Nicole Laux is one of English instructors at CRCS for periode 2010 to 2012 from the United State. For two years she had been living in Yogyakarta and starting to use a motorbike. From her motorbike she observed how people live in the city which has many names: the city of culture, the city of education, the city of tolerance, the city of young people, and the city of motorbike. In her writing for Shansi, the instituion that sent her to Yogya, she share what life looks like from a motor cycle, as she wrote below:
When it rains in a motorbike riding country people sometimes stop on the side of the road and wait it out, but I would say most people want to get to their final destination, so they put on a poncho. As much as I hated driving in the rain, and hated having to put on my blue-plastic- shin-length-perpetually-moldy-smelling- sort- of- slimy- when – I-forget- to-dry-it –out-poncho, I liked the 20 second adrenalin rush I got when I was trying to get into my poncho as fast as I could. I got pretty good. If I was at a stop light and the green light countdown was at 30 seconds I knew that I could dismount my bike, take off my helmet, open my seat, take out my poncho, and put it on, and still have 10-5 seconds to get my helmet back on and turn on my bike. It’s almost like me and all the drivers were super heroes changing into our crime fighting outfit to fight the oppressive rain. Once the masses have their ponchos on, there is a sea of plastic capes flapping behind the lone drivers, families of 2-4 huddled under one or two ponchos, and the best, couples on bikes with two headed ponchos looking like a two headed alien”.
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