Hi everyone

Hi I'm anne.

Well, here we are at the Seattle airport waiting to depart to begin our year long adventure. It's Sept 27, 2011 and it's been a long and winding road that has gotten us to this place and time.

Tom will be fAcebooking, but I am going to try the blogging thing. My friend, Hilary, helped me set this up, but I can see I have a lot to learn.

The story of how we got here is a bit strange and has been very frustrating and I am going to chronicle the whole thing once for posterity and then quit whining about it.
It really begins in august of 2010 when Tom got a notification that the Fulbright program was waiving the two time limit for people interested in going to Indonesia to teach science. (it turns out that they also waived the limit for Pakistan- gosh, I wish we had known about that! And also dropped the science teaching requirement so it was open to any discipline.) The deadline was imminent so Tom scurried around and got his application off ASAP.
Then there was the wait.
Mar 7 2011. We were doing our volunteering at Pipe Spring National Monument in Arizona when we got the word that the application was successful.
We arrived home at the end of March to find a packet of info including that we would be at Petra Christian Univrsity in Surabaya. That was interesting and we began to google and find out all we could. It was a bit puzzling since they didn't seem to have a science department,but...
Meanwhile there were medical forms to deal with. Tom called for a physical and was told it would be three months, but he said it was urgent so they got him in in a few weeks. My most recent physical was less than a year so my doctor just had to fill out some forms. It was also recommended that we visit a travel clinic for advice on shots, etc. We decided on Lifecare Alliance and had the first of several visits. We learned that malaria is common in much of Indonesia, although not where we would be. Take pills if in those areas. Also a different mosquito carries Dengue Fever for which there is no prevention except avoiding getting bitten. After much discussion we decided skip the rabies, but got typhoid and Japanese Encephalitis. We also got a full barrage of other medical tests- blood tests, mammograms colonoscopies eye and dental exams, whatever.
We talked to our son ,Steve, about whether he would be willing to move into our house And rent out his ranch house nearby. He agreed and now this is a fact although none of us knew how much work that would be to get his place emptied and ready to rent. But the deed is done and we are very grateful to him.
After some gentle probing which yielded nothing, Tom came directly to the point and asked if Petra was a good fit for him. No response for three weeks and then finally a note that they were changing his assignment to ITS also in Surabaya. It is a technical university with undergrad and grad programs.
For a long time heard nothing more.
In mid July we went to DC for a three day orientation. It was very useful because we met many of the staff we will be working with both from dc and Jakarta. There are about 50 English teaching assistants, but they have different issues and they are young so I won't talk more about them. The rest of the people are about 10 senior scholars (Tom is one) and about 10 junior researchers who usually are working on a masters or PhD. The best part was getting to know them and exchange email addresses and start to form a loose network to find out who knows what and help each other deal with the frustrations.
We had been told they would like to have all our paperwork done by aug 26 when Ramadan would end and a week long holiday would begin. Then we would have to get a short stay visa called a VITAS In our case from the consulate in Chicago. So we began thinking about a Labor Day departure. But the August date came and went with no word. Around Sept 1 we were told that things should be done by Sept 5. That day also came and went.
Finally on sept. 11 we got a call from Nellie in Jakarta who told us with some trepidation that her staff had mixed up some of my documents with another Fulbrighter. But... She said we could get our visas in Singapore in one day.
So, finally! We immediately began to make final departure plans. Our plans were to fly to Seattle at our own expense and spend several days visiting friends and family and then AMINEF would make flight arrangements to Jakarta and on to Surabaya. We spent a couple of days making all these arrangements and were on our way.
We still didn't have the paperwork needed to get the VITAS, but it arrived while we were on the west coast. As I was checking it ( it was all in behasa) I saw the word Chicago. So Tom wrote to ask if that would be alright. Of course not! So several more days were necessary to fix that and we got the final (correct) documents about 24 hours before departure from Singapore. Included were instructions for how to get the visa in Singapore. I will quote them verbatim:
We should come to a meeting point at the McDonalds next to the Hilton hotel under the red smoking canopy between 9 and 11am, give them our passports and $200 each, then return at 4 pm to pick up passports with the visa.

ARRIVAL IN SINGAPORE

Arrived in singapore after a 21 hour flight. Thank goodness for business class. I can go to Europe in economy, but my days of crossing the Pacific that way are finished.
Singapore is a highly efficient city. Some have criticized it for being too much so, but I found it pleasant in view of the purported vast inefficiencies where
I am headed.
A couple of things have surprised me. Of course there is an abundance of shopping centers carrying American goods, luxury and otherwise, but I was not prepared to see a lot of bread shops with everything from rolls to croissants to beautiful pastries. Probably not a good thing for them to have absorbed from the west Also we have been taking the subways (again very efficient) and I notice that while I hang onto a rail or strap that years of riding these rails have given them an exquisite sense of balance so they can stand and check their phones without holding on to anything. Singapore has solved it's traffic issues by a couple of measures. It is very expensive to get a permit to buy a car. Those fees are ploughed back into public transportation which is very high quality. We can get anywhere in town by metro or bus. Furthermore personal cars have to pay a surcharge every time they enter the center and taxis are prohibited from stopping on the main streets to pick up fares. There are taxi ranks where one can get a taxi. All this means that traffic flows very well.
We were able to get our visas yesterday. We dropped them off with the man outside the mcdonalds at nine fifteen and picked them up at 4pm. We only had to give him the passports and money and our long awaited Vitas form. Had we applied at Chicago we would have needed 10 or so more documents and waited four days.
Lots of observations. Most of the people we see in the city and on the metro are very young,say 15 to 30. They are all dressed very fashionably, although some young girls frankly look like hookers. It does make me feel my age, not as in decrepit, but generationally.
We got back to our hotel too late last night(after a river cruise) to eat at any of the regular places, but we had noticed a 24 hour food court nearby and it was either that or a Wendy's and I didn't come all this way to eat at a wendy's. So we went in and looked around at about 15 vendors and made our choices. I got Singapore noodles which were tasty but very hard to eat with chopsticks. Tom fared better with a fried noodle dish. We ate at different food court today-more upscale with about 30 vendors. This has been a good introduction to the foods we will get, but, alas, the hygiene in Indonesia is such that we are advised not to eat so called street food there. Here we can also enjoy salads and iced drinks, but not there.
All told Singapore has been a good entry point into the culture. But I have to say the glitz and over the top architecture wears thin quickly with me whether it is here or Dubai or Las Vegas. I am going to coin a word and say that I am a "heritagist", meaning I enjoy finding the historic places and ways. Not much left of those in any of these cities.

I did find a place that values heritage. We missed our Chinatown tour by a few minutes so decided to tour the Chinese cultural center. It was an original building that showed how the Chinese immigrants lived when they first came to Singapore in the late 1890's. Their life had been hell in china and it wasn't much better in Singapore. It didn't whitewash anything and showed the opium dens and brothels. I know immigrants to the US in that time period had a hard time, but I think their lives were easy compared to those to Singapore.
I want to write more about Singapore but now we are in Indonesia and I want to begin getting thoughts down about that.