Revisiting old haunts
Today’s post is written by Gavin Johnson, who is serving in Ungaran. He writes about revisiting our study setting in Yogyakarta.
Study term was so much fun, from the language class and malls to the trips and the city of Yogya itself. So while I have been enjoying my service and have been able to eat at a new restaurant every day, I’ve been longing to visit Yogya and my old host family, and I also wanted to visit the various places in Yogya that our group went to during our first six weeks of study . I brought Lindsey with me and the trip revolved around us going to our favorite places and finishing up gift shopping. We went to Malioboro (a popular gift-shopping location in Yogya) and stumbled upon the coffee/tea shop that my group of four visited during our public transportation-related activity on our first full week in Indonesia.
Normally a trip to Yogya from my service placement in Ungaran would be pretty costly (at least if you wanted to get there within a few hours), but luckily my language partner from our Indonesian class at UKDW showed me how to use this cheap transportation service called Sabila Shuttle that is pretty fast. It was air-conditioned, had comfy seats, and was an hour faster that what was predicted.
Once I arrived I dropped off my belongings at my former host family’s home and left for Rumah Goshen. If you don’t know what Rumah Goshen is, it essentially translates to “Goshen House.” It’s where our SST leaders Susan and Ben stayed at during our study term. From home-cooked meals to traditional dancing, we’ve had a lot of great memories here. It was a bittersweet experience visiting it, for it brought a wave of nostalgia, and seeing it blacked-out and empty made me miss it more.
Next stop was the Puri Chorus Hotel, the very first place we stayed at in Yogya for our first couple of nights. To this day, the hotel still has some of the best nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice) I’ve had yet. The place isn’t too big but the atmosphere and the rooms themselves were very comfortable and calming.
It was at this point that my phone’s service stopped working and I ended up getting lost for about 20 minutes, looking for the next location (or at least somewhere with Wifi). Eventually I luckily stumbled upon Galeria Mall. This small shopping mall was very close to UKDW and our group frequently went there during study term. Lindsey and my favorite place there was a restaurant called Happy Bee that’s actually owned by a UKDW alumni (according to my study term host father). We stopped there and ate some delicious lunch for what could potentially be the last time.
The last stop was UKDW, which like I said, was close by. What I didn’t expect to find was a pretty empty campus that was mostly dark and closed down. Apparently there were no classes that whole week because Easter was coming up (take notes, GC). Unfortunately this means I wasn’t able to visit our old classroom or the dining hall (which also had great nasi goreng, by the way).
On my final day in Yogya, I said my farewells to my former host family and left to visit the pesantren (Islamic boarding school for Jr. and Sr. High students) that Evan had been staying at during service. Our whole group had also gone here for a day during study term, so it was nice to visit one more time. I was surprised to see Ben and Susan appear as well, and we all joined Evan in assisting an English class.
Afterwards we got lunch in Yogya City Mall, which was very tasty. My time in Yogya and in SST in general has been an immensely enjoyable one that I will never forget.
