What's in a (Good) Blog?

Blogging about a distant, unfamiliar country can be difficult. And because I know so little about Indonesia, it's easy for me to single out the most unusual elements of its culture and environment for writing: bucket showers, active volcanoes, utterly enormous bats, and pork being taboo, for example.

However, although exoticizing Indonesians might make my experiences seem adventurous and exciting, my college lit professors would probably tsk tsk against othering, defining a group people solely in terms of how its culture differs from one's own. Likewise, I don't want to create the impression that an enormous divide exists between our two countries when there are probably considerable similarities. So I'll do my best to both cut the cheese and tone down the romanticizing once I get overseas, knowing that a good blog should be an honest blog.

At the same time, though, I'll try not to dwell on personal, everyday routines. Don't expect much of this: the neighbor's rooster woke me up at 5:00. I had a rice breakfast, taught phonics at school, and headed home for a rice dinner . If I'm not too lazy in my writing, then posts should be more interesting, touching on topics like

• political attitudes in one of the world's newest democracies;
• how the 4th most populous country maintains any sense of social "togetherness" despite spreading across an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands;
• what Islam looks in a distinctly Asian culture; and
  
• how an educational system partially controlled by the Ministry of Religious Affairs makes Indonesian schools different from American schools.

I'll do my best to keep it both real and interesting. This is my informal pledge to create a blog worth reading...