Attention devoted readers! (Of which I think there are 2)
Brace for impact as we re-enter the Blogosphere!
Once again I am preparing myself for an International adventure, this time I’ll be going about as far away as possible – halfway around the world and in another hemisphere, and I’ll be there for much longer than I’ve ever been away before.
In a week and a half, (September 12th) I will be leaving Buffalo, New York (where I’ve been living since November 2011) to go to Malang, Indonesia and teach English for at least a year. For those of you too lazy to look at a map, Malang is on the island of Java. Jakarta (the Indonesian capital) is on the left side of Java, Surabaya (the second largest city) is on the right, and Malang is about 2 hours South of Surabaya (depending on traffic and road conditions). The Wiki article about it is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malang
It looks like it will be a great fit for me. I tend to prefer cities and town that are little bit out of the way, and Malang seems like it will give me access to a lot of the Western comforts my fleshy body has grown accustomed to, but not overwhelm me with big city brute force.
If anyone is interested in learning more about where I’ll be teaching, the school is called English First, and here is the website for it:
http://www.efsurabaya.com/home.html
Many people have thought that it's a school like a traditional grade school/high school, but it's actually more of a continuing education center – like a place you’d go to learn karate or practice yoga. There are mostly afternoon/evening classes, and the only subject taught is English.
Once I get there, I will sign a contract for a year, and depending on how I like teaching and Malang and where I’m at in my life in a year’s time, I can always renew my contract for another year, and many teachers often do so. In the meantime, the teachers are well-paid and get ample vacation time, so I’ll be able to indulge my wanderlust even more when I’m there.
So these past few weeks have been filled with preparations and, more recently, packing. My wonderful father has been gracious enough to allow me to store most of my things in his attic, which is a necessity as I am only allotted two bags of luggage at 40 pounds each. Yikes. That’s not much stuff, and it’s about 1/20th of my wardrobe. So the first few days of packing up were easy, there’s lots of stuff that I can’t bring with me that I probably won’t need while I’m there anyway. Today was the start of the “hard decisions” phase of packing… which is probably why I’m distracting myself by finally writing in The Blog.
Now I’m going to distract myself even further with lunch.
