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Heya,
It’s been a while, a 17k cycle to Prambanan temple on a bike with no gears (but a basket!) and a beach trip involving getting splashed by high tide and frightened by angry geese since I last wrote…
The internet cafe I’m at doesn’t seem to be able to upload my photos which is a shame but nevermind, suffice to say it is the end of Ramadan tonight and the mosques, fireworks and celebrations are going off!
Tomorrow and the next day are public holidays, where people generally go and visit family, ask for forgiveness for any wrongdoings over the past year and eat.
I’m at a wonderful homestay in Salatiga, a town in the mountains of central Java. It took about 3 hours by minibus to get here through the winding roads, by car or motorbike is more like 2 hours (less too-ing and fro-ing droping people off, waiting and so on). After a week of assignments and progress exams, five ACICIS people chose Salatiga to spend this uni break, and yesterday we trouped out to a waterfall that was so powerful you only need go in the general vicinity to get soaking wet, and saw Merapi quite close up on the way back. (Mt Merapi is the local active volcano, quite spectacular but often obscured by cloud and maybe a little Yogya pollution. From Yogya we can only see it occasionally despite it being so close to the city.)
Today I started my research (for a research unit) on Festival Mata Air, an environmental/arts festival to be held this year in October. More on that later, it’s going to be great (concerts, street parade of costumes made from rubbish, stalls and sculptures involving recycled stuff, mural painting etc etc etc)!
Apalagi….oya, just for fun, here are some of my favourite new Indonesian expressions. There are some great ones too, people who study the language tend to sometimes say lots of new words just ‘make sense’, for eg ‘jam tangan’, literally ‘time arm’ means ‘watch’. My new faves are:
Shortcut – Potong Jalan – literally, ‘cut street’
Back streets – Jalan Tikus – literally ‘mouse streets’
Speed bump – Polisi Tidur – literally ‘sleeping police’ (is that not gold??!!)
Subheading – Anak Judul – literally ‘child heading/title’
Satu dayung, dua pulau terlempaui – means ‘with one stroke two islands can be passed’ (as in rowing) – Indo expression for killing two birds with one stone.
I like that one. Alright, back to the homestay for me, lots of eating (home cooked meals, yum!) for me to do the next couple of days!
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Gimana, Miss Erin? 