Mohon Maaf Lahir dan Bantin....

My apologies for not blogging for some time. Last I talked to you all, I had just gotten into my groove of teaching. However, we then had some off for Idul Fitri so there was a slight disturbance in my weekly schedule...Needless to say, I still think I am still in vacation mode. In any case, I returned back to school last week and I definitely missed all of my students and teachers!

A quick story from before break. My school had a parent teacher conference right before the Idul Fitri holiday. Now in Indonesia, the parent teacher conferences are a bit different than what you think. Instead of sitting in a classroom with your child's teacher, you sit in an auditorium and listen to the headmaster/principal and school administrators talk. And if you are me, you sat through this same speech three times -- once for the tenth grade parents, once for the eleventh grade parents, and once for the twelfth grade classes. Most of the teachers only had to sit on stage until they were introduced and then they were able to leave (this was about 15 minutes). However, being a native English Speaker from America, Rashi got a front row seat on stage, sitting right next to the headmaster himself. For the first speech, the headmaster went through a pretty long introduction for me, which was kind of unexpected. All of a sudden, I notice that a bunch of the people in the audience are all whispering and pointing at me. Unsure of what is happening, I ask a fellow English Teacher what is going on.

Apparently, my headmaster had introduced me to the room as the great granddaughter of Gandhi.

I then had to explain to the room that I was actually born and raised in American although my parents were from India. I didn't know how to break it to them that I wasn't related to Gandhi (and we didn't really learn how to say that in our three week crash course in Bahasa Indonesian), so I guess there are some people who still think I'm related to him. There are worse things I suppose.

Over the break, I was able to visit Gunung Lawu, a huge mountain in Central Java. Getting to the mountain was a bit difficult, but luckily I was with a few friends so it didn't seem too bad. First I took a bus to Solo. Then I took a bus to Tawangmanggu. Then I took another bus to Sarangan. Then we took a van to a hotel near the actual starting point of the hike.

We began climbing the mountain at 9pm with hopes of reaching the summit by sunrise. The hike up was absolutely amazing. The route we took was literally up the side of the mountain so you could see the most beautiful views. I don't think I have ever seen that many stars in my life and the views of the Solo and Madiun below us were equally beautiful. The mountain is 3,339M high so when we reached the top, we were literally above the clouds and had a great view of the sunrise. I have included a picture below:


By the time I returned back to Salatiga, it was time for Hilal Bi Hilal functions. These ceremonies are for people to get together and apologize to each other for any mistakes they made in the past year. All of the teachers and administrators at my school had one. Generally, you greet each other saying, "Mohon Maaf Lahir dan Bantin" or "Selamet Riyadi." Then you sit for awhile and listen to a bunch of speeches made by school administrators and imams. And then you have to shake everyone else's hand and apologize for your mistakes or bad thoughts from the year. They also had music and food, so there was a lot of stuff going on.

Since returning, my teaching schedule has more or less included preparing students for their mid semester tests which are this week.

I will try to blog again soon!