Ihku Indonesia!: Rafting and Choir concert

On Saturday I had my first ever river rafting experience. And it was great!! There were about 11 of us who decided we needed to get out of Jakarta again and we headed to Bogor area in West Java, around 2-3 hours drive from Jakarta. There it's much more hilly and now during the rain season the rivers should be good for rafting. Our destination was Citarik river in Sukabumi, supposedly the best place in Indonesia for rafting.

Finally at the rafting place, we got our life vests and helmets and were loaded on a little truck (!!) which drove the bumpiest, steepest, smallest and worst road ever upstream where our boats waited. Our group was split up into three boats and skilled instructors hopped on as well. After a short course on how to behave in the stream (either paddle forwards, backwards, stop paddling or in a threatening situation get down on the bottom of the boat), we took off. The river was level 3+ from a difficulty scale from 1 to 5 and the trip was really enjoyable! And we got extremely wet from top to toe. Oh gosh it was fun. Best about it were the beautiful views surrounding the river; rice fields, jungle, total greenness everywhere. Absolutely huge lizards were lying everywhere on big rocks and watching, bored, how our joyful entourage floated by. The rafting lasted only 2 hours, but we were absolutely exhausted and slept the entire way back to Jakarta.

Sunday was just as fun and just as exhausting. I have been a member of Jakarta International Community Choir since I arrived here and it was finally our Annual Concert day. First of all, singing in a choir is totally different in Indonesia. The people here have such passion for performing and being on stage. Almost all of our songs had some sort of choreography and even costumes, so the concert itself is also a very visual experience for the audience. While my old choirs in Finland would rehearse the music to the smallest detail, making sure that every single tone goes right, the choir here doesn't make it such a big deal, as long as everyone looks like they really enjoy singing together. I have to say joining this choir is one of the best decisions I've made in Indonesia. The people there are absolutely amazing and a lot of fun. And as the common language is English, I haven't had such a hard time knowing what's going on :)

Here all the girls in our choir are performing "Santa Baby",
with the idea of acting as sexy as possible :D

On Sunday we had two consequtive shows and I was especially happy to have some of my friends in the audience :) Two of my colleagues, Leila and Ella and two other embassy trainees, Catharina and Johanna, came to see the show, which was really great! Our repertoire consisted of some Christmas songs, one song from Walt Disney's Notre Dame, some ABBA, songs from Broadway musicals and international songs from all over the world - China, Japan, Indonesia, the Netherlands etc. As we kept changing costumes, the green room got quite hectic at times as we didn't have much time to change. But all in all I think we offered two great, sold-out shows and even made it to the Metro News morning broadcast the next day! Metro News is the national tv news producer in Indonesia and you can see the programme here (our part is in the very end). Our choir will still deliver a few Christmas concerts in shopping malls and small events right until Christmas - I will join one of them on December 6th when we perform at an American Christmas brunch. This following weekend will be music-filled too, as we're then recording our album!