their calls to prayer over the loud tannoys – close, meandering melodies. Rats scurrying, street dogs howling, that quality of dawn light you can only get when you’re this close to the equator.
It’s so good to be here.
Your city is so beautiful.
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Saturday, 20 February 2010
No, she went by boat
Everything's changed.
Job
I no longer work in Surat Thani. "The job didn't work out" is the official line I'm using on everyone. I found the place and the job exciting at first, but eventually I was finding everyday life pretty dull and was just living for the weekends. I also had some difficult classes which never really got any easier. My naive hopes about Thai school kids - they would all be quiet, polite, meek and humble - were way off the mark! They're absolutely bonkers. And one high school class was so...stupid that I didn't know what to do with them half the time. After a week of trying desperately to teach them how to say what time it is in English, I finally realised that most of the class couldn't even read a clock-face and say it in Thai!
I also didn't really click with the senior teachers and in the end it was quite a relief to leave, despite forming some good friendships along the way.
Thai people
I'm starting to get frustrated with Thailand in general; the smiley, happy-go-lucky 'mai pen rai' culture belies a people who are actually at times quite narrow-minded. I've learnt enough Thai now to know just how rude, even racist they are being sometimes. Yet Thai people seem to aspire to be white and find dark skin really ugly, and there's no taboo about making this very clear to black people. Why doesn't anyone ever talk about anything real? Why doesn't anyone ever worry about things that need to be worried about? Why is everyone so lazy? After twenty-eight years of fighting against the system, hating money and ignoring politics, I've come to Thailand and it's turning me into a right-wing capitalist. There's something wrong going on, I'd better get out.
Backpacking like a proper backpacker, not a pretend teacher
On the bright side, in my four months in Thailand I've travelled most of the south. I've also now been to a Full-Moon party (which I could have written a whole blog about but there's no time for all that now). I recently spent some time on the infamous Khao San road in Bangkok and made friends with Israelis, Slovenians, a Danish businessman etc.
I went to Kuala Lumpur when my work visa was cancelled so that I could re-enter the country on a 30-day tourist visa and I absolutely loved the place. It's so multi-cultural and somehow sophisticated. I walked around in the loudest thunderstorm ever in the world and looked at massive buildings, museums and a butterfly park. The people speak incredible English and even their own language sounds strangely similar to a Westcountry burr.
Me v Airports
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a terrible flier. Not because I have a fear of flights, but because of that stupid thing called 'time'. When my work visa was cancelled and I had to be out of Thailand the same day, my bus was delayed by two hours and I missed my flight. The only other flights that evening from Phuket airport were going to strange, far off places like Seoul and Helsinki or whatever. So I bought the next one to Kuala Lumpur which was at 8:00am the next morning. And I waited. For 12 hours. It was a lonely and bizarre experience, in a small airport, just me and the cleaners and a few Spanish travellers sleeping on benches. Then when I finally went through immigration, after no sleep, I got pulled to one side because I was leaving a day late. A stern officer sat me down in front of his desk and asked me several questions, shaking his head disapprovingly at every answer, then he asked if I wanted to pay a fine.
'No', I said.
'No!? Why not?'
'Because I've already had to buy another flight.'
'Hmmm.'
Then he smiled slightly and pointed to a sign which said something about exemption from fines for 1-day overstay.
'So it's ok?' I asked.
'Hmmm. No', he said, his face rigid.
An uncomfortable silence and then he and several of the immigration officers around him all burst out laughing.
Ahh, Thai immigration, those funny, fucking guys.
Then on my way back to Thailand I'd stupidly forgotten that you need to have proof of a return flight or onward journey. So at the check-in at Kuala Lumpur the lady told me to go and buy another ticket. "You have 20 minutes before the check-in closes." I went to the Air Asia ticket office and tried simultaneously queuing and using their computers to book something online. My card was denied and I'd run out of time. I went back to the lady who had already checked my bags in. She spoke with her senior and together they agreed to help me and give me a dummy ticket. They told me what to say if Thai Immigration asked questions and it all felt a bit naughty and illegal. Lovely, lovely, dodgy Malaysians.
So now after all this, am I heading back to England with my tail between my legs?
No, of course not. I'm starting a new job on 1st March in Jakarta. You can expect more regular updates on here from now on, about my time in Chiang Mai where I am now, and then about me struggling to get to grips with another new and entirely different culture. Jakarta!? I've never even lived in a big city before. It's going to be messy.
Job
I no longer work in Surat Thani. "The job didn't work out" is the official line I'm using on everyone. I found the place and the job exciting at first, but eventually I was finding everyday life pretty dull and was just living for the weekends. I also had some difficult classes which never really got any easier. My naive hopes about Thai school kids - they would all be quiet, polite, meek and humble - were way off the mark! They're absolutely bonkers. And one high school class was so...stupid that I didn't know what to do with them half the time. After a week of trying desperately to teach them how to say what time it is in English, I finally realised that most of the class couldn't even read a clock-face and say it in Thai!
I also didn't really click with the senior teachers and in the end it was quite a relief to leave, despite forming some good friendships along the way.
Thai people
I'm starting to get frustrated with Thailand in general; the smiley, happy-go-lucky 'mai pen rai' culture belies a people who are actually at times quite narrow-minded. I've learnt enough Thai now to know just how rude, even racist they are being sometimes. Yet Thai people seem to aspire to be white and find dark skin really ugly, and there's no taboo about making this very clear to black people. Why doesn't anyone ever talk about anything real? Why doesn't anyone ever worry about things that need to be worried about? Why is everyone so lazy? After twenty-eight years of fighting against the system, hating money and ignoring politics, I've come to Thailand and it's turning me into a right-wing capitalist. There's something wrong going on, I'd better get out.
Backpacking like a proper backpacker, not a pretend teacher
On the bright side, in my four months in Thailand I've travelled most of the south. I've also now been to a Full-Moon party (which I could have written a whole blog about but there's no time for all that now). I recently spent some time on the infamous Khao San road in Bangkok and made friends with Israelis, Slovenians, a Danish businessman etc.
I went to Kuala Lumpur when my work visa was cancelled so that I could re-enter the country on a 30-day tourist visa and I absolutely loved the place. It's so multi-cultural and somehow sophisticated. I walked around in the loudest thunderstorm ever in the world and looked at massive buildings, museums and a butterfly park. The people speak incredible English and even their own language sounds strangely similar to a Westcountry burr.
Me v Airports
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a terrible flier. Not because I have a fear of flights, but because of that stupid thing called 'time'. When my work visa was cancelled and I had to be out of Thailand the same day, my bus was delayed by two hours and I missed my flight. The only other flights that evening from Phuket airport were going to strange, far off places like Seoul and Helsinki or whatever. So I bought the next one to Kuala Lumpur which was at 8:00am the next morning. And I waited. For 12 hours. It was a lonely and bizarre experience, in a small airport, just me and the cleaners and a few Spanish travellers sleeping on benches. Then when I finally went through immigration, after no sleep, I got pulled to one side because I was leaving a day late. A stern officer sat me down in front of his desk and asked me several questions, shaking his head disapprovingly at every answer, then he asked if I wanted to pay a fine.
'No', I said.
'No!? Why not?'
'Because I've already had to buy another flight.'
'Hmmm.'
Then he smiled slightly and pointed to a sign which said something about exemption from fines for 1-day overstay.
'So it's ok?' I asked.
'Hmmm. No', he said, his face rigid.
An uncomfortable silence and then he and several of the immigration officers around him all burst out laughing.
Ahh, Thai immigration, those funny, fucking guys.
Then on my way back to Thailand I'd stupidly forgotten that you need to have proof of a return flight or onward journey. So at the check-in at Kuala Lumpur the lady told me to go and buy another ticket. "You have 20 minutes before the check-in closes." I went to the Air Asia ticket office and tried simultaneously queuing and using their computers to book something online. My card was denied and I'd run out of time. I went back to the lady who had already checked my bags in. She spoke with her senior and together they agreed to help me and give me a dummy ticket. They told me what to say if Thai Immigration asked questions and it all felt a bit naughty and illegal. Lovely, lovely, dodgy Malaysians.
So now after all this, am I heading back to England with my tail between my legs?
No, of course not. I'm starting a new job on 1st March in Jakarta. You can expect more regular updates on here from now on, about my time in Chiang Mai where I am now, and then about me struggling to get to grips with another new and entirely different culture. Jakarta!? I've never even lived in a big city before. It's going to be messy.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Lust In Translation 2
Fa comes up to me in the office with a slip of paper. All the other teachers’ names are scrawled on it, alongside mobile numbers and email addresses. Some of the names are misspelt and it’s all in the same curious handwriting.
‘Jooooon, can you write?’
I write my name and number and it instantly looks out of place on the paper.
Sure enough later that day I get a message - ‘Jon what do you do? (Fa)’
It’s a good question and one that I should ask myself more often. But I assume she meant it in the present progressive so I reply ‘I’m at home reading a book’. She replies ‘Me also reading a book. And you?’
And this was the beginning.
She likes to send about 10 messages a day and if I don’t reply quickly enough she rings my phone and cuts off before I answer, just in case I hadn’t heard the message tone.
She came into the office one day with two bits of weird Thai fruit that I hate – the pink sort with sharp green spikes protruding out around it, a bit like the visual representation of the HIV virus. I wrapped them in paper and put them in the bin.
For my birthday I received some of the most amazing gifts – t-shirts that I wouldn’t have picked myself but look great on me, a crate of beer, a cheap but usable toy guitar to entertain the kids with…and a weird plastic inflatable cat-type thing that looked like it was made by a 5-year-old. Obviously most of these presents were from the other teachers who by now know me quite well. Alongside the cat was a note which read ‘I wish you happy always’. I was puzzling over which way up the cat was supposed to be and what it was meant to be used for (it looked kind of like a key ring) when Fa came over and demonstrated that it’s something you attach to your mobile phone. So she attached it to my mobile and I smiled and thanked her in Thai.
On Christmas day I went to a party and the cat ‘fell off’, never to be seen again.
My second date with Fa came about in a similar way to the first. Some miscommunication in the office, some mention of a ‘movie’ but then lots of frantic phone calls after I’d left work. I then realised that she thought I’d agreed to meet her at the Coliseum, so, feeling bad I rode my bike over there. There she was waiting outside. I thought we were about to go inside to the cinema but she tried to explain something else and we went in a tuktuk. By now it was nearly 5:30pm and I’d agreed to go to a boxing day Christmas dinner at another teacher’s house at 8pm. Maybe still time for a movie? The tuktuk dropped us at a main road a few minutes away and we went into a photo developing shop. It turned out Fa was on a quick work errand, putting together some photos of the teachers and students for advertising purposes. 30 minutes dragged by, with her asking my opinion on sizes and frames and whatnot. When we finally got in the tuktuk to go back to the Coliseum I had to explain to her.
‘I’m sorry Fa, I go to Christmas dinner at 8 o’clock.’
She shook her head not understanding.
‘8pm, Christmas dinner. I said to other teachers I will be there. They buy food for me’
She still didn’t quite get it.
I don’t have a watch, so I took my phone out of my pocket ‘Look, now 6:10pm, I go to dinner 8pm.’
‘Where is gift?’
‘What?’
‘Gift?’
She pointed at my phone and my heart sank.
Just you try demonstrating to someone who doesn’t understand your language that something ‘fell off’, rather than ‘was pulled off’. It’s a subtle difference and one which I couldn’t clarify, and even if I could it would have been a sodding great lie.
‘Jooooon, can you write?’
I write my name and number and it instantly looks out of place on the paper.
Sure enough later that day I get a message - ‘Jon what do you do? (Fa)’
It’s a good question and one that I should ask myself more often. But I assume she meant it in the present progressive so I reply ‘I’m at home reading a book’. She replies ‘Me also reading a book. And you?’
And this was the beginning.
She likes to send about 10 messages a day and if I don’t reply quickly enough she rings my phone and cuts off before I answer, just in case I hadn’t heard the message tone.
She came into the office one day with two bits of weird Thai fruit that I hate – the pink sort with sharp green spikes protruding out around it, a bit like the visual representation of the HIV virus. I wrapped them in paper and put them in the bin.
For my birthday I received some of the most amazing gifts – t-shirts that I wouldn’t have picked myself but look great on me, a crate of beer, a cheap but usable toy guitar to entertain the kids with…and a weird plastic inflatable cat-type thing that looked like it was made by a 5-year-old. Obviously most of these presents were from the other teachers who by now know me quite well. Alongside the cat was a note which read ‘I wish you happy always’. I was puzzling over which way up the cat was supposed to be and what it was meant to be used for (it looked kind of like a key ring) when Fa came over and demonstrated that it’s something you attach to your mobile phone. So she attached it to my mobile and I smiled and thanked her in Thai.
On Christmas day I went to a party and the cat ‘fell off’, never to be seen again.
My second date with Fa came about in a similar way to the first. Some miscommunication in the office, some mention of a ‘movie’ but then lots of frantic phone calls after I’d left work. I then realised that she thought I’d agreed to meet her at the Coliseum, so, feeling bad I rode my bike over there. There she was waiting outside. I thought we were about to go inside to the cinema but she tried to explain something else and we went in a tuktuk. By now it was nearly 5:30pm and I’d agreed to go to a boxing day Christmas dinner at another teacher’s house at 8pm. Maybe still time for a movie? The tuktuk dropped us at a main road a few minutes away and we went into a photo developing shop. It turned out Fa was on a quick work errand, putting together some photos of the teachers and students for advertising purposes. 30 minutes dragged by, with her asking my opinion on sizes and frames and whatnot. When we finally got in the tuktuk to go back to the Coliseum I had to explain to her.
‘I’m sorry Fa, I go to Christmas dinner at 8 o’clock.’
She shook her head not understanding.
‘8pm, Christmas dinner. I said to other teachers I will be there. They buy food for me’
She still didn’t quite get it.
I don’t have a watch, so I took my phone out of my pocket ‘Look, now 6:10pm, I go to dinner 8pm.’
‘Where is gift?’
‘What?’
‘Gift?’
She pointed at my phone and my heart sank.
Just you try demonstrating to someone who doesn’t understand your language that something ‘fell off’, rather than ‘was pulled off’. It’s a subtle difference and one which I couldn’t clarify, and even if I could it would have been a sodding great lie.
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