All the world's a stage

...And we but players in this comedy. Indonesians love to laugh. At everything, but especially foreigners. Once you get over the slight indignity (at times) its easier to appreciate how funny we actually are. Grown people stumbling through your language like children is really funny. But it's reassuring to know that we're not their only means of amusement. Indonesian humor encompases many situations, many of which I have yet to understand : ) 

Some mornings, after you've found a cockroach in your room (albeit a dead one but it was still a sizeable speciman) and you're late for school so you hurry to hang your laundry so it will be dry that evening and you hear a group of ibus, bapaks, kids and whoever else laughing at you, there's a critical moment where you either glare or start laughing with them. I found recently that doing the latter made the dark cloud hanging over me magically disappear in that moment. At first, it does seem really rude and/or awkward that they laugh when you are struggling to integrate or when you accidentally swallow a chilli and your eyes are streaming for the next half hour or when someone dies in a motorcycle accident, but 1. it's their way of dealing with everything and 2. It's reflective of their good nature. They'll laugh at you and take a thousand photos and then they'll invite you into their houses for a five course meal and their entire family will come out to meet you and make you feel really special and welcome. And at least they're not ignoring us. 

The thing about Indonesians laughing at death is something I witnessed last week when I saw that motorbike accident. I still find it strange but whatever.

May showers

The next two weeks are probably the busiest in all of Training. We had our last afternoon link session yesterday on correcting students' errors and feedback and also needs assessment. The paragraph pictured below is from a student with very high English proficiency. The lesson was on simple past tense and we practiced deciding what feedback to give (picking your battles). I thought  this was one of the most useful link sessions we've had. We've been told so much that the type of feedback you give should depends on the student's proficiency. Stigmatizing and global errors should, in most cases, be corrected. Those are errors like saying "we shit together" instead of "we sit together." Global errors transcend simple local errors, which don't impede the listener's understanding of what the speaker is saying (i.e. "We visited the gravy of Gus..." where gravy should be grave.) All useful stuff. 

In the next two weeks we have a Teachers workshop, our  Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) and a teaching practicum where we will actually teach a class with an Indonesian teacher. 

We went to pick out fabric for our swear-in batiks last weekend. Swear-in is on June 1st and each cluster (7-10 of us per cluster) is going to wear matching batiks. We get to design them differently. I tried my best to show the tiny fashion designer with whom we met what steampunk was... Our group has decided to err on the side of outlandish because, when will we get to design a batik like this again?

Our teacher brought this to class for inspiration in designing our batiks.

Sadly, this fabric exceeded the price of the amount we decided upon as a group. And no one loves cats as much as I do.

View from the rooftops of my friend's house. 

Nita (right, obviously) is my favorite teacher so far, not only because she spent hours making this game of snakes and ladders for one of our 8-hour language classes (we're up to two/week now), but that certainly put her in the above and beyond category. She approaches all of our classroom activities with this level of enthusiasm.