Saturday Night @America (Haha See what I did there with the @)

Busy weekend. So Saturday evening I was invited to @America to help with an exchange student presentation. @America is Ameria's cultural center in Indonesia. It's very high tech, screens everywhere, you can see their past events (such as Martha Stewart living, school visits ect.), their twitter feed. There's touch screen computers where you can take quizzes about America and English. There are constant slideshows playing, showing American architecture, famous sites, methods of transportation. Chock filled with America information.
    The name of our presentation was Within Us: Exchange Student Stories. It focused on all aspects of being an exchange student. First, a guy who had been an exchange student to the US in the last couple years talked about his experiance. He stayed in Arkansas and showed pictures of his school and family usual stuff. When they were taking questions though they asked him to sing a bit of the National Anthem. I was very impressed. I definitely don't have Indonesia Raya down.

ARKANSAS

    Then an alumnae (right? alumni is plural? I don't know) who went on to be really active in her community made a presentation of how exchange helped her become brave and achieve her goals. She was really impressive. She was interested in physics and dance and we saw pictures of her in different countries doing her favorite activites.

So you see her but then you can also see her on camera showing off her pictures behind as well as their twitter feed. @America well done.

    To finish the presentation Nathan and I came up to the stage. I was very nervous. So far the whole presentation had been in Bahasa Indonesia and while I can usually mangae, giving a whole presentation might've been a stretch. I also had no idea what was on our slideshow thanks to me missing the information meeting because of lateness. It was fine though, as most things usually are. They asked us questions in English and we could mix the two languages however much we wanted. Some questions were

• What were your fears coming to Indonesia? If I'd get along with my host family. No problem, I love my host family.
• What's the biggest differences between America and Indonesia? School: A lot of straight copying in Indonesia not discussion/project based. Religion: Not as private here. You can ask a person's religion or if they pray when you first meet them and in school there's religion classes. Weather: It's hot so so so very hot here. 
• If you were to leave now what would you miss the most? Family and friends and food.

  I hope you can see why I was nervous. Very talk show-y with bright lights and mutiple camers for the crowd too and huge screens. It was kind of a big deal. And I wore Nikes. They said casual but all the girls (in the audience even) wore these fancy sandals or high heels. Nikes are casual, not those sparkly strappy high things!

Then over. We took some pictures and looked around @America a tiny bit then we went to hang out and eat.

Jalan-jalan aka hanging out with the peoples in Pacific Place in Jakarta

So @America's in Pacific Place another very fancy mall. Many foreigners come there and you can play guess where that foreigner comes from. For dinner all the exchange students went to Pizza Hut. Yeah it's fancier here, like a sit down restuarant. Very strange to hear Let's go have dinner at Pizza Hut. Is the food better though? Eeer maybe if you've never had super good pizza or pasta. It's ok.

Ankhet lesson: Good company will make most things taste better. In this case yes it did taste better.

After that 3 other exchange students (Monica, Dhania and Gana (he exchanged to california!!)) and I went to find some dessert and take pictures. The mall is huge like most fancy malls here. There's a Ritz-Carlton attached and they sell cars on the lower levels like most malls here. But that also means things are more expensive (ok like they'd be regular in America but that's expensive here).

Yes there are boats on a lake within the mall. You can also have dinner on one or maybe you'd like to be  in the sky. Yes you can eat in sky too.

We got ice cream and it cost 5 whole dollars! It was good, french creme brulee and a lot of it. But $5 can be a lot here for food. For $2 you can get a whole meal with a fancy colored mocktail! Oh look at me turning cheap over food. Hahaha.  

They said be excited. It was @America's brithday wish.

cool saturday night. And busy sunday too.

*Citation:Thank you facebook buddies for the foto-foto.