They say that there are several stages to culture shock. First comes the “honeymoon period” when everything is exciting and new (like on the “Love Boat”). This is followed by a period of frustration and rejection of your adopted home. The last stage involves adaptation. I’m not sure which of these stages John is currently experiencing, but it has him too exhausted to post a blog entry today.
The cultural differences between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, where we arrived yesterday via a Garuda Airlines flight, are probably just as great as those between San Francisco and Jakarta. Aside from crazy motorcycle drivers and streets crowded with vendors, Jakarta is a lot like major metropolitan areas around the world. Now that we are in Yogyakarta, the center of traditional Javanese culture, the real immersion has begun.
This has already required some meaningful adaptation. Even washing in the traditional bathroom can be a challenge. To be fair, the bathroom in the house we are living in is semi-modern—there’s a flush toilet and a shower head. But, no hot water and no sink. I constantly splash my clothes while washing my hands without a faucet or basin, making a task that should be relatively straightforward look like an embarrassing accident. And John is looking for tips on how to shave when there is no way to contain water to rinse the razor. Add to that the fact that he fried his hair clippers when he forgot to plug in the wattage adaptor, and you have a sense of the challenges we’re facing.
Bathing obstacles notwithstanding, we’re finding Yogyakarta a much more relaxed and pleasant city. We’re living with a host family on a lovely, quiet street in a middle-class residential neighborhood. Our hosts, Bapak and Ibu Sunarto, are a retired couple who have two sons working in Jakarta. They are very friendly and regularly host students from the language school where we are both taking intensive Indonesian language courses. Coincidentally, the couple is among the 3 to 4 percent of Indonesians who are Catholic. It appears that our neighborhood is predominantly Christian — there is a St. Canisius Catholic elementary school around the corner and we can only hear Muslim calls to prayer faintly in the distance.
Four hours of daily one-on-one private language lessons is exhausting, but useful. I’m slowly remembering my Indonesian grammar, and after only one day of lessons John successfully ordered his own lunch in Indonesian and impressed our hosts at dinner with his basic conversation skills. Of course, his favorite part of our language school is the complimentary Javanese coffee.
When not in class or doing homework, we plan to embark on an ambitious cultural program. Of course, I’m not sure how many all-night shadow plays and performances of traditional dance John can to endure…
The cultural differences between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, where we arrived yesterday via a Garuda Airlines flight, are probably just as great as those between San Francisco and Jakarta. Aside from crazy motorcycle drivers and streets crowded with vendors, Jakarta is a lot like major metropolitan areas around the world. Now that we are in Yogyakarta, the center of traditional Javanese culture, the real immersion has begun.
This has already required some meaningful adaptation. Even washing in the traditional bathroom can be a challenge. To be fair, the bathroom in the house we are living in is semi-modern—there’s a flush toilet and a shower head. But, no hot water and no sink. I constantly splash my clothes while washing my hands without a faucet or basin, making a task that should be relatively straightforward look like an embarrassing accident. And John is looking for tips on how to shave when there is no way to contain water to rinse the razor. Add to that the fact that he fried his hair clippers when he forgot to plug in the wattage adaptor, and you have a sense of the challenges we’re facing.
Bathing obstacles notwithstanding, we’re finding Yogyakarta a much more relaxed and pleasant city. We’re living with a host family on a lovely, quiet street in a middle-class residential neighborhood. Our hosts, Bapak and Ibu Sunarto, are a retired couple who have two sons working in Jakarta. They are very friendly and regularly host students from the language school where we are both taking intensive Indonesian language courses. Coincidentally, the couple is among the 3 to 4 percent of Indonesians who are Catholic. It appears that our neighborhood is predominantly Christian — there is a St. Canisius Catholic elementary school around the corner and we can only hear Muslim calls to prayer faintly in the distance.
Four hours of daily one-on-one private language lessons is exhausting, but useful. I’m slowly remembering my Indonesian grammar, and after only one day of lessons John successfully ordered his own lunch in Indonesian and impressed our hosts at dinner with his basic conversation skills. Of course, his favorite part of our language school is the complimentary Javanese coffee.
When not in class or doing homework, we plan to embark on an ambitious cultural program. Of course, I’m not sure how many all-night shadow plays and performances of traditional dance John can to endure…
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