First Days: Taman Mini LOCamp

My first days in Indonesia were spent in a language orientation camp headed by Indonesian AFS with the rest of the 20 exchangees. The loc was held in taman mini which is vaguely amusement parkish vaguely hotelish vaguely I probably should have figured out what exactly it was because I was there for nearly a week. We stayed in like a cabin one for boys one for girls. The place was actually pretty beautiful with all the trees and flora and a huge pond (lake i don't know) with a bridge and koi! in it. It was hot but most of the time we were in rooms doing sessions with air conditioning so it wasn't bad. And at night I would be freezing because the ac would be on so high. I didn't take a picture of the bathrooms but it was cabin style except for the added squat toilet.

   So what'd we do there? Orientation stuff of course! This includes:

• Bahasa Indonesia lessons 
• Just numbers, and ask how much things are, days of the week, what you'd learn in kindergarten. You know the useful stuff.         
•  Daily life lessons 
• How to bathe and use the bathrooms. Note: I'm so good at squatting. What Indonesians call squatting anime ppl (not me) call looking like Elle or at least that's what Steph told me when I took to siting like that a year ago.              
• How we might have maids and what our own responsibilities might be            
• How curfew might be earlier for us and we might have less autonomy (as long as you live in the house you're still a child in Indonesia)            
•  Communication style in Indonesia 
• Indirect always smiling, no privacy between family members not even for things like journals or diaries          
•  Recreation and games 
• In the mornings before doing anything we would go out and exercise. There was some stretching and some leaping over ropes and some untangling a group of people tied to a knot. My favourite was the one where we had to basically run through a human foosball setup like thing and guess what I actually got through. (For some reason in Indonesia I'm not my usual winning self I can't count how many times I've lost at games and people know I very very rarely lose games) Then we played Indonesian traditional games too; a mandala like game, a game like jacks, and a spinning top game. Yay exercise I'm actully missing it now.   

   Everyone at the orientation was nice from the heads of the orientation to the actualy exchangers. There were 5 from Japan, 3 from Belgium, 2 from Germany, and 5 from the wellworts program. The wellworts program seems really interesting. They also come from Germany but instead of being here to go to school they've come to volunteer in schools or other places. Cool, Germany. There were a lot of people watching us maybe 20 and they were all previous exchangers to different places. We called them kakak which means older brother/sister in Indonesian because that's what the are. They were cool 20 somethings.  And this was how I spent my first four days in Indonesia. Of course there were some special moments that I have to mention in another blog post. Special moments called visit to the American embassy, the mini Olympics, and the farewell party (aka talent show O_O)for the loc. So be prepared. I'll post them soon because I want to be caught up on all my time here. Much love.

 Note* I wrote this days ago but had to wait until I got wifi to post. I wanted to add pictures but its really complicated so pictures will have to arrive separately later. Love again though.