My Bali Story (Chapter 6): Nama saya Pol
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We came to study!
In the past entries, you may have noticed that I mostly wrote about the people I met and my first impressions on paradise.
But what about actually studying in Bali? That's what we all came for 😎
To recap, my scholarship was to study the Indonesian language in Universitas Udayana. In the past chapter, I gave you a glimpse into the darmasiswas' life. Darmasiswa was the name of the study program which encompassed all students that had gotten the scholarship. This group of people was commonly called darmasiswas.
Intro
After we all found a place and got to enjoy a few days of doing nothing and exploring our surroundings, it was finally time to start classes.
The Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) darmasiswas class from Udayana, which I was in, was comprised of about 15 students. We all came from different places: there was no nationality repeated twice. It was cool! This fact made really easy to strike up a conversation with any of the students.
After attending Business Management classes in Barcelona with an average of 80 students per classroom, I was happy that we were such a small group.
Getting there
As you might recall from previous chapters, Jimbaran Shore was far from our university. Our classes were to take place in Denpasar, the capital city of Bali. We had to drive a scooter around 50 minutes every day to reach Denpasar.
In the beginning, that was a big issue for me because I never rode a scooter before Bali and I was extremely scared of driving. Before leaving Barcelona I was so afraid about driving a scooter that I even took a 1h lesson in a driving school (more on that soon 😀).
The first days I got there by bus. Let me tell you, that was some experience. Bikes are so cheap that the only people who take the bus are villagers, students, and you guessed it: people whose bike broke down. There was no timetable, it was impossible to know the routes or how long it would take to reach there. Armed with patience, I took it many days. The only good thing about it was that it was dirt cheap (like 0.2 euro) and that I got to meet some amazing people. I was usually the only bule (foreigner) on the bus, so I was the centre of attention 100% of times I rode the bus. Everyone wanted to talk to me. Which was great because I got to practice what I learned in school. In many occasions, some bored high-school students helped me with my homework.
These bus rides also were my first contact with Indonesian dance music. Indonesian EDM. They call it dangdut or dugem. Obviously, the best is from the late 90s early 00s. It is difficult to describe it, but I fucking loved it. Here is a small taste:
With Bali traffic, the bus took around 1h 15m; twice as much as it takes with a motorbike.
Class schedule
We were supposed to go to class five days a week, four hours every day. In the beginning, we were upset, because ISI Denpasar students had classes only 3 days a week, and they spent the time either playing music, painting, sculpting in the garden... While we Udayana students, we were stuck inside a small classroom for four hours each working day of the week.
The subjects were: grammar, speaking (ber-bi-ca-ra), writing, listening, and culture.
It started every day at 10am with a lunch break in between. You should have seen our faces after lunch breaks... We were all falling asleep (even teachers). On many occasions, we managed to end the classes earlier :)
Teachers
Our main teacher, the one responsible for us, was I Made Rajeg. He was great. Always happy, always making jokes. He travelled the world a lot in his younger years, and you could tell he really enjoyed being around us. I really liked him, we were always joking. It made you feel you could trust him and tell him anything that went through your head. In the rare occasions when he was not smiling, it meant something was (really) wrong.
I Made Rajeg showed us the classrooms and gave a small pep talk on the first day. He had a right hand, a close assistant who followed him everywhere and was supposed to be our first local friend, and the connection between students and teachers. He was young, in his early 20s. His name was I Kadek Sanjaya. He was super nice as well, funny and good to have around. What you did not dare tell to Made, you could tell to Sanjaya. Or that was what they wanted you to feel :) Sanjaya was also the teacher of the budaya (culture) class. These lessons were on Fridays, and in those, he taught us a lot of things about Balinese culture. On some days we even did workshops, like traditional dances or cutting banana leaves. We had good fun.
I vividly remember the first real lesson we had. It was with Ibu Dana, grammar. She spoke the whole hour in Indonesian. Not a fucking word of English. Of course, we didn't have a clue about what she talked about. We looked at each other just laughing and trying to tell her we did not get it. She didn't care. At first, we thought she was stupid. It turns out she spoke a bit of English and just wanted us to get better as soon as possible, doing a total immersion in Bahasa Indonesia. In my opinion, she was one of the best teachers. Serious but funny. She always joked with the guys in the class by shouting GANTENNNNNNG (handsome) every time she saw us around the corridor.
There were many teachers. They kept changing over the course of one year. Everyone who was there with me and is reading this knows I cannot end this section without talking about my favourite teacher: Ibu Widarsini. We called her "Ibu Berbicara" (berbicara = speaking). She was the speaking teacher. The lesson consisted of us trying to talk with her. Mostly, she explained stories. But the way she talked, soft and slowly, made you felt like you could understand everything. She encouraged us to speak and make mistakes. I learned a lot from her. It was amazing to see the progress at the end of the year. She was always really proud of us all, she cared about us. It was funny to see this soft-spoken and quiet woman leave the school precinct in a scooter with flames🔥 painted on it.
I am still missing a heavyweight teacher, the big boss: Pak Sukharta. But he deserves his own chapter...
To be continued...
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