I’m not sure what it’s called, but you sometimes find breakfast or dessert dishes here which are just chocolate sprinkles between two slices of bread. Europeans say it’s because of the Dutch colonial influence, but per what I just found at the supermarket, maybe it’s because sprinkles resemble a certain Asian staple food?
That’s right: THERE IS A WENDY’S IN JOGJAKARTA, INDONESIA. I dipped handcut, sea salt french fries straight into a chocolate frosty. I’m really not suffering here, guys.
Jogja also has a couple Pizza Huts, one or two Starbucks, a few McDonald’s (24 hours and delivery!), and way too many Dunkin Donuts and KFCs to count. They tend to be pretty fancy; for example, I’m told the Pizza Hut is where you take a date who you really, really want to impress. Western food like that is expensive here though, i.e. as expensive as it would be at home, so I can’t indulge too often on a volunteer’s stipend. Yep, that’s right: I can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s.
And before you judge me: the local frozen yogurt shop in the mall was closed, and Wendy’s is open late night, so…
Adjusting happens in big ways and small ways. The big, immediate adjustments happen through food, health, language, and company. Over your first two months, you figure out how to get around autonomously, start to make new friends, and slowly acclimate your intestinal track to Southeast Asian spices and water (beware iced fruit drinks… though don’t let fear stop you because they are delicious). The small adjustments happen just when you’re starting to feel comfortable with the big ones; two months in, you realize you don’t know where to buy an extension cord when your old one breaks, learn that wearing flipflops everywhere the way you have been is actually considered sort of rude, and can’t even piece together the meaning of a local newspaper article about Steve Jobs dying, though you think it has something vaguely to do with his turtleneck. Enter Phase II of the “Culture Shock” cycle: when everything you thought you were used to is all of a sudden intensely foreign again.
Maybe the keyword for preparation is keeping momentum; for acclimation, curiosity and humility; and for long-term happiness, patience. For example, making friends takes time and you can’t learn a whole language in two months. These are facts. Once you come to terms with how long adjusting actually takes, you can either start moping or start coping. My (superficial) coping methods this week have involved eating ice cream and peanut butter & jelly when I feel like I need it, frequenting a nice cafe down the street where I can go to sit and write alone, finding a pool suitable for exercise, and planning a short weekend vacation with new friends to one of the most beautiful places in the world. Keep stimulating yourself with new things while comforting yourself with some pieces of familiarity, as available. It’s not so bad, and thousands of people go through the same process all the time, all over the world. Taking care of yourself means you’ll have the energy and continued interest to confront much harder questions to come.
Our two VIA coordinators visited Jogja this week, and brought with them two fellow VIA volunteers for hanging out, site visits and meetings, and a nice group dinner. Around midnight on Thursday, one of the volunteers and I were walking around downtown Jogja and stumbled on the city’s 255th birthday celebration: six-hundred-plus Jogjakartans bicycling around the downtown area together and singing, “Happy birthday, Jogja – AYO, AYO!” This city is seriously charming. It reminds me of Baltimore with all its quirk and creativity. Here’s a small video – I absolutely love this city – all of the twinkling bells that you hear are hundreds of bicycle bells being rung at once:
Question: How many people does it take to get a bule to the Ramayana Ballet?
Answer: Seven.
1. One stranger who picks the walking bule up on the street and drives her to the bus stop on a motorbike, saving the bule a 20 minute walk when she was already late (jam karat), and also invites the bule to visit her NGO sometime, a German development organization not far from where the bule lives. Networking!
2. One stranger on the bus who distracts the bule with an invitation to speak at the senior high school where she is a Sociology teacher, enough that the bule misses the Terminal bus line transfer point. (“So do any of your students speak English?” “……No, not really.” Uh oh.)
3. Another stranger to help the bule navigate a brand-new bus line, resulting in bule missing the chance to grab a ride on a friend’s motorbike, but that’s okay, the new bus “goes straight to Prambanan Temple!”
4-5. Once at “Prambanan,” two British tourists who allow bule to walk along with them on the dark street to the Ramayana Ballet. Bule had assumed that the “Prambanan” bus stop meant really, truly Prambanan, the same way the DC metro stop Chinatown really, truly means Chinatown. Rookie mistake! Luckily the British four-day tourists know their way around Jogja better than the bule.
6-7. Two wonderful French students who invited the bule to the ballet with them in the first place, arranged a ticket sale in advance, and provided good company and a motor ride back home after the public buses stopped running at 10pm.
Key vocab: Bule (“boo-lay”) is the Indonesian word for “albino,” and has come to be an unoffensive word for any white person, or any foreigner I think. e.g.: There were a whole lot of bules at the Ramayana ballet tonight.
Verdict: Beautiful Javanese dancing and gamelan music outdoors at the base of a must-see 7th century Hindu temple, unexpected networking opportunities, Bahasa Indonesia AND French practice, and the chance to make new friends — yes, please!
I went to the movies tonight with Andre. The cinema was extremely nice, more updated than many I’ve been to in the states. Tickets were Rp. 35,000 (~$4, expensive!), and the cinema seemed to offer only Hollywood blockbusters: Transformers, Planet of the Apes, Final Destination 5 (really?), and Captain America, which we saw. The films are shown in English with Indonesian subtitles.
Since we’re in Java, the theater offered both sweet and salty popcorn. Salty was habis (run out) by the time we got to the register – devastating! – so I ordered sweet popcorn, asked for extra butter and some salt anyway, plus a fountain coke. Perfect.
It was a little awkward watching filmed American military propaganda in a foreign country, no matter how light hearted or Hollywoodesque, but all the explosions and Tommy Lee Jones mumbling a lot made up for it. I ended up falling asleep because the seats were so comfortable, missed the bad guy getting killed (Hugo Weaving!), and woke up to Samuel L. Jackson in a leather trenchcoat and eyepatch standing in the middle of Times Square, telling the protagonist he had slept for 70 years and was now in the year 2011. When exactly did I leave Indonesia?
By the way, when you buy your movie ticket at the box office here, you also pick your seat in the theater on a screen, the exact same way you would pick an airplane seat in advance online. Andre noticed how ridiculously confused I was by this and asked whether we do the same in the U.S., which of course we absolutely do not. This is about the conversation that followed:
Andre: Then how do you make sure you do not have the front-row seat?
Maura: You have to get there early to pick good seats, otherwise you may have to sit in the front.
Andre: But that sounds so stressful – you’re supposed to go to the movies to get away from stress! How do you make sure everyone you’re with can sit together?
Maura: Most of the time, you can save seats for friends, but sometimes that becomes difficult with very crowded movies. [Quick shout-out to Tara, Sarah et al in DC for our last experience with this at Bridesmaids in Chinatown!]
Andre: So you don’t pick your seat in advance? It’s just whoever gets there first, gets the better seat?
Maura: Yes, exactly!
Andre: ……..I don’t understand.
So I’ve weathered delicate political discussions, concern about the health of my freckles, confusion about the nature of American smalltalk, bizarre bathroom habits, and conversations consisting of nothing but misunderstandings, yet here is the first cultural barrier we simply couldn’t cross: Indonesia cannot fathom how backwards the US must be if you can’t reserve your movie seat and row in advance…!
Mount Merapi, an active volcano just 17 miles north of Jogjakarta, exploded last winter and killed over 300 people over the course of two months of activity. Many of the deaths and most of the visible destruction in the area were due to pyroclastic flows, terrifyingly hot and fast flows of superheated gas released during volcanic eruptions.
My NGO had coordinated some of the first water infrastructure installations on the base of Merapi in the 1970s. Now that infrastructure has been completely buried by volcanic activity, so the NGO is busy uncovering the source springs and their originating well, stone by stone. I took a trip to the field with project staff last week to visit the uncovering process. (Unfortunately I was only wearing a dress and flipflops when I was invited to come along, so I scrambled down the canyon cliff barefoot, and look a little ridiculous in the pictures!)
I’m used to grey and dust indicating construction, building sites, urban growth, and it’s hard to remember that all this grey is the result of massive destruction. Everyone in Jogja has their story of where they were or went during the Merapi activity last fall. The entire city was dusted with ash like snow, and countless homes and fields in the north, closer to the mountain, were burned or destroyed by the heat and gas. The landscape was black and grey after the eruption, but low shrubbery is starting to grow back now and there’s a lot of green — until you see the treetops that were scorched, which is the only way to follow where the pyroclastic flows were the worst.
Project progress at the site is slow but steady! One excavator is kept at the base of the river canyon and digs away at the buried water. It’s miraculous to see water come right out of the buried rocks and sand. The canyon itself is pretty dangerous and there’s always a threat of rocks falling to re-cover what the NGO has painstakingly unearthed. This is the nitty gritty of development: the hard stuff that communities need but so few people know how to do well and effectively.
Ramadan colored our travels in Indonesia for all of August as the majority of Indonesians we met had been fasting from all food and drink (water included) every day, from sun up until sun down. Last week, we had accepted a friend’s invitation to attend celebrations for Idul Fitri – the holiday celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast – at her family home in Jogja. Excited to see how a family celebrates one of the most important and festive Islamic holidays of the year, the three of us showed up in our best outfits on Monday night for dinner with oleh-oleh (gift) cakes in hand, ready for a kick off dinner.
Our hostess takes one look at us and says, “But where are your bags….? You have not brought any clothes?” Turns out we were invited to stay there for THREE DAYS, not just one dinner!, and there were already guest rooms prepared in the house for each of us to sleep. Wow!! Laughing at our biggest rookie mistake so far and amazed at such generosity, we proposed that we taxi back to our house to pack some things and return for the whole holiday.
Everything kicked off with prayer at about 6AM on Tuesday morning with the neighborhood, which was held in a nearby field to accommodate a crowd too big for the mosque.
The next three days were like Christmas. Family gathering, tons of food, relaxing in a living room, playing games, visiting neighbors, having family neighbors visit in turn, happily cocooning away from work, stress, and language barriers. The family was immensely generous and we were so lucky to stay for the whole time.
Javanese culture and Islam have been integrating for a long time now. It reminds me of early Christian history in Ireland, where a dominant religion starts accommodating local cultural practices, and before long the two cultural sets start playing off one another. Javanese food, language and neighborhood customs have become fully a part of the Idul Fitri tradition, like particular kinds of rice (fermented and served in a banana leaf!) and kids in costume parading the night before Lebaran with torches and sorts of parade floats. I don’t know where the Javanese ends and the Islam begins, or vice versa, so I don’t want to say too much for fear of being wrong, but it’s one big lively mix. It’s really fun to live someplace with such strong culture, though it goes without saying that I have a LOT more to learn about.
Ketupat – packets of rice cooked in woven coconut.
Our hostess’s niece and her (very pregnant!) cat.
Watching coverage of Idul Fitri in other parts of the city, if not country. Alternatively, we watched recordings of the traditional Javanese puppet shows. Sort of like watching the Vatican on Christmas Eve?
Our incredible hostess, Andari, and her niece. Terima kasih!
Rachel and Chrissy, my two fellow VIA Indonesia volunteers, climbed Mt. Merapi last night/this morning to see sunrise on a volcano top. Here’s Chrissy and Rachel (backs turned) and the mountain as we saw it last week – they climbed just about the whole thing.
Rather than climb up, much less down, a volcanically active mountain, my temperamental knees and I opted to explore my new city instead. Our new friend Andre and I are looking for roommates for his house, where I’ll also be living (if you know anyone in Jogja…), so we needed to hang signs up at cafes and schools across the city to advertise. But first I had to find Andre. He’s not sure where our house is, and it’s not on any maps, so we agreed to meet at 1:30pm at Mirotah, where I’ve been a couple times.
Being alone in a foreign language country is a little like the monkey bars: you just kind of (s)wing it until your next good hold. It was my first solo bus ride into the city, and I missed the stop at Mirotah Kampus. My curious “Mirotah? Di mana Mirotah?” questions to passengers and the driver had them pointing behind us, smiling, and giving me advice in Bahasa. Soon I was the last passenger on the bus, so I asked the driver to speak to Andre on my cell phone and they figured out where to leave me so Andre could pick me up. Turns out I wasn’t that far off from Mirotah after all, though the driver might have changed his route to help me (thank you!). Also, never underestimate the power of a phone-in translator, if you’re lucky enough to have both kind and multilingual friends.
I’m going to be heavily reliant on buses, taxis, friends, and a borrowed bicycle to get around Jogja until I can figure out my own vehicle. The bus system in Jogja is pretty comprehensive except that it only runs until ~6pm each day.
There are no official “bus stops” – the buses just pick you up and drop you off wherever you need, as long as it’s on the route. You hail a bus like a taxi cab, and to get off, you stand up and yell “KIRI, MAS! (“Left, sir!”) to the driver or money collector to pull over and let you off (traffic’s on the left side here). Sometimes the bus barely stops moving long enough for you to descend, and you have to hop the last step.
I successfully took the bus both to and from our house today and paid a total of 5,000 Rupiah (about $.63), whereas the same trip in taxis would have cost about $6.00. Of course, the most fun way to get around is the generosity of friends — and most friends here will inevitably have motorbikes. Wahoo!
Looking forward, Ramadan ends this week and the city shuts down to celebrate for a few days. We’re lucky enough to have been invited to a friend’s home to participate in the holiday tomorrow, which will bring a whole host of new culinary delights that only happen once a year. Selamat Idul Fitri!
Time passes simultaneously very slow and very fast here. The things we do, the people we meet, the events stretch luxuriously for hours so that days pass very quickly. We have a week left of language training and then off to the workplace — except I visited my future workplace at the NGO this week and it’s full of nooks, odds, ends, engineers, air conditioning, internet, a fish pond, and the potential for field visits! More on work once I start there.
There are a few superficial things here, in Indonesia and Java specifically, which suit me very well:
This is my favorite dish so far: grontol, a traditional Javanese dish. It’s steamed (i think?) corn, coconut, and sticky rice drizzled with carmelized palm sugar and sprinkled with soy dust. Ho-ly cow.
We made it to Indonesia! Think less jungle and more abundant, beautiful garden. We are studying the language and stretching more brain muscles than I knew I still had.
mcljava 