Batam Birthday

So, apologies for not posting for a while, but last Monday was my birthday. I just turned 25, and I've had an interesting fortnight to tell you about.

The Saturday night after my last post I went over to Nat's house, because he was having a grill. There was a lot of good food and I met Nat's brother, Sirus, and his friend Ivan. We had a fun debate about where people and language come from, and as Ivan was from Hungary I had the chance to say the little Hungarian I know (all thanks to my former housemate, Wojtek). It was really fun and reminded me of the good times in Krakow.

After a nice weekend it was back to work, and I finished a project I have been working on. It's a "Murder Mystery", where students click through slides explaining a murder, and they must make the right choices, ask the right questions and understand the answers to find the true murderer. It took a long time to make, but it paid off because various teachers have used it with different classes and it has repeatedly gone down well, and now it has been sent to the head office to be used in other EF schools. I'm proud of myself.
I had a relaxing week, as a lot of my classes were coming to the end of their courses, and so were doing exams or playing games. With my conversation class I did a lesson full of introductory and team building exercises, which was really fun.

Friday came, and I didn't have any classes, so I decided to give myself an early birthday treat, and I went for my first professional massage.

It was a strange experience, one I haven't had before, and I was rather confused when asked what type of massage I wanted. I opted for a 'traditional' and was led to a room containing a matress, a pillow, a towel and a pair of shorts and left alone to 'get ready'. Not really sure what to do, I dressed myself in the shorts and waited. A lady came in and told me to lie face down, put the towel over me and proceeded to give me a massage, starting with my feet. It felt a little strange, but was very relaxing. There was one arkward moment when the girl accidentally touched my gentleman's area, but she profusely apologised and I was relieved not to be propositioned for anything untoward. After an hour and a half I was feeling very relaxed, and went back to school to do some preparation for classes.

That night we went out to another food court, ate sate and drank beer. Tommy sang on karaoke, and as I was merry from the beer I started dancing on stage, to cheers and applause from the entertained Indonesians. We returned home, and started to drink some Indonesian rice liquor. It's toxic stuff, and I ended the night vomiting in the bathroom, ruining all the relaxation I had from my massage.


On Saturday I woke up with a killer hangover, but I arranged with Nat to go to the gym, so off I went. After a good workout I had sweated away most of the toxins in my system, and then proceeded to enjoy the swimming pool and sauna. The gym was really nice and when I left it I felt a lot better.

That evening, for my birthday treat, Nat, Steve, Michelle, Tanti and I went bowling at a nearby shopping mall. Indonesian malls are quite strange, with lots of noise and robotic dogs and dragons which children (or Michelle) can ride around on.

We played 3 games of bowling and it was really fun, even though I'm very bad at it. By the last game we had virtually given up bowling normally and were just having fun. A crowd gathered to watch our crazy techniques, including baby bowling (which I was very good at), kicking the ball down the alley (and I still hit 8 pins), and the highlight where Michelle bowled backwards and got a strike! We concluded that the normal bowling technique is the worst one, and went for pizza before going home.

Sunday came, and as it was a very hot day a load of us decided to go to the beach. There was a sand (and rock) covered football pitch there and we played a game, barefoot, against some locals. It was very fun but also very hot, and when we finished I was really looking forward to swimming in the sea.

This beach was quite rocky, and the water was shallow so I waded out to try and find somewhere that the water was deep enough to swim properly. I put my foot down and had a painful surprise - I was bitten by a crab! I looked down and it was still hanging onto my foot, and when I shook it off I saw my blood mixing with the seawater in a very Jaws-esque way. I went back to the shore, patched myself up, and then the tide went out, so I decided to get some revenge and go crab hunting. I'm apparently not very good at this, and all I caught was a few sea-snails and a starfish.

We then went and played football again, when I made my foot bleed more and and was embarrassingly tackled by a 5-year-old, but scored a nice goal to make up for it. Then we went home to rest before work (and my birthday) on Monday.

I had a nice day at work on my birthday, everyone was shaking my hand and wishing me all the best, and after teaching my first lesson I came back to the staff room to find a chocolate cake on my desk.
 
One of my classes found out it was my birthday and sang to me for five minutes, and my final class was covered by another teacher so steve, Tanti, Tommy and I could go out for some drinks at a food court.
At the food court, I wanted to eat something 'interesting' and so had baby squid cooked in their own ink;

Later on, after a few beers I was talked into singing on the big stage for karaoke. After a difficult decision about what I would sing (they didn't have much in the way of good English songs) I ended up singing "Wavin' Flag" by K'Naan, and even though I'm not a great singer, it went pretty well, and I did some silly dance moves to accompany my singing, which were very well recieved by the crowd.

So that was my birthday over and done with, and it was back to work, where I have taken on a new class who are all very eager and fun to teach.

The hilight of the week came on Thursday, with my conversation class. At the end of the lesson when I asked "Any questions?", one of the seemingly shy girls said she didn't understand a word she'd read. When  I asked her what it was she gave a very surprising answer; "Sado-masochism", and took my shocked silence as misunderstanding, and wrote it on the board to clarify. Needless to say I was very careful in my answer.

Thursday was also Tommy's last day at work, so we went out for drinks at a different food court, ate barbequed chicken wings and sunflower seeds. After playing a drinking game, we started trying to put sunflower seeds in each other's beer, culminating when Tommy went to the toilet and returned to find more seeds in his glass than beer.

Then this weekend, I had to go back to Singapore for a couple of hours to renew my visa (Indonesian paperwork is verrrry slow), just about long enough to eat a longed-for Burger King and catch the ferry back. And I have moved house, as the school's rent lease ended and they found a house closer to the school. It very nice and spacious and much closer to shops, food and work than the old one was.

Also this weekend I played basketball, went to a food court and explored a few bars.

And now it's Monday, time for another school week to start.

Lucky to Be Here

It's been a little while since I posted. After I went to Singapore I have been very busy, having a full teaching schedule every day and keeping myself occupied at the weekend.

My classes have been fun, I made a game called "Dinner Party" - where students randomly select a characteur to act as, there is one person with a magic frog, one who loves ice cream, and another who sneezes whenever they hear the word "frog" and laughs when they hear "ice cream", as well as a lot of other crazy people. It was really fun to do. I was laughing, and my students loved it. It went so well I used it in 3 classes and gave it to other teachers to use.

Also, for the first time ever, I sent a student out of the class. I was teaching an all-girl group, where most of the girls are very sweet, but a few are absolute terrors. I introduced my form of classroom discipline - a smiley face on one side of the board and a sad face on the other, the students names go on the board to show if they are behaving well or badly, if a student on the bad side misbehaves, they are out of the class. When I put one girl's name on the board she kept repeating "I don't care" and disrupting the class further, so she was out.

For a treat on Friday another teacher, Michelle, took me to a place called the Candy Bar, where they serve English food. I ate a steak and Guiness pie, and it was delicious, it put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. I got talking to the owner of the bar, an English guy called AJ, and he invited us to the bar's one year birthday party on Saturday.

Later that day I was teaching my regular class of upper-intermediate students, and they had a task to write about their problems when learning English and meeting native speakers. One student wrote that her biggest problem is that it's difficult to lip-read people if she doesn't know them. Yes, lip-read. It turns out she is almost deaf and has to watch people's mouths in order to understand what they are saying. I was amazed, I have taught her about 10 times, and I didn't realise until she told me. Yet more, when I checked her writing, it was virtually perfect, with no grammatical errors at all!

On Saturday afternoon, Steve, a returning teacher - Nat, and I played basketball. It was fun, even though I'm not used to the sport, and in Indonesian heat it was really good exercise. Then in the evening I went to the Candy Bar's birthday party with Phil, Michelle's boyfriend, where there was free food and drinks. I got quite inebriated, and may perhaps have made a fool of myself by dancing on a pole. Anyway, the most remarkable part of the evening was that I actually got a picture with a ladyboy!

His/her name was Jasmine, and (s)he was quite a convincing woman, with just a few give aways such as (s)he was taller than me, which doesn't happen with Indonesian girls, and had big hands despite the effeminate handshake.

On Sunday I woke up with only a mild hangover, and my students picked me up to go and play football, I had fun, but again we lost, and again I only scored one goal. After the game they took me to a food court to try some pork soup, which was very tasty. However, when we went back to the car, we saw that while we had been eating someone had smashed the passenger window and taken one of the student's bags. It was a really unlucky thing to happen to such nice guys. So we cleared up the broken glass and went home, feeling a bit dejected.

Monday came, and I met the head of EF Indonesia - Alan, the guy I did my interview with over 4 months ago. He's a Scottish ex-serviceman who has been in Indonesia for 20 years, and gave me a few good tips on culture and teaching techniques.

After work on Tuesday we (Alan, Steve, Tanti, Tommy and I) went to a place called Golden Land - another food court with a karaoke stage - to eat sate and drink beer. A few drinks later we were feeling merry when a girl came over and said to me "Hey, you handsome." (which as far as I can tell over here means "Hey, you are white.", but anyway). She asked me if I wanted to sing on karaoke with her, at first I said no, but everyone egged me on, and seeing as I have made a fool of myself singing before, I agreed to be led up to the stage...

She then proceeded to lead me straight past the stage, into the car park behind, where there was a car waiting with a pretty girl in the driver's seat. The girl who led me away introduced me to the girl behind the wheel and then opened the back door and told me to get into the car. I looked in the car and there was a guy sat in the back seat. I obviously refused, and they said they were going to take me to a bar to sing karaoke. At that point Tommy, who had noticed them lead me away, came running and started shouting at them in Indonesian. The car drove away, and we went back to our table, confused and angry. We explained what had happened and then, amazingly, the girl who had originally led me away came and sat at the table. Alan told her in no uncertain terms to go away, but she just sat there staring at him with an insolent look on her face. The atmosphere started to get unpleasant, and we left soon afterwards, with the girl following us to the car, shouting insults in Indonesian.

After that my week has been pretty uneventful. I've spent most of my free time working on a project for a class which will write about in my next post.