Day 1: Intro to history and tons of food

My day in Emojis: 🧐🇮🇩🍚🕌

Literally right after I posted my previous blog post the call to prayer started.  I don't know why I love the call to prayer so much.  We heard it in Egypt too.  There is something unifying about it.  Maybe there is something reflective about it.  Maybe it is like an outside voice saying "hey, it is time to take a break from what you are doing".  Cannot put my finger on it.

The rest of "true day 1" continued with lunch.  This lunch buffet was crazy town.  In the way that I think "buffet" doesn't really do it justice.   There were just so many options.  Again, as someone who's Asian food experience it typically curry or sushi, there were lots of things I didn't know what they were.  I stuck mainly with recognizable items to me - there was just so much unknown that to "try" anything made me think I needed to try everything. 

By far my favorite tables were the fruit and dessert table.

The Dessert Table. The Great British Bake-off would have been happy with these.

Fruit Table.  Lots of different options!  Unfortunately, I tend to stay away from thin-skinned fruit when I am traveling but it all looked amazing.

This place really knows how presentation works!

After lunch we had a little history lesson on Indonesia.  There were lots of questions - I give credit to our guide who tried to answer as many of them as she could.  If I were asked to give a complete history of the US talk, I would struggle with some of the details too.  It was interesting that they talked at length about the diversity they had in the country and how they saw it as a strength of their nation.  Some people asked great questions about conflicts between diverse groups which I think highlighted some of the conflicts we see in the US between different groups.  According to our guide, there isn't as much tension between these different groups.  Another American teacher pointed out that many of the different groups appear to be geographically separate from each other which perhaps leads to a different dynamic than in the States. 

We also talked about the role religion plays in the government and how one leader lead for 32 years until the economic troubles in the country in the 90s.  It seemed like a lot of people in the group had a lot of questions (I know I did!) - I think that might be because history is complex.  Nothing is straight forward.  Even in the US, we stick with the "Columbus discovered America" and then several people point out that maybe he wasn't the first European here and others point out that natives already were here, so how could he "discover" something that thousands of people already knew about because they lived there.  In summary, I would not be a good "here's the history of the US in 1 hour" presenter.  We wouldn't get past Columbus.

After our history presentation we made our way to the Istqlal Mosque.  This is the largest mosque in Indonesia and holds up to 200,000 people and was built after the Indonesian people won their independence from the Dutch.  There was tons of symbolism in the mosque in terms of numbers representing dates, places and times.  I found it interesting to see what people were doing in the mosque below.

Here is our whole group at the main mosque area.

A picture of what was happening in the mosque while we were there.  There is a group of people praying.  1 person here is laying down, and another guy is charging his cell phone.  It was a bit of everything.

This was the outside courtyard of the mosque.  You can see the tiles in the ground.  They don't run parallel to the large space - they actually represent the space a person can take up for prayer.  During large events, they pack people into this space and each person gets a square's worth of room.  The lines all run so people are all facing mecca.  It is like having built in "carpet squares" for individuals.  You will also see the minaret in the background which is 66.66m tall to represent the 6666 verses in the Quran.

Here we have a drum used to call people to prayer and a sign that says "kiblat".  Which, might sound like a great superhero name, but it actually points to the direction of Mecca. 

In addition to seeing some nice culture/archeticture places in the mosque there was a good number of kittens - this one was playing with a leaf.

And that seems like a good place to end our blog post for the day.  Day 2 tomorrow includes a trip to a school and learning more about the Indonesian education system as a whole.  Again, probably a topic I would struggle to present to others in a 1 hour lecture...