Maksi 2017, That is a Wrap!

Maksi 2017 was a huge success for SMPK1 BPK Penabur Bandung. Maksi, which stands for Malam Apresiasi Karya Siswa (Student’s Creation Appreciation Night) is an event held by SMPK1 BPK Penabur once every 2 years. Students were given a chance to show their ability in non-academic sector, such as dancing, singing, play drama, etc. This is my first year seeing Maksi. This year’s Maksi was held on Balai Kartini in Bikasoga, on February 10^th 2017, with the theme ‘Harmony in Diversity’. I went there with two of my friends, Caleb and Adriel. We got the regular pass ticket. My first impression when I entered the hall was so amazing. Colorful lights lit up the room and strobe light beams running here and there, creating an enormous effect on the hall. We got our seats and enjoying the shows.

Chelsea's performance

There were bands performing, and they were all great. The Retro Dance Crew dances very well, I like how they were very solid and move rhythmically. Then the Point Z x Golden Cross came up to perform. Hype was the most memorable dance performance I’ve seen that time. Two of my classmates, Alicia C and Nadya were members of the dance group. They were doing really great. Their costumes were nice as well. Chelsea also performed with her band. On top of everything, I was waiting for No N’3 to perform. No N’3 is a dance group with the members of K1s alumnus. They are quiet famous, I think. Once they attend a dance competition on television and did a really great job. I love every performance they’ve shown.

Here’s a sneak peak when Maam Liani acted on the play.

After No N’3‘s performance, it was time to watch the Maksi most memorable, most climax, most intense show; the teacher’s play! The play was opened by a woman with pink dress and fancy hat with black sunglasses which then I recognized as Maam Liani came to the stage. Then other teachers came up and dance off to JKT48’s song and another dangdut song. The audiences laughed off to see how ridiculous and creative K1 teachers are. Unlike most other teachers, they were not afraid or ashamed to act differently from how they usually do in classes. Then some other teachers came to the stage and play a song as a band, while 3 others with black suit doing some ‘magic tricks’. I recognized one of them as Mr. Ook. Then, Ms. Ratna came up with a male teacher as Indian dancers. This makes the show very hilarious. Ms. Ratna is do known for her hilariousness. At the end of the play, all the players came up to the stage and gave us a good farewell.

What would your reaction be when you see your teachers dancing like this?

This was my first year of Maksi and I am really impressed by it. Though I wasn’t one of the participants, I as an SMPK1 student, also feel proud by the success of Maksi 2017. I can’t wait to see the next Maksi on 2019!

Bandung Flood

A few days ago, exactly on Monday (10/24), a sudden flood engulfed Bandung. The sudden flood hit some parts of the city in the afternoon, including Jl. Dr. Djunjunan (better known as Jl. Pasteur and Jl. Pagarsih), sweeping away several cars and killing a resident. I was in school and it rained heavily, but I wouldn’t think there would be a flood. On my way home from school, the streets were full of cars and seldom moving, so I waited in school until 4 p.m. and then I went home.

I saw nothing on my way home because I was sleeping. Later at home, I heard news about the sudden flood. It was said by Bandung’s Bina Marga road agency head Iskandar Zulkarnaen that the extraordinary heavy rain unexpectedly flooded the riverbank beyond its maximum capacity. Thus, overflowing water from the Citepu River inundated Jl. Pasteur and Jl. Sukamulya.

"Because of the excessive heavy rain, the river is unable to contain the water," he said to reporters in Bandung as quoted by kompas.com.

The flash flood reportedly took the life of Ade Sudrajat (30), after he fell into the water and was swept away while trying to assist his friend escape from flooding on Jl. Setia Budi. His body was later found in a gutter.

A black Nissan had been dragged more than 200 meters along the street before being diverted by the flow of water and carried into the Citepus River. The flood also swept away a three-wheeled motorcycle, which was parked in front of a garbage dumpster on Jl. Pagarsih and a smaller red Daihatsu Charade sedan.

The mayor of Bandung, Ridwan Kamil, has apologized to the public for Monday’s flash flood. As the mayor, he said, he will be responsible upon the disaster which made up to 16 billion Rupiah loss. He will keep sought on to repairing the drainage system.

“Indeed as Bandung mayor I am responsible. The flood countermeasures keep continues on. This year, Bandung city government has fix up the drainage system in 19 roads. It shows that our yearly installments due to the limited budget,” he said.

Through his Instagram account, Kamil uttered his apologize to all Bandung citizens, and also invited us as Bandung citizens to take our part on keeping our city clean and preventing flood in the future.

Reference:

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/10/26/cause-city-s-recent-fatal-flooding-a-mystery-bandung-mayor.html

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/10/25/bandung-blames-heavy-rain-poor-drainage-for-flash-flood.html

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/10/26/bandung-administration-denies-flood-caused-by-burst-dike.html

https://www.instagram.com/ridwankamil/

http://regional.liputan6.com/read/2635192/ridwan-kamil-bingung-penyebab-banjir-di-bandung

What would Indonesia be in the Next Five Years?

In the next five years, I’d like to see lots of positive changes take place in my country, Indonesia. I don’t have to be a major change that leads Indonesia to be a developed country like USA or Singapore. Instead, small positive changes would give better impact than nothing, right?

In the next five years, I’d like to see a better government system and better government employees in Indonesia. Nowadays, lots of the governors and civil servants corrupt the country’s budget. It is a lot better now than 5 years ago, where the TV programs were full of the corruption news. Thus I think in 5 years I’d like to see no corruption case in Indonesia anymore.

I’d also like to see a more open-minded society and no more racist people. The country’s development is also affected by the citizens. In such wise, if we don’t have good citizens, this country won’t develop well. Indonesian citizens should be more open-minded about everything. We should be willing to hear each other opinion and not being conservative about one idea. I think now, as well as in the future, being racist is not cool. So, stop being racist and start to love our diversity.

I see that there are lots of poor families today, so I hope in the next 5 years the number of poor families will decrease, and more people will have a good quality of life, because every person in the country deserves the same rights to have a good quality of life. They should have better nutrition, in fact that many poor families today suffer from malnutrition. Many also do not have access to clean water, which oblige them to use dirty water for their everyday usage. There are many more that we, especially the governments in this case can do to help these poor families.

One of the most common social issues today is that many parents could not afford their children’s education. Hence, a lot of the country’s next generations are uneducated. I really appreciate Mr. Jokowi’s program of the free schooling that he made so that more poor children can go to school without paying the school fee. But this program has not been spread equally all over the country, only some cities have this program already. I wish in the next 5 years, this program will spread all over the country. Therefore, more children can go to school.

The last change I want to see it take place in Indonesia is a fast internet connection. The internet connection in Indonesia is considered a slow compared to other countries such as South Korea and Sweden. Today, internet is one of the most important aspects of human’s life. The internet helps us connected with someone far away, do homework or researches, play games, or just simply to post selfies on Instagram and watch your favorite youtuber on Youtube. But slow internet connection will make our activities take a long time. Slow internet connection could ruin everything; students ca get no marks because they didn’t do their homework, you could have miscommunication between you and your girlfriend or boyfriend,  or you could be undated with the latest news today.  Thus, I hope we could make Indonesia’s internet connection faster.

Changes won’t happen if there are no actions. We all have to be willing to do things that support the change. I believe that small actions could make a big difference to our lovely country, Indonesia.

Holiday Story

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog :)

How’s everybody going? I hope y’all good. I haven’t post anything yet on this blog since last month or even more. I was going on a long holiday on my semester break. It was really fun. Now I want to share my last holiday experience to you. 

I went with my family using a car all along our holiday. It was kind of road trip. We started from Bandung on June 25^th to our first stop, Cirebon. We stayed in Swiss-Belhotel Cirebon. After checked-in for our room, we went out to Trusmi Batik Village. There were a lot of batik stores selling nice and unique batiks. We bought some batik fabric, blouse, scarfs, and shirts. We ate seafood for our dinner. Then we headed back to our hotel and had some rest. At midnight, we all got up except my brother, and smacked him with pillows. He woke up with shock and stared at all of us for a few seconds and then laughed out loud. Yes, it was June 26^th, my brother’s birthday. After gave him a ton of happy birthday wishes, we went back to sleep.

The next morning, we woke up and had our breakfast. Then we packed our stuffs and checked out from the hotel. Cirebon was pretty hot that day. We continued our road trip to Semarang, Central Java. At one point there was traffic jam, and we were stuck there for like 4 hours. Thanks to anyone who invented Waze, we could get out of that crazy traffic. We were up to Semarang at 6 p.m., and due to at that time most of the people were break fasting, the city were pretty full yet beautiful because of the buildings and vehicle lights. We went into a mall to eat, wee, and do other things for a while. Then we continued again to Salatiga, and stayed for a night there. Salatiga was a nice city, with cold weather like Bandung. We slept peacefully that night.

The warmth of sunlight woke me up that morning. Oh, I just realized there were big windows in my room. I didn’t realize it before because the night before was dark and you cannot literally see anything. I had my breakfast and also checked my phone. The signal was very rare and always low and to find a good signal, it really wasted my battery percentage. So most of the time, I put my phone on airplane mode. That time the Wi-Fi was very strong, so I didn’t waste that chance HEHE. After we packed our stuffs, we continued again to Yogyakarta, our main destination. We stayed at Tentrem Hotel, and I swore it was the best hotel I’ve ever stayed on my entire life so far. It has such a big swimming pool, Chinese restaurant, and traditional restaurant, western and also European restaurant. There were also gym, sauna, Jacuzzi, whirlpool, and board games including billiard. We were really happy to be there. Despite the heat, Yogyakarta was a nice city with amazing culture, amusing city sights, and friendly people. We visited so many places there, including the old Keraton palace. We also looked around the city to find some batik. At night, we mostly stayed in hotel to play and have some rest. Whirlpool or sauna sounds great after you had a really tiring day. So we went downstairs and enjoy the moment. 

4 days and 3 nights in Yogyakarta weren’t feeling that long. Although we still wanted to stay, we had to go to the next city, Purwokerto, because my grandparents have already had waiting for our arrival. So we headed to Purwokerto from Yogyakarta. The time needed for us to reach the city was about 4 or 5 hours. We brought so many souvenirs from Yogyakarta, like t-shirts, bakpia, and other things. We arrived in Purwokerto at 8 p.m., and so we took a bath and had a rest. 

We didn’t do much in Purwokerto. Only gathered with my family there and city sight-seeing was felt really fun. We stayed in my grandparents’ house for 3 nights. We went home to Bandung after 9 days we had our road trip. This trip was really fun!

But unfortunately school will start a week straight after my homecoming. So I stay at home and prepare for my new school year. I still wanted to be on holiday. 30 days straight of holiday feels only like 14 days. But I also missed my friends. I cannot wait to meet them and share my story to them. So I went back to school.

That was my holiday story. I hope you enjoy reading it. :)

Obama's Inspirational Speech

Whenever you feel down or losing your inspiration, just take a look at this Barack Obama's speech about his early life and how he got into politics. He encourages the youths to be active in the middle of the world changes. He said that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they are given an opportunity. He also said that all of the youths represent enormous potential and enormous possibility for change. At the end of his speech he said that he hope all of the audiences who are on the brink of doing extraordinary things decide the channel that talent in that energy and that imagination to figuring out how do the audiences move the process along for better history. I think this a very good speech with very inspiring quotes.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzII3W2MLYY

Niall Horan

Niall James Horan is an Irish singer-songwriter and guitarist, known as a member of the boy band One Direction. He was born on 13 September 1993 in Mullingar, Ireland.

Niall auditioned for the X Factor

In 2010, at sixteen years old, Niall auditioned for the seventh series of The X Factor in Dublin. He sang "So Sick" and received 3 out of 4 ‘yes’ from the judges. At bootcamp, Niall sang "Champagne Supernova", but failed to qualify for the "Boys" category. After a suggestion from guest judge Nicole Scherzinger, Niall was put into a group with four other boys; Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomnlinson and formed One Direction. They became second runner up.

One Direction had been signed by Cowell to a reported £2 million Syco record contract. They began to write their songs, and making their debut album. One Direction has released five albums so far, and Niall had been wrote and co-written some of the songs; Taken, Everything About You, Same Mistakes, Back for You and Summer Love, from the albums Up All Night and Take Me Home. He also co-wrote the songs Don't Forget Where You Belong, Why Don't We Go There and Story of My Life for the Midnight Memories album, Night Changes, Fool's Gold and Change Your Ticket for the album Four, Wolves, A.M, Temporary Fix and Never Enough for the band's fifth album Made in the AM.

Niall was said to be the sixth sexiest man on “Top 20 Sexiest Man in the World” which was made by The Sun. He once said that he couldn’t live without his heart, his family, his phone, and food. He enjoys playing golf, football, and Gaelic football. During One Direction’s hiatus on 2016, Niall spend his time playing golf, go on vacation, and gather with his family. 

You can get Niall’s updates by following his social media

Twitter: @Niall_Official
Instagram: @NiallHoran
Snapchat: niallhoran
or visit One Direction’s website: onedirectionmusic.com

Album Review: Pharmacy

Pharmacy is my favorite Electronic Dance Music album so far. Pharmacy is the debut studio album by Swedish electronic music duo Galantis, released on 8 June 2015. This album has 13 tracks, including 3 singles, Runaway (U & I), Peanut Butter Jelly, and You, and also a promotional single, Gold Dust. The album has reached number 1 in Billboard Dance / Electronic Albums, number 45 in Billboard 200, and number 7 in Sverigetopplistan Swedish Albums. I think all songs in this album are great. I could jam to all of it all day long and replayed it for hours. Pharmacy is under license of Atlantic Recording Corporation.

You can buy the album and merchandises from Galantis here: wearegalantis.com