Let’s see if anything has changed.

Image from the New York Times article on the soccer riots – there’s Rob, right in the thick of things!!

This is an old post that I found in my “drafts” folder. It dates from way back in 2009, when I first joined Facebook. I wrote it in India, but never posted it. It is cute and still timely, and I figured that it deserves to see the light of day! So here goes:

My students are all into Facebook, and so they convinced me to sign up for it. While I don’t really spend all that much time exploring it (there are plenty of other time-wasters on the internet, thank you very much), it has been kind of fun to run into old acquaintances in the virtual world.

One of the other things a person can do on Facebook is join any number of different groups, and one of the first that I saw was called “You know you went to an international school when…” There follows a list of more than 80 ‘indicators’ of someone with an international school background – some of which I agreed with, and some of which I didn’t.

In any case, here is my personal list of those criteria that best fit my experiences:

You know you went to an international school when:

• It is hard to answer the question “Where are you from?”
• Your life story uses the phrase “Then we went to…” five (or six, or seven) times…
• Your school memories include those days that classes were canceled due to tear gas, riots, demonstrations, or bomb threats.
• Police guarded your school…carrying machine guns
• School trips meant going to a different country
• You could walk into a bar and order a drink without being questioned
• You got excited when someone sent a video tape of regular TV with commercials.. in ENGLISH!
• You never had a job until you reached college
• Class reunions are not at your school – not even on the same continent!
• You run into someone you know at every airport
• You don’t think its strange that you haven’t talked to a friend in a couple years, but you know you will always have a unique bond
• You have a time zone map next to your telephone
• You know the geography of the rest of the world better than that of your own country
• You speak in many broken languages when you are drunk
• You go home for vacation.

(another installment – probably the second to last – of travel adventures and pictures from our just-completed winter break)

Borobudur is Java’s largest Buddhist temple. Historians think it was constructed before Prambanan during a time when Hinduism and Buddhism co-existed peacefully on the island of Java. According to our LP, when viewed from the air, the structure resembles a colossal three-dimensional tantric mandala. While we can’t speak to that, we sure agree that it looks very much like the thanka we got in Dharamsala!

We woke up at 4:30 one morning to watch the sunrise over Borobudur.  While the clouds hid much of the sun, we still enjoyed the peaceful landscape, rice paddies, lush jungle walk and misty valley. After wake-up drinks, we headed down to the site to beat the real heat of the day.

There are four entrances to the temple – one on each side – and three layers. The first layer represents the human experience. The 2nd level has panels that reveal the life of the Buddha and lessons from Buddhism. The 3rd layer represents enlightenment. The first two layers are square and the top is circular with stupas that have Buddhas on the inside.  A pilgrim (or tourist) can walk clockwise around the entire monument – a total of almost 5 kilometers.

The sculptures are incredible. There are 2 million stone blocks, 1460 narrative panels, 1212 decorative panels, and over 500 Buddha statues. We marveled over and over that there was such detail left after 1,000 years of rain, earthquakes, and volcanic ash inundations.

We noted there were several figures that actually faced into the monument – so the carvings were of the back of the head. This is highly unusual – we’d never seen that in Buddhist sculpture before. There were several scenes of a boat – representing the sea trade between West Africa and Java many hundreds of years ago. There was a museum dedicated to this same boat, as some rich guy from England took it upon himself to build it and re-create the sea voyage!

Breck shares his birthday with India’s Republic Day (so he always had a school holiday when we lived in Mumbai) and (as I learned yesterday) Australia Day. So happy birthday to all of them.

He’s having a Guy Party this weekend – he made up invitations that invited friends to “explore their inner guyness” as they play video games and watch PG-13 movies – so that’s pretty exciting. Bookended between baseball games on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, he’s got a full schedule.

For his birthday evening, we ordered in McDonald’s, ate the birthday cake his sister made, opened presents, studied for his math test, and watched War of the Worlds. Not too shabby for a Thursday afternoon!