Today marks two weeks, more or less, until I board a plane to return home, from my home. It's the last Monday I'll ever spend in my classroom, my last groggy morning spent dozing and blogging while my classmates study (or eat or shout to each other in Javanese). Next week we'll be shuffled into some other classroom in the school, where everyone will take their final tests for two hours and then go directly home.
So today is my last painful Monday morning, and one of my last opportunities to forgo my usual pick-up car method of getting to school and take bemo instead. If I didn't have to walk so far to get to the usual stop, I'd take bemo every day - there's always someone new to meet and something new to see. You can never quite call your life monotonous when you take gutted-out vans to school every day.
At 5.34 AM sharp I stepped out of my house and walked maybe all of three minutes before it started pouring rain. My jackets are all currently M.I.A, too - because Indonesia is not a country where the weather is just
dry or your stuff just
stays where you put it. Therefore I went bareheaded and got soaked, but nonetheless, I had a lovely walk in the blue-grey morning, ducking under palm trees and enjoying myself in that early hour where my presence is barely a blip on the radar of still-sleepy Indonesians.
When I got to my stop, the normally treacherous street was empty and blotted with rain, streetlights and the occasional motorbike the only thing streaking its surface. I still had about a ten-minute wait for the first bemo of the morning.
Question: what can you do when you're bored, waiting for your bus, while sitting in thick rainforest foliage by the side of the road in Indonesia?
Answer: you take a selfie. Because you're Indonesian now, right?
