GIZA - Submit two personal photos, a copy of your identification card, fill out an application and congratulations, you can become a student of the Indonesian Cultural Centre and enter the world of Indonesia for free. At this centre, which is located in Mossadek Street in Dokki, one can learn the Indonesian language, receive cooking lessons, play music using local instruments and perform marital arts, and much more. Indonesia, located in Southeast Asia and Oceania, is an archipelago comprising approximately 17,508 islands. It has 34 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Because they are keen to spread their culture here, they offer cultural activities for free. Ninety per cent of the students in the Centre are Egyptians aged between 8 and 60 years old, while 10 per cent are non-Egyptians like Americans, Pakistanis, Italians, Chinese and Syrians, said Dahlia Kusuma Dewi, the director of the Centre. All the teachers there are Indonesian who speak Arabic and English for those who don't understand Arabic. After finishing all six levels of language lessons, students can use it in tourism, journalism, and academic research as well as in trade and scientific research. Learning Silat is popular among people here, especially among men. Silat is a collective word for indigenous martial arts from a geo-cultural area of Southeast Asia encompassing most of the Nusantara, as well as the Malay Peninsula and Malay Archipelago. Originally developed in Indonesia, Malaysia, south Thailand, and Singapore, it is also traditionally practised in Brunei, Vietnam and the southern Philippines. Silat is one of the sports included in the Southeast Asian Games and other region-wide competitions. Watching Indonesian films is not only for entertainment, but also to help the audience know more about the life and culture of the Indonesian people on one hand; it also helps students develop listening skills to better understand the Indonesian language. "Some of the viewers understand the film without reading the Arabic subtitles," Wahyudi Abdurrahim of the Centre told The Egyptian Gazette. There are also lessons for learning how to play the angklung, a musical instrument made of two bamboo tubes attached to a bamboo frame. The tubes are carved in such a way as to create a resonant pitch when one of the tubes is struck. The base of the frame is held in one hand, whilst the other hand strikes the instrument. This causes a repeating note. Each of three or more performers in an angklung ensemble plays just one note or more, but altogether complete melodies are produced. The angklung is popular throughout Southeast Asia. The centre also holds seminars that tackle certain issues like politics and culture. They invite specialised speakers of every topic from Indonesia and Egypt to exchange views about contemporary issues.
