Yesterday's post, posted today (finally found some wireless!)

Hip-Hop Dance Competitions, Grilled Corn, and Friends

Ibu set me up today. I organized my day (not that I had much to do!) around attending my SMAN’s birthday party (apparently it wasn’t an independence day celebration, it was the school’s birthday!) at three o’clock. At 2:30 I got a text from my Ibu telling me to plan on being picked up for the party at 6:00 instead, “because the dance and music performances weren’t good enough just yet.” Okay then. When we arrived at around 7:15 (there’s a concept in Indonesian culture called jam keret= rubber time), we went to the central courtyard where a gigantic performance stage had been installed; the kind they have at radio station music festivals. On stage was our dear old principal, who immediately announced my arrival to the entire student body, and beckoned me to cross the expanse of grass and students and get on stage. Dammit, Ibu, why didn’t you warn me of this? Of course she didn’t warn me because that would ruin the surprise, and apparently in Indonesia we love surprises! Oh well. I won’t pretend that it was horribly mortifying or anything that hyperbolic, because it wasn’t. I was expecting something like this to happen at some point, and from my class visit back in Bandung, I realized that it’s pretty easy to get high school students “pumped up” by doing silly things like woo-hoo-ing and fist-pumping. It worked.
We stayed for a few of the dance and music acts, and from what I could tell the competitors were mostly hip hop dance acts (in one, the girls all wore matching blue sweatsuits) and emo/numetal/hardcore bands of disaffected boys, whom according to one of the English teachers, start these bands because “they aren’t too smart, so they need something else to be good at in school.” I’m going to withhold judgment until I actually have these guys in class! They seemed pretty cool. If I were an Indonesian high school student I would probably want to hang out with these dudes. Also, stage gives the band boys at good foot of height. They looked somewhere between 5’10 and 6’ while they were performing, but afterwards they walked by me and I realized they couldn’t have been taller than 5’6! Now I understand why everyone is in a band.
Later last night I met up with some of my American friends, including a former ETA who was visiting for the weekend from Jakarta, and we went to a café whose specialty was flavored grilled corn. On the menu was sweet corn, spicy corn, sweet AND spicy corn, super spicy corn, chocolate corn, strawberry corn, etc. It didn’t taste particularly wonderful, but the concept was pretty precious. The ETA had some of her student friends meet us there, and Gilang and Riri were straight out of an SNL skit. They talked at a speed (even in English) I couldn’t keep up with, they smoked strawberry-flavored cigarettes, and spouted off the names of myriad characters in myriad American reality tv shows and sitcoms without breaking a sweat. Apparently they are BOTH competitive hip-hop dancers (in Indonesia, who isn’t?) and we may see them compete in Surabaya soon enough. Also, according to this fabulous pair (one male, one female, I should add) our city has its first nightclub with a pole (i.e.: for pole dancing) and they are super excited about this. I love it here.