I want to make notes of some more culture differencies.
Firstly, people eat with bare hands in Aceh. In the beginning they provided spoons and forks to me and everybody companied me by eating with the tools. Note that it was always spoon and fork, never knife. So you would cut the meat with the spoon while holding it with the fork. At some point I realized that everybody else except our table were eating with hands. So people in my table used the tools just to company me, that I wouldn't feel different. After that I wanted to try eating with bare hands also, thinking I want to do like the locals. At first it felt weird, of course, but pretty soon I got used to it. It started to feel normal. That's something travelling and getting really into other cultures does to you: your idea of "normal" changes, gets broader.
One interesting culture difference was that everybody called me (and other teachers) for "miss" ( or mrs" or "mr"). PThe students always started talking to me with "miss". At first it felt funny to be called as miss all the time, but then I of course got used to it, too. In Finland students usually get the attention of a teacher by starting by "ope", which is a shorter word for "opettaja" (=teacher) in spoken language. Or sometimes also the first name of the teacher is used to get the attention. It doesn't feel so frequent, however, than using the word "miss" here.
Sometimes the way of speaking a foreign language reflects the native language of the person talking. For me it sounded funny that people passing me in the school area kept asking me "miss, where do you want to go?". It took some time to get used to it, why would they ask where do I want to go? But that was just their way of asking where I was going to. Also, the same happened when they needed to leave for praying. They always said "sorry miss', but I want to go pray". I am not sure, but I guess they use similar kind of structure when in their own native language, bahasa indonesia. An interesting culture detail was also how the small students greeted you when meeting or leaving. They take your hand in theirs and bring your hand gently to touch their forehead. I think there was something beautiful in the habit.
I was also many times confused by being asked something like "how about school in Finland?" Or "how about Finland?" with no previous context. I mean, normally when you use the words "how about", it refers to a previous conversation, the subject you have been talking about. But these people used it without any previous context, and it made me confused, thinking what exatly would they want to know about. Well, with the other volunteer we came to conclusion that it was their way of asking you to tell everything :D Which doesn't make it any easier to answer, where to start?
Then finally just a very tiny detail, but as I am interested in languages it is interesting to me. The Indonesian people have difficulties in saying the number 6. They will continuously say "sick". And still, they can pronounce the sound 'x' if you ask them to. Somehow it is just not natural for them, it is not frequent in their native language. A bit similar thing is when Spanish people pronounce Steve as Esteve, skate as eskate etc. It is natural for them to add an 'e' in the beginning of the word beginning with 's' + another consonant? These kind of little things are interesting to me, and also it is interesting that after interacting with people from different places of the world you begin to recognize the typical way of pronunciation in certain countries. Then when you meet new people or just hear somebody talking to somebody else with not-native English you start to guess where they come from by the way they speak English.
