Not in Kansas

Okay, sorry for the infrequency of these posts but I've been really busy here, which is great but it also means that finding time to post is a little challenging. I know many of you want to know about family and school and daily stuff like that, which I will get to soon, but some really interesting stuff has happened to me over the past couple of weeks and this post is more about those events than my day to day routine.

As many of you know, I celebrated my first birthday abroad a couple of weeks ago. On that day, I had to go get my KITAS, a card that says that I can stay in Indonesia as an expat for a year, so I didn't go to school and I wasn't expecting much of a celebration especially from my friends. My family woke me up in the morning with singing and a cake, but I thought that that would be all. Little did I know, my host family and friends from school had been working together to plan a surprise party for that afternoon. I had been taking a nap (being an exchange student is very tiring) and when I woke up, my friends had decorated the entire family room and were waiting to surprise me with a cake, some cool new batik (a type of traditional Indonesian fabric and design) and the Indonesian tradition of making a cake on someone for their birthday. I got a watered down version where they just sprayed flour all over me, but normally Indonesian high school students celebrate birthdays by covering their friends in flour, eggs, coffee, honey, chocolate and anything else that might be normally used to make a cake. Overall it was a really great experience.

Me with many of my new Indonesian friends on my birthday, as they prepared to cover me in flour...

...and as they actually start dumping the flour.

The next noteworthy event happened about a week after my birthday. My family took a trip to Bogor, a smaller city about an hour away from where we live, to attend a cousins circumcision party. It was actually the second circumcision party that I'd been to, apparently getting circumcised is a big deal in Islam, so the family and friends of the boy get together to celebrate the milestone. Anyway, there was live entertainment at this party, and after a little while one of the emcees noticed me in the crowd (I'm about 8 inches taller and several shades whiter than the average Indonesian so I stick out just a little bit). They pointed me out to the leader of the music group that was playing, and I ended up on a stage in front of everyone playing a drum with an Arabic singing/drum/dance group. My host mom got a video of it so enjoy!

The next day I had the chance to tour Istiqlal, the largest mosque in southeast Asia. For those of you who don't know, Indonesia has the highest Muslim population of any country in world and is much more open about religion in general, so I'd seen and experienced Islam quite a bit while I was here, but I'd never actually been inside of a mosque. One of the first things that I found very interesting was that I was the one who had to cover up. We hadn't been planning on going to Istiqlal, so I had been wearing shorts, which in Islam is seen as immodest before God, so I had to put on a long grey robe to be appropriately dressed. Other than that the tour, such as it was, was fairly simple. Mosques are meant only for praying, so besides the main praying room and the minarets (pictured below), there isn't much of the art or architecture that people go to see at many big churches or cathedrals to go see. I was not allowed into the main praying room, because I was not Muslim, but I did get to see it from an observation deck on the second story. While outside the mosque there were some vendors and people just hanging out, once we were inside, everything was focused towards prayer and reverence towards God. One of the final things that I noticed as I was leaving the mosque was that just on the other side of the street is where Indonesia's national cathedral is. While it may just be a coincidence, I believe it does show something I've noticed over my past month here, that different religions can coexist here, not because people hide their religion and keep it private, but because people are willing to show and discuss their religion with members of a different religion. I've had and heard many conversations about religion while I've been here, with both adults and high schoolers, and I've found that everyone is genuinely interested in hearing about different religions and about having respectful and intelligent conversations about religion, without judgment or attempting to change the religion of the person they are talking. I find it quite different from the US.

The inside of the dome above the main prayer room at Istiqlal.

The main prayer room at Istiqlal, as seen from the second floor observation deck.

Monas, the national monument and a symbol of Jakarta (think Washington Monument), as seen from inside Istiqlal.

A random cat that decided that my robe was the best place to hang out while I was at Istiqlal.

A few pics of the national cathedral from the front door of Istiqlal.

The final experience I am going to write about in this post is my first time going to Car Free Day, an event that happens every Sunday in downtown Jakarta. Each week, the police shut down one road in Central Jakarta to cars and open it for anyone to come down and exercise, sell goods, or perform. I went with my family and joined the tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people walking up and down this massive in the center of the city. Some highlights included having an Asian civet crawl back and forth across my shoulders, trying some street food, seeing a couple of the national monuments and buying my first completely genuine American t-shirt in Indonesia:

My absolutely authentic American t-shirt.

Me with a civet on my shoulder.

Me with my host family and grandparents in front of the Jakarta welcome monument.

Anyway, I hope you all are doing well back in the US and I will try to be slightly more regular in my postings. I do get and read any e-mails or Facebook posts/messages that you guys send my way, even if I don't always get the chance to respond to them quickly, so feel free to contact me in any of those ways or to comment on these blog posts. My first month here has gone by so fast, I'll be back to see you all before you know it!