Saung Anklung Udjo

Well, I have so much to write about! The 70 people I have been living with for the last week have all been split up and sent to separate cities and art centres to study various aspects of Indonesian art and culture. I am now living in Bandung with 11 other people from India, Austria, Thailand, Naru, Samoa, Figi, Turkey, Germany and Kiribati, and this will be our home for the next three months!

The place we're staying at is called Saung Anklung Udjo, and it is a haven of peace and community in the centre of Bandung (which is nearly as crowded as Jakarta). It's a centre set up to educate people about the art form of Angklung, a traditional Indonesian musical instrument made of bamboo which is extremely versatile and sounds incredible when played well. They also teach Silat, a tradtional Indonesian martial art, which we will also be learning during our stay here. The centre has 500 visitors a day, with two daily performances and lots of workshops. The volunteers and staff live in and around the centre, and the IACS participants are staying in a beautiful little house all together. Here are some pictures!

Our shared living area with my new housemate from Figi

My lovely bedroom!!

Saung Anklung Udjo is exactly the kind of place I was hoping to be sent to in Indonesia! It's a centre which teaches music and harmony through community, as well as teaching Indonesian people about their local culture. There's always activity and music happening here - I woke up this morning at 7am to people rehearsing for this morning's performance. There is a huge performance area with a stage with lots of instruments we're free to use in our spare time when the performance area isn't being used:

The performance space and the morning show (just for locals in Bahasa Indonesia, the evening show is always packed and is for the visitors, in English)

A scary looking ram who lives here with us

A huge bat with massive teeth!

Making the Angklung - it's all made by hand and we will learn to make our own while we are here.

I have been playing violin a lot over the last week, it's been great because I haven't played much at all this past year. Before we all left to go to our separate art centres, each group had to come up with a 10 minute performance to show to the rest of the groups at our big farewell party. We discovered that each person in our group had a talent, whether it was music, dance, or martial arts, and we incorporated all of these into our performance with myself and the guy from India providing the soundtrack on violin and drums. Afterwards we won the prize for the best group performance, and I'm so glad we were able to do this as I missed my end of year performance at university but this kind of makes up for it.

The girl from Thailand in my group plays the saw duang, a Thai stringed instrument, which she has tuned so that we can play together. We've been teaching each other simple tunes and learning each other's instrument, which is great, I hope by the end of the three months to be able to be able to play it! I am going to learn so much here; as well as learning how to play Anklung and learning Silat, the Indonesian martial art found in this area, I will be learning Bahasa Indonesia, possibly some traditional dance, maybe some Indonesian cookery and the art of Batik, and lots of phrases in Thai and German because my friends have promised to teach me more of their languages. 

Oh and I get to visit volcanoes!