The Full Yogyakarta Experience: Part 2: Homestay

Homestay - A key defining aspect of the Immersion Programme.

Just a week before departure, the gals and myself met up with Ibu Indri for a final briefing and confirmation of the immersion programme. We found out the names of our homestay families and the addresses. I was assigned to Dr J. Bismoko and the homestay location was stated to be approximately 10 minutes by foot from the Language Centre.

White box on the left is home; The other box is Sanata Dharma University

Above is the satellite map I got off Google Maps. Maybe something of interest to you is that unlike Singapore, many of the minor roads do not have names. For example, there is no road address at my homestay place. The place is identified according to the cluster. In my case, the cluster is named KarangMalang. From the map, the house looks pretty far away, but still I managed to get to school in 10 minutes or so.

Bagaimana sistem lalu lintas di Yogyakarta? 

In the map above, you can see 1 main road, Jalan Gelayan. It is a very busy high-traffic road and there are zebra crossings marked out across the road. However, these are for a decorative purpose as no one really cares to stop. The 'tactic' to crossing a busy road in Yogyakarta is to look out for small pockets of gaps within the traffic flow itself and to tactically insert yourself in between. Just walk normally and 99.999% of the time the motorists will try to avoid you.Of course, this is not something you can or should do in Singapore.

So who is Dr Bismoko?

Bapak Bismoko buying knives and holding on to a bunch of bananas

During the brief, Ibu Indrianti told me that Bapak Bismoko was her English language teacher when she was an undergrad at Universitas Sanata Dharma. She sort of mentioned that she was afraid of him as he was insanely smart. Her words made my imagination run wild. What kind of person is this Dr Bismoko? Is he the super-strict guy? Will he be difficult to get along with? Being the kay-poh that I am, I went to investigate [with Google]. It seems that Dr Bismoko is quite an authority in English Language studies within ASEAN, he had given quite a handful of speeches regarding English Language education in regional conferences. My 'investigation' still left me with lots of unknowns, will I be able to get along with him and his family? One thing is for sure though, I will have no problems speaking English there!

HomeStay at Bapak Bismoko 


Touching down from the airport, we were fetched by the staff of the Lembaga Bahasa Universitas Sanata Dharma [Language Institute of USD] to the school campus for a brief introduction and a placement test! [YES! A placement test straight after 2 hours of flight!] After that, we were sent to our homestay locations.

KarangMalang Map

Bapak Bismoko's home is located in Karang Malang. The area is made up of little warungs and some kos (boarding house). Bapak Bismoko's home is close to quite a number of universities, as such there are many kos in the area. The area that I lived in happened to be a kos area for women. Bapak Bismoko's residence is made up of a 2 storey building. Bapak Bismoko, his family and myself stays on the ground floor while the 2nd floor is a kos for the girls. [In case you are wondering, I did not get a lot of opportunities to hang around with the girls.]

Double Doors leading into the same room.

The house is weirdly configured. There are a total of 3 doors leading into the house.  1 main door, and 2 side doors that are next to each other. The girls will have their own side door and I have my own as well. I'm not sure why is it arranged this way and neither did I ask Bapak Bismoko about it.

First Encounter with 'Pak Bis'
My first encounter with Bapak Bismoko was an interesting one. He introduced himself, "Hi I am Pak Bismoko, you can call me Pak Bis." He got me a bar of soap and told me to have a good bath and rest since I had just arrived from Singapore.

So, I entered my room and started to unpack. Here's a picture of my room.

My room

First impression of room, "Wah big! Wah got air-con! Wah got bathtub in toilet!". But yes, good first impressions always wear off after awhile. There was lizard crap over the left edge of the bed. The bathtub was for show [as mentioned in the previous page]. And yes, I had brought my laptop there. Without internet, the laptop was useless! So did you think I enjoyed my time at the homestay? Well, I did. There were other things that more than made up for the cons of the place [like the air-con and stuff that I will talk about later]!

And then, I thought, it was time to finally bathe after all the unpacking. So, I tried to lock the door. Guess what, the lock wasn't working! I told Pak Bis about it, we spent the next hour or 2 dismantling the door locks from other doors and swapping them around. When we started to dismantle my own door, we realized it was stucked in a semi-lock position and we couldn't remove the lock. So off Pak Bis went to his toolshed and back he came with hammers and other tools. We banged and slammed at the lock and tried our best to 'destroy' the lock. The lock survived. Pak Bis was quite strong for a man turning 70.

Just when we ran out of ideas and strength, I suddenly noticed that the brand of the key that was given to me did not match the lock. I suspected that the key was wrong, Pak Bis wasn't convinced. So anyway, I was right. The 2 hours we spent trying to fix the lock was a waste of time! Weirdly enough, I found it quite fun for reasons that I myself do not understand as well.

This  incident wow-ed me, I realized that Pak Bis, despite his age, was amazingly independent. He is the fix-it-all guy in the house. It seems that the water piping system and all the doors in the house were installed by Pak Bis himself. I did not recall seeing a maid in the house during my 3 weeks stay there. The house despite not being spotlessly clean, was in a very good shape.

Subsequent Notable Experiences with Pak Bis

Dinner with  Pak Bis was always interesting. Our conversations touched on a wide range of topics, sistem lalu lintas  and healthcare di Indonesia, strategies for crossing roads [as mentioned above] and even to corruption in Indonesia. Pak Bis talked about how he tried to keep fit by walking to the schools that he teaches at [one of it is at least 20 to 30 minutes walk away] and why he decided against the use of a backpack as his work bag. Apparently, he uses a hand-carried bag because such a bag would utilize his arm muscles. He also makes sure that both hands are utilized equally! Interesting enough, he even showed me his healthcare report.

Kampung Area and Pak Bis' Jeep

Towards the end of the 3 weeks, we had sort of ran out of places to go too. To be more precise, there were places to go to, just that we did not have sufficient time to visit them due to the long traveling time required. So Pak Bis, being the nice man that he is, offered to bring all of us to a traditional market [refer to the pic above with him holding on the bananas]. Also, we visited the kampung that he grew up in and snacked on many types of traditional Indo kuehs. It was a very different experience as compared to the tourism-oriented homestay covered as part of the NUS-organized excursion. Our local guide was Pak Bis and he showed us around the irrigation channels around the village and the avocado trees in the area


Of course, there are some negatives about the homestay as well [Food]. However, I shall leave that for my other posts.