My Australian Journey (Part 1)

My Words

First of all, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to God Almighty, the One and the Only who has shown me the way and led me to one of my dreams.
Second of all, I would like to thank all participating parties; school administrators, fellow teachers, and of course the parents whose children are trusted to me to take care of during the overseas program.
This memoir was composed in line with the notion “Write what you did, and do what you wrote”, so that my journey was nothing but meaningful. And I want to let my kids know that their father has gone away with a piece of idea and came back with a bunch of greater knowledge.
I just took freedom as my idea for writing this piece of work, probably still far away from “being grammatically correct” so don’t bother about that because that’s not the point.
I do hope everybody who reads this will enjoy the story, but most importantly understand that I am not a tourist yet a traveler.

Magelang, September 2010
The writer


Day 1 June 18, 2010
§ I am Leaving on the Jet Plane §

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, or experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting thing to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing”
(Daniel J. Boorstin; 1914-. The Image: A guide to Pseudo-Events in America)

Students gathered at the transportation garage of our school by wearing the PDPM at 2.00 pm. They were ready with their luggage and it seemed that they couldn’t wait going out from the campus. Two buses were also ready and some parents were there also just to say good bye.
Then, there was a problem…the bus was not enough so we had to ask more cars…who would voluntarily offer the cars???? Of course the parents..who else? The loading took place 1.5 hour when everybody was set and ready to leave on a jet plane.
The journey to Jogja was so so…nothing special even I myself was nervous as we faced some traffic jam..but thank God we arrived at Adisucipto airport at 5.30 pm. We still had time to check in and prepare things inside, moreover the students got KFC for their dinner.
After waiting for some times..then the announcement stated that our flight was delayed for about 30 minutes..WHATTT!!! This is gonna be a problem as our flight to Melbourne was at 10.00 pm. But it’s okay as we still have time…
The calling came when we headed to the plane at 7.30 and we sat on Garuda and the thundering sound of the plane’s propellers signed our take-off. The journey was scheduled for about 1 hour but when we were about to land at Soetta airport, the pilot announced that we had to fly over the airport a bit longer due to bad weather. Again, this is gonna be bad….can we reach the time of departure to Melbourne?? The “extra” fly was about 30 minutes and we landed safely but we had to be in a rush to check in and dealt with the immigration and customs.
We were so lucky that the immigration officers helped us because some of them were students’ relatives and alumni of our school. This process was so stressful because the on board officers kept on reminding us to be faster. Then, everything was done and again…we had to.. ”run” to get to the boarding gate..and we were in the plane..but with thousands of eyes staring at us…I don’t care about them…this was not our fault.