And done

The blog has definitely been forgotten. In all the excitement, finding time to write about what's going on here has been.. well, in a way there has been plenty of other things to get on with. However to bring this page up to date: I have moved into a house in Bandung in an area of North Bandung, Dago, and since January I have been working for English First as an EFL teacher.

The two months that I've been in Indonesia seem to have flown by. After the initial week or so staying with Anja's folks in Upper Dago; their village is Ciburial, a week which, thanks to Gary and Siegrun's fantastic hospitality and culturally balanced environment, provided a gentle shift from West to East; we both headed to West Sumatra, the Island north of Java for one week, before returning to Bandung and heading to the south coast of Java to celebrate the Christmas holiday with Anja's parents. New Years was vastly different to the last few and was spent at Fashion Pasta an Italian restaurant which overlooks the city of Bandung. The night was accompanied by a small string band and four singers who rotated throughout the evening, which played a variety of eastern and western music and felt special. It was one of those events that you know is a once only affair. The set-up was two guitars, mandolins, and an instrument that I'd describe as a three-string cello and was simply surreal. What was really funny to see, was the way in which the majority of people seemed to bring in New Year together at midnight and then by quarter past, seemed to evaporate.

That more or less covers life in the first month in Indonesia in terms of events and what happened. Personal reflections are harder to put down on paper. I'm not sure that the phrase culture shock would be proper for the way I felt when I arrived in the country. It was more a sense of pure wonder. In a way, with the abundance of photos and information about anywhere you care to look at on the Internet, you can create a fairly good mind's eye of how a place might look and feel; you expect the heat and humidity when you step out of the plane so when it happens it isn't so much of a shock, but it still feels incredible. An entry in my diary from the first few days here reads: I'm astounded by everything and surprised by nothing. Livingwithin view of but outside the city, in the hills meant that Bandung wasn't in my face initially. It also heightened the intrigue: looking at it everyday, down below, wondering how it worked and what it felt like.

For me, one of the greatest experiences when stepping outside the environment to which you've become accustomed, is the feeling that so much is so new. The knowledge that you're really looking at the world and noticing it objectively. You walk around, drive, ride, all with eyes wide open, attempting to take everything in. To this end, everything here is so different visually, from what I've become accustomed to in Europe.