It would be easier to write this comment tree months ago, when I just arrive and everything was so different and shocking to me! It could take half an hour for me to get enough courage to cross the street, I could spend hours wandering between shelves in the supermarket looking at products I would never guess that exists. How can people eat dried little fish as a snack, drink boiled aloes with strawberries flavour or use whitening cream? It was so exciting to discover those new things. I thought I would never get used to it and I don’t even know when it happened that all started to seem to be normal to me… Now I am still often surprised, but not like at the beginning. I can walk calm even if I see a rat or cockroach, people calling me: misterrr doesn’t annoy me any more (I get mad only if I hear Sir!), I can cross the street without having a hart attack. Now I started to enjoy more the differences, trying to understand the way people live here, different culture, different tastes, smells, the variety of tropical fruit that I can find here, so many things! At the beginning I thought it would be difficult for me to find friends, I couldn’t accept the attitude people often have in front of ‘westerners’, racism is so common here and Indonesian seems to treat me differently only because my skin is white! Their attitude is something between admiration, enviness and sometimes making fun of me…

For the person that likes privacy it can be difficult to live in Indonesia as You are always in the centre of attention, that is also because of the colour of the skin, people are curious, want to know everything and questions like: where do you go?, where do you come from? are heard hundreds times a day. Some people like to feel like a move star but not me and honestly speaking all the attention I get is tiring for me.

Luckily I did find friends, maybe not many but they are unbelievable, strong characters, interesting people that I will never forget. We can talk for hours and it is so interesting to discover how differently we look at some things, it opens my mind so much, I don’t consider Europe the centre of the world any more, now when I look at it from other’s people perspective.

Surely being in Indonesia is an incredible experience for me, the things I learned here will be useful no matter where I go in the future. I am stronger, more tolerant, more open minded and maybe also more patient :)

-AGA-