@dgillette - waiting for your tome on the trip to Bogor and Jakarta - did you need the malaria tablets?? Good talking with you when you were here - thanks!
Don't believe I ever got bit by any mosquitos, so malaria seems unlikely, although I still won't be able to donate blood for a year. (My grandfather, a Navy surgeon, picked it up in the Solomons during the war. I don't think his health was ever great after that.)
It was a good trip, aside from taking 36 hours to get home, from the time I got dropped off at the Jakarta airport until I got to my front gate.
[Much of the following was prewritten, and had been sent out to friends and family in the States. I didn't write it all for you.]
Very nice people there, both those involved with the class and all the people I saw on the street when I went out wandering around in the evenings. Walking down the street, people would stop me to talk. I had my picture taken with lots of people, including the police (good people to be friends with). Walking through the informal/illegal sidewalk market (small capitalism at work) one night, a guy came up and started asking me about English pronunciations, like the differences among see, sea, and she. Turns out that he was a primary school English teacher, but his English was not as good as that of the driver we hired to drive us to the tea plantation up in the hills a few days later, who claimed to have learned his from books and watching US movies and TV. Foolishly perhaps, I followed him to his house a short taxi ride and a long way walking through a rabbit warren of alleys and bridges, frequently turning around to try to memorize the turns. (I was imagining the newspaper: US Engineer Missing in Bogor – Story on Page 5.) I met his kids and his uncle, and couldn’t quite turn down a glass of water that came from I know not where, probably from a commercial water bottle, but I was still wondering what I should do, induce vomiting? Go back to my hotel and drink Listerine? Turned out OK, but it would have been safer to accept the cigarettes instead. I got invitations from him and one other to stay with them next time I’m in Bogor, instead of blowing money on hotels. (I need to send him a note, along with an email to a guy from Aceh I met in Jakarta, who insists that should be my next destination in Indonesia. Most people said it should be Bali.) The students and organizers were great too, and they sent me home with souvenirs, snack food, coffee, and a batik shirt to wear on Fridays. (I bought a lot of coffee also, but not the infamous kopi luwak whose beans have passed through the deepest darkest part of a raccoon-like creature's digestive tract. Even if I thought it would be really good, the price was enough to deter me. Enough for one pot was 200,000 rupiahs = US $225.)
I was teaching in Bogor for 10 straight days, aside from a "day off" on Sunday, when we did a mock inspection of Jatiluhur Dam (which has some interesting issues, including fish farms and many floating residences that could get washed into the spillway). Aside from that trip and a day in Jakarta, I didn't get to see very much outside a 1 km radius of my hotel (walking in the evenings), and only ate about two meals outside of my hotel, since there didn't seem to be anything else in walking distance, aside from street food that was tempting, but not quite tempting enough. (Buffet with decent food though limited variety, and I ate different varieties of nasi goreng or tahu goreng three meals a day. Nasi goreng with cheddar cheese!?!) Teri kacang adds some interest to the rice. Good coffee, kopi baik?
Apparently Bogor doesn’t have a lot of western visitors, even though it is fairly close to Jakarta. Went 8 days without seeing any European-type faces other than mine and my coworkers’, and then I saw Germans in the botanical garden, Bogor’s main tourist attraction. That being a predominantly Moslem country, I didn’t see a bar or liquor store until the very last day I was there, and that was in the big city of Jakarta, not Bogor. I think I only saw one dog the whole time I was in Indonesia.
Most of the students were young, under 30 or not much past 30. They all seemed to be receptive to what we were teaching (they were smart enough to know what they didn't know), and I think we were a good influence on their practice. I'm curious about how things will be in 3 or 4 years.
I heard about the kopi-luwak coffe, you can find it in one place in Italy, a coffee boutique in Milan, where an espresso coffee (tiny cup) runs at 5+ euros (7+ US$). Money is not an issue though, courage is.
