TRAVELS WITH MY TEXT BOOKS 5

As several of my friends have recently left the Indonesian bubble to head back to their lives in the real world, I have become more reflective about my time here. In particular, I’ve begun to assess how far my students have come and whether my time with them has actually made any difference to their English speaking skills or if I’ve just convinced them to use British over American English under the pretence that I will fail them otherwise.

All classes have days when the students are lazy or turn up insultingly late or just refuse to get excited about second conditionals and it is then that I wonder whether I am of any use at all. But there are three classes that I’ve had since my first working day, one of which started from the most basic level. I was watching them working and suddenly realised that not only were they interested in the exercise, they also completely understood what it was they were supposed to be doing. At the beginning, I’d had trouble just getting them to understand ‘sit down’. Now they were reporting their fellow classmates (‘miss, look, he is naughty!’), expressing preferences for games, and telling me about their weekends.

I acknowledge that their capabilities to learn a new language are principally accelerated by their being of a much younger age, but I’ve noticed throughout age groups and abilities that not only do I detect a hint of my accent, they’ve picked up an alarming amount of catchphrases that I didn’t evenrealiseI was using. Their chants of ‘put the rubbish in the bin’ and ‘it’s not pants, it’s trousers’ are so completely in unison it’s slightly unnerving.

As well as personally recognising that you are making a small difference to their English speaking abilities, it is occasionally nice to feel that this hard work is appreciated by the students themselves, especially when you’ve had to sweat over a grammar book to fully comprehend the exact difference in use between the past perfect and the past perfect progressive. A highlight of my CELTA course was when a student came up to me after the lesson and thanked me for explaining the difference between prepositions. But I was completely unprepared when one student actually came to my house to bring me some food. This of course could have been some very blatant bribery for her up and coming report, but my appreciative housemates told me to inform her she was always welcome to bring us some more treats, even if it had taken us five minutes to identify exactly what it was that she had brought us.

Indonesian food has always been somewhat of an eccentricity. I am often able to use sentences such as: ‘today I had an avocado shake (pause for effect) with chocolate’, ‘today I ate horse sate’, ‘today I ate rice porridge with chicken’, ‘today I had a cheese, sausage and chocolate sandwich’. And, perhaps the most coveted; ‘today I ate durian’.

Durian is infamous throughout Southeast Asia. I can confirm the rumors that the smell is so strong it can’t be taken on public transport, that mixing it with alcohol will lead to hallucinations and can even be fatal and that despite this that most Indonesians consider it a delicacy. My students, intent on making me try some, promised to bring it to class. I told them in no uncertain terms that there was absolutely no way they were bringing it into the school. My director of studies would kill me, if my co-workers hadn’t already. They looked confused. To Indonesians, food that smells like a drain is considered completely normal. Tobule(white foreigners), such food is considered absolutely bizarre. My students forgot; I actually still haven’t tried durian. I guess I’m too much of a chicken, but I did most of my unusual snacking (scorpion, grasshopper, tortoise) during my footloose travels and somehow, when you have your own kitchen, the incentive to try things with claws, horns and shells just loses its appeal.

An always eventful game to play is to go to a restaurant and order something on the menu when you have no idea what it could possibly be. I have tried this in the past and consequently discovered some incredible dishes; rice porridge with chicken being one such example. I have also ended up with deep fried tree (leaves and branches, not actual pieces of bark). The most intriguing item I found recently was entitled ‘soisis and the gank’ which loosely translates as ‘sausage and the small street’. Visions of dishes made from street animals popped into my brain and the dish in reality was not one of the most pleasant things I have ever tasted.

That aside, street food is probably the simplest and most economic way to survive and almost negates the need to cook, especially once your favourites are established. The choices don’t always have to involve unidentifiable lumps of meat or the frighteningly ultraviolet coloured drinks that are on display in my neighbourhood. The inevitable collection of enamel rotting sugary snacks naturally attract the younger Indonesians and several of my students greet me with rotten, brown toothed smiles. When these children are five, this is somewhat terrifying, especially when there are much healthier, tastier snacks on display.

Jakarta is teeming withwarung(street stalls) where on even the simplest of menus, you can buy bowls of steaming noodles, although some of these can vary in cleanliness and health risks. In the centre of the city, warung are open well into the small hours, the ideal provider for insomniacs and night owls. Ultimately Jakarta is a city that never sleeps and has to cater appropriately. Forget London, LA and the like and consider this rather frightening prospect: in Jakarta, it is alarmingly easy to leave your house on a Thursday night and not return until Monday morning. With anything from six floor clubs with pounding dance music to karaoke rooms decorated with indescribably tacky decor, you can hole up in these places and become completely unaware of what day it is, let alone the time.

With the prospect of another birthday looming, I had to decide whether to spend it in the finest of Jakartan clubs or to go to the beach. Pelabuhan Ratu is a fishing village with a beautiful beach on southern Java, approximately four hours drive from Jakarta. An infamous surfers’ haunt, it also holds legend to the great sea goddess Nyai Loro Kidul who, according to Indonesian myths, will drown anyone who wears green. Having spent the last few weekends in the city, it wasn’t a hard decision. A few days spent in the sun eating fresh fish and occasionally rousing myself to dip a toe in the water was a much needed break from the drone of city life.