A slice of life after Christmas

I’m alone, sitting in our hammock drinking coffeemix while the cats hunt each gecko in our dirt yard. Chrissy and Rachel both left this morning after a few days of extra Indo holiday bonding in Jogja and Solo (a 50-km train ride away). I spent Christmas in Solo with Rachel pillaging the box my amazing mother UPS’ed me for its hot chocolate, marshmallows, pancake batter and candy canes. Later we got hungry again and went to Pizza Hut for a 7-cheese, stuffed crust, unmistakably American pizza pie. Chrissy arrived the next day from Jakarta and we walked around Solo together sampling roadside food carts, eventually treating ourselves to holiday creambaths and facials at the spa ($4!). Then a train to Jogja, fermented tapioca drinks at Milas and late night hanging out on the sidewalk mats near Jogja’s train station to talk and drink kopi jos, “strong” coffee brewed with charcoal, plus warm ginger milk and fried tempeh.

I’m sitting alone with the cats on this rarely cool afternoon and enjoying how quiet our neighborhood has been today, though broken now as each of the five mosques nearby takes its turn to call our neighbors to prayer. I’ve heard bule claim they hate the sound of the call to prayer but I can’t see why; besides being useful for telling time, it’s a peaceful, periodic reminder to take a moment for yourself, like this one. The prettiest call I’ve heard yet was from the mosque near Rachel’s house the morning after Christmas, when I was awake enough to hear the day’s first call at 4am. He let each line’s last syllable close quietly, gently, avoiding the mechanical drone that the other broadcasted voices can have, as if he was singing to himself in an empty room, bored, tired, maybe sad. It pulled me out of sleep but lulled me right back into it, an Arabic lullaby on Christmas night.

Though lacking a Christian majority, Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur were Christmas-crazy: garland, trees, Santas, reindeer, strings of lights, music in the stores. It was retail-oriented, hollow but familiar signals that you need to be shopping and you need to do it now! I don’t miss this American-style obsession with consumption, every inch of our sight and second of our attention being pulled away from these precious internal thoughts to convince us that we should be buying something, anything, to make our day better, when how much does it ever improve? Indonesia’s (or at least Jogja/Solo’s) version of Christmas was more relaxed, some Christmas music in the grocery store to hum along to and a tree or two at the mall, which still seems like a lot in an area that’s 90+% Muslim. I was happy to pass the time with close friends plus enough wireless internet to dial into the real festivities at my family’s Christmases in Chicago and Utah, enough video power to experience my awesome nieces and nephews so excited about their presents, family company and Christmas treats. I miss you guys.

Scenes from an Indo Christmas:

Rainbows and rice fields on the drive to Solo.

Thanks mom!

Team Indo, one becek: bisa.

Srabi: hot, squishy, coconutty bread with a jackfruit topping — only in Solo.

Durian + chocolate juice, Solo

Street corner serenades at kopi jos, Jogjakarta.

Just for fun, Christmas elsewhere in Asia:

Greeting Seasons!

Sidewalks and storefronts in Vietnam’s big cities.

Mixed Chinese and Christmas goodies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

A Very Retail Christmas in Kuala Lumpur – overload! Look how small those people are!

Now THIS is a chicken finger.

Midnight snack!

I’m not sure what purpose the spoon serves; this is definitely finger food. (Get it?!)

Vietnam 3 : A review in pictures

Vietnam was very good to us, and we’re soon headed back to Indo with an overnight stay in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We’re sad to leave the incredible food and friends, so goodbye and many thanks, Vietnam! Here’s a quick review:

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon):

• French style urban planning and those culinary staples of French colonialism which make me wish the Dutch had better sweet colonial legacies than the Danish, or Indonesia’s bread-with-sprinkles.
• Christmas everywhere in a Socialist country that is 85% Buddhist. Same in Hanoi and Malaysia, so I’m wondering if the Christmas spirit will overtake Indonesia as well..

Ho Chi Minh vs. Christmas tree

• Motorbike city! These traffic jams make me grateful for the aforementioned urban planning (sidewalks and greenery):

• Visited the Cu Chi tunnels, where the Viet Cong would hide guerilla-style during the war, and then the war remnants museum downtown. A must for historical perspective, but very sobering.

Tiny entrance to the Cu Chi tunnels.

Hue (former imperial capital of the Nguyen dynasty):

• We came to Hue to visit two VIA volunteers who directed us to the good places to eat. Real Vietnamese food is the best cuisine I’ve ever tasted, and I’m so sorry if I become a snob about it when I repatriate.

Tomato-based “winter pho.” It’s cold in Hue!!

• Chrissy and I rented motorbikes and went hunting some emperor’s tombs in the countryside. Here’s some scenes from the Minh Mang tomb, a spectacularly restored UNESCO site. Note the heavy Chinese influence and layouts providing harmonious scenery from every angle; the chi was balanced here, my friends. This afternoon was possibly my favorite part of the week, despite our equatorial selves being unprepared for cold and rainy weather.

• Then we boarded a 15-hour overnight sleeper bus, contracted an eye infection and some chest coughs, and woke up in…..

Sleeper bus!

Hanoi!:

• Pastries, wine and DIY spring rolls.
• Visited the preserved corpse of Mr. Ho Chi Minh himself, embalmed in a simple marble room inside a massive concrete tomb. His wish had been to be cremated and spread in South, Central, and North Vietnam, and we’re not quite sure how he ended up on display, so we have some reading to do.

• Wandered on foot (Indonesian: jalan-jalan) around Hoan Kiem Lake at the city center to see old Vietnamese men in their spectacles and berets and dodge ladies walking aggressively arm-in-arm. Same in the city’s Old Quarter and French Quarter.

• We also booked a one-night tour through our hotel to visit Halong Bay, a recently appointed Wonder of the World, to eat, sleep, kayak, and enjoy the views from a large sleeper boat anchored in the Bay. Misty weather made us wonder if the bay’s namesake dragons were really out there, till I found a real one on our boat trying to chomp down on part of Vietnam’s national heritage:

Dec. 4 – Dec. 9: Phu Quoc Island
Dec. 9 – Dec. 11: Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon
Dec. 11- Dec. 13: Hue
Dec. 14 – Dec. 17: Hanoi & Ha Long Bay
Dec. 2 – Dec. 4 & Dec. 17: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Things Vietnam has which Indonesia doesn’t really [in pictures]

Pho.

Pastries (Hanoi), and this is killing me a little bit. Not pictured on the shelf beneath: real baguettes, thanks to France.

Wide, tree-lined boulevards and sidewalks (Ho Chi Minh City) (again, thank you France).

Public parks (Ho Chi Minh City), and/or places to sit quietly in public in general, and/or a climate conducive to spending the afternoon outside.

Jameson Irish whiskey.

Ridiculous Christmas decorations.

Offerings quietly stuffed next to an electrical pole…

….or a bridge.

Guys who try to glue your friend’s shoes back together when you’re not looking.

Kids who sit on chairs propped on their parents’ motorbike.

Stylish but ridiculously unprotective motorbike helmets.

Chinese-style emperor tombs (Hue – this was worth a blog post all to itself…).

Trees that look like this (emperor’s tombs, Hue).

Winter coats (it’s so cold here! Or have I been living on the equator too long?)

Salted coffee (Hue): A layer of thick syrupy coffee, condensed milk, and salt, which you mix together once the coffee drips and serve on ice.

Mi opla (Hue): Eggs cooked on a hot plate beneath a thin layer of a tomato cream, onions, cilantro, stuffed into a baguette and eaten like a sandwich.

Pork!!

Shark meat (Phu Quoc Island). (Yes, i tried it, but i still hate seafood.) (Those who love it still couldn’t swallow the shark liver.)

Egg coffee (Hanoi): Thick, syrupy coffee served beneath a super-whipped layer of eggs. And for that matter, backdrops to enjoying egg coffee which look like this:

I don’t remember what this is called (Hanoi): Crispy egg omelette with pork inside, which you roll up with greens in rice paper and eat like a spring roll.

Public parks, certainly with pagodas in the middle (Hanoi).

Old men who wear berets and sit in the park to contemplate (I love them!).

Toddlers playing tug-of-war in said public parks. Well OK, Indo has toddlers, but still — tug at my heartstrings a little more, Vietnam.

And till December 17…. me!

I’m in Vietnam!

About a year ago, I realized that an unhappiness I had felt for a long time was too deeply rooted to solve by changing jobs in the same city or doing similar work in any other city. I started floating the idea of moving to Southeast Asia to friends, who might have thought it was a desperate, escapist, kneejerk reaction to much deeper issues which “running away” would never solve. Given my state of mind at the time, maybe they were right, so I redefined “running away” as running towards something instead: running towards a different professional direction, more diverse surroundings and lifestyle, time spent creating rather than consuming, and helping others live better lives while learning to do the same myself.

I’m writing to you from Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam, where the VIA Program’s Southeast Asia volunteers are meeting for our annual conference. This is a tough, dynamic, engaged, brilliant group of people who are now my coworkers, travel buddies, and a network of support we’ll carry through the future. We first met in San Francisco, spent two weeks teambuilding in Phnom Penh, split off into our respective countries, and are now reconvening for some tough conversations about the direction of VIA and our NGO and university posts in 5 countries across this beautiful region.

CHANGE IS POSSIBLE. That’s repeated a lot in pop culture and I’m not sure they mean it half the time, but individually, if you decide you need a different direction one day, make it happen. I’ve been surprised every day out here by how stimulating life can be, and this conference is kicking that stimulation into overdrive by generating tons of ideas about strengthening my NGO post and our VIA program as a whole, which is still the best kept secret for professional development in Southeast Asia. I couldn’t have imagined these heights this day a year ago — I feel like I have come so much farther than just the 10,000 miles away from home!

It doesn’t hurt that thanks to the local knowledge of our managing staff, we’re on a secluded island off the southern coast of Vietnam and the backdrops of our conference modules look like this:

Also, where else but Southeast Asia does your conference get interrupted by a baby monkey getting a suds bath? And who can keep concentrating once it does??

Twitter makes the world a Christmas tree

Some folks extracted language data from worldwide twitter feeds to create a map of who’s tweeting where and especially in what language. Coming in at #4: Indonesia! From bigthink.com (http://bigthink.com/ideas/41004):

In relative terms, the world’s top tweeting nation are the Netherlands, with just over 22% of the Dutch online population using Twitter. The US, at 8%, is far behind Brazil (almost 22%), Venezuela (21%) and Indonesia (19%). So it’s a fair guess that a majority of the 200 million tweets generated every day are in languages other than English.

It looks like Indonesian is the world’s #3 Twitter language, behind English and Portuguese and ahead of Spanish. With so many people and their Blackberries squeezed onto this island, I’m surprised that Javanese didn’t rank too. Here’s the world map on Eric Fischer’s Flickr – make sure to check it out in its full size. And here I am!:

Jazz in the ancient city

You might know how much I love live music, and it’s one thing I really miss. Bands in the bars here play the same 10 reggae and classic rock songs, and we have discotheques in Jogja, but they seem to be for for underage kids existing outside a culture of alcohol who drink way too much and fistpump to uber-masculine brostep. When my friend invited me to go to the Jogja Jazz festival (http://www.ngayogjazz.com/) this weekend, I was also skeptical. How many other ways can I be reminded that I won’t have a satisfying live music experience for a year or two?

Again: wrong! Welcome to nine hours and seven stages of improvisational jazz in Kotagede, the ancient capital of the pre-colonial Sultanate of Mataram. The stages were nestled throughout Kotagede’s ancient market and mosque, with my favorite under the hundreds-years-old banyan tree at the city center (which I don’t have a picture of – sorry!). We grabbed a table with a view at a nearby warung (small restaurant) and watched music from there while friends came and went, sipping coffee and hot orange juice till after sunset when we walked around to the other stages. Only one thing felt off: no one danced. During one set in particular with as much energy as any ‘jamband’ concert I’ve been to, I barely saw a head bob.

Listening to this music played out loud in Indonesia made me feel like I was hearing it for the first time in the 1950s — good old transgressive American-style music where maybe it’s never been played before, in the conservative context of Java’s ancient capital. That’s not to say that such cultural displays are “disapproved” of here, or that it feels counter-cultural, threatening, revolutionary to be present, not at all: people from all over the region came with their families to enjoy the music and festival in Saturday’s nice weather. It’s only that sometimes, the great cultural mix of Indonesia makes you do a double take.

Idul Adha, a vegetarian’s nightmare

This weekend was Idul Adha (Arabic: Eid al-Adha), the Islamic holiday commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God. Each Muslim family traditionally slaughters one livestock and gives the meat away to neighbors and those in poverty. To illustrate the holiday’s scale, per the Jakarta Post: “around 62,801 sacrificial animals had been brought to Jakarta, comprising 10,796 cows, 964 buffaloes, 47,618 goats and 3,450 sheep” — and that’s just one city. It’s a deeply meaningful exercise which encourages reflection on alms and death, and Jogja once again shut down as everyone went home to be with their families.

For me in Jogja, this meant there were a LOT of sheep hanging out in the roads last week, the five mosques near my house each chanted Allahu Akbar from sunset Saturday until Sunday morning, and I spent an hour Sunday night trying to find an open restaurant for dinner before settling on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at home. Luckily now, Indonesian friends are still giving away stacks of extra meat their neighbors left for them as the whole country overdoses on fresh lamb (yum!).

Sorry to say that I didn’t take any photos of the holiday; I wasn’t feeling well on Sunday and a day at the mosque watching ritual animal slaughter wouldn’t have helped. I’m feeling better now though, so here’s a picture of my lunch at work today: chicken spine with heart!

Afternoon at the mall

Before I came to Indonesia, I thought I was going to have to live without chocolate, butter, pancakes, ice cream, root beer, mochas, milkshakes, peanut butter, reliable electricity, English. I’m an idiot: for better or worse, these things all exist in Jogia in spades.

I went to the big mall in town, Amplaz, for the first time on Saturday. It’s huge.

The Carrefour in particular was system shocking. It’s Target basically – you can buy anything you could ever need and the prices are decent. It looks and feels like an American superstore except looking closer reveals all the foreign brands (though many familiar too) and knick-knacks that come with living in another country. It’s like walking into your childhood home and finding a different family living there. Disorienting/paralysing/awesome.

I wasn’t going to get a Starbucks. I wasn’t! It’s too expensive and I’m not homesick yet. One drink there costs at least 40,000 Rp., or~ $4, my whole food budget for two days, whereas coffee on the street costs 3,000-5,000 Rp and it’s delicious. But after wandering around for an hour or two, I was looking at the electronic touchscreen mall directory to see what stores I might have missed (Guess, Baskin Robbins, Polo/Ralph Lauren, Croc…) when a nice guy approached asking to practice his English, and won’t I take a drink with him at Starbucks, anything I wanted. I get a little weary sometimes of English-practicing requests from strangers but oh man, a free frappaccino?! Definitely worth an hour’s tutorial on the past tense.

Guilty as charged. Yep, tastes the same.

Rice cookers, clean water dispensers, buckets for showers, high-tech stereos, and Ralph Lauren.

Karimunjawa, tropical paradise

Last weekend, I took my first big trip outside of Jogja to visit the archipelago of Karimunjawa. Situated 50 miles north of the northern coast of Central Java (6-8 hours drive north of Jogia), the islands are not easy to get to and require either a 6-hour ferry (boasting both economy and “VIP” sections) or 2-hour “fast boat” from either Semarang or Jepara, each making just two trips a week either way. Here’s the ferry:

There’s not much English on the islands and the tourism industry, while existent, isn’t very developed, so booking a package through a guide, agency, or hotel is the easiest way to plan a trip. Most visitors we saw were Indonesian tourists; we met only 3-4 other groups of Westerners the entire weekend. We started out with a local tour guide but decided mid-trip to change hotels and stay at the Wisma Apung, a “floating hotel” off the coast of the main island which maintains a shark aquarium and lets you swim with the sharks (!). The Indonesian-speaking staff was friendly and extremely helpful in coordinating our rooms, a one-day private boat tour, snorkeling, food, and ferry transport back to Jepara for about 340,000 Rp ($38) total.

Their conditions are basic though — when I first checked out our bathroom, there was a crab sitting in the squat toilet. I asked what to do and the guy shrugged, grabbed a bucket, and poured water on the crab till he went back down the pipe. Later in daylight, I realized that our bathroom was just a foot above sea level, and you could see the ocean water through the clapboard floor and watch little white fish gather around to eat, well, what you put down there. Bucket baths too, no showers, though that’s normal for Indonesia.

Logistics aside, once you finally get to the islands, it is 360 degrees of paradise, each island more beautiful than the next. Typically you hire a boat to take you around for the day, and since most of the archipelago’s population of about 5,000 live on the main island, the rest of the islands are either protected national parks or isolated areas for fishing, eating, deep-sea snorkeling and napping. The water was really salty and calm so you could float without moving a muscle. I even watched underwater while our boat crew fished and caught some inky squid, which they later cooked to complement our shoreside lunch. (Yes, I tasted it, but god istillhateseafoodsomuch!)

Just please do better than I did and wear at least SPF 30, preferably higher. The equatorial sun is a different star than the one above the States, and I got the worst sunburn of my life after taking a nice nap on the shore. Definitely would have appreciated the “VIP” section on the ferry ride back but it was sold out. Anyway, here are some pictures to give you an idea of what natural beauty on steroids looks like, though you can check out more on my Flickr too. Indah sekali!