English Camp!

During Lebaran, after I was fully satisfied that I had been to enough group buffet sessions, I organized a trip for 11 students in the 6^th grade (our equivalent of 12^th grade) to travel four hours to Bira beach for some English-based activities and R and R. I quickly realized that an English immersion trip was definitely out of the question with only one native speaker, as the conversation would have been quite brief and one-sided. All in all, I probably learned about as much Indonesian as they did English. Still, we all had a great time roughhousing and engaging in boyish activities—swimming, fighting, competitions of all sorts, sports feats and the like.
This male bonding moment brought to you by sports.

We spent most of the time riding 12 of us in the back of a truck.

I learned a few more things about Indonesian culture while hanging out with the boys. Although the two main destinations of the trip were a pool and the beach, and all of these guys live on an island, I was shocked to realize that very few of them can swim! Crazy. Also, our cultures are completely opposite when it comes to ideal skin color. All Indonesians want to be as white as possible, which leads to the popularizing of whitening skin products and a distinct fear of direct exposure to the sun. Conversely, I am happy to soak up some rays, and ours is a culture of tanning beds and SPF 5 tanning oils. Classic example of the grass always being greener on the other side I suppose. Actually, after reading a little about Indonesian history, I discovered that whiteness is a positive ideal deeply ingrained in their culture. It has its origins in Dutch
colonialism, when the Dutch would strictly deport anyone white who was under a certain income level in order to maintain the strict dichotomy of white wealth and mastery vs. native poverty and servitude. In today’s world, go to any mall in Indonesia and 90 percent of the models in every picture will look nothing like any Indonesian. They are almost all white models from the western world…occasionally I will see a very white face with Asian features. This is the ideal of beauty that upper-class women strive for when going to wedding celebrations. They whiten their faces with so much makeup that each one looks like an expressionless porcelain doll.

Hanging out yet simultaneously fearing the water at the local pool near Bantaeng.

Combine the fear of darkening skin with traditional Islamic conservative values, and it means that 75 percent of the people at the pool and on the beach swim or wade fully clothed. About half the guys are afraid of getting tan, while all the women wear sweatshirts, jeans, and headscarves in the water! My students refused to play a game with me outside after 10:30 AM because the sun was too strong.

Saving money on sunscreen.

We were gone for three days and I think I spent a total of about 10 dollars. By far the cheapest vacation I have ever been on. This was facilitated by the unconditional hospitality of Pesantren alumni and students’ parents that live along our vacation route. We only paid for one meal the entire time. After 32 years in existence, the Pesantren has formed an extensive alumni base throughout the province of South Sulawesi. Alumni meetings with one’s high school are all but unheard of in the United States, but talking with many of the alumni I found that they were born in a particular town, went to the Pesantren for four years, moved back to their town, started a business, got married, and had kids. Conversely, my parents met in Maryland, lived back east for a while, had my brother, moved to Colorado for four years, came to Oregon and had me. This 3,000 mile family relocation is unheard of for an Indonesian. Many of the people I meet here have not even been to Jakarta. Although from our perspective we may be inclined to pity them— don’t. This permanence is a reflection of our different ways of thinking about the world. They are completely happy here in South Sulawesi and, in fact, they don’t really
understand my desire to travel to other areas of Indonesia. When I went away to Lombok and Flores for Ramadan, many people assumed that I had gone to Tana Toraja or Bantimurung, two destinations within a short drive of Makassar.

Sharing a meal in one of the student's houses.

On the way back from Bira beach, taking public transport, I was sharing the front seat with the stick shift between my legs and my head bouncing against the ceiling for a full 4 hours. Thirteen people in one Kijang SUV is the Indonesian idea of efficient transport (you will NEVER see a single mom driving a giant empty suburban in this country!) The discomfort is exponentially amplified by physical contact with other bodies, no air conditioning, and 100 degree temperatures with about a 90 percent humidity factor. Meanwhile, the family behind me had three kids on their laps, who took turns passing around a plastic bag and vomiting into it about three inches behind my head. This astonishingly uncomfortable situation received no comment from other Indonesians in the car as we rode for four hours sweating it out in complete silence. Needless to say, I was relieved to arrive back at my house, crank up the AC, kill the roaches that had accumulated over the past few days, hop in the cold shower and take a deep breath.

Idul Fitri at MY House

Actually, the title is a little misleading because I celebrated Idul Fitri just about everywhere in Makassar except my house. I initially wanted to have some people over, but I realized that I couldn’t possibly compete with the mass cooking skills of a seasoned Indonesian wife. For those of you unfamiliar with Islam, Idul Fitri is the day that marks the end of Ramadan—the fasting month for all Muslims. Basically, this means that everyone is really stoked to munch on a grand buffet of their favorite foods during daylight hours. The week after Idul Fitri is known as Lebaran, and (from the perspective of an Indonesian anyway) it is a full schedule of the following:

1. Wake up early as always. Usually, everyone gets up for the call to prayer at 5 AM. Lebaran is no exception, because we want to get up and out so we can eat as much as we can!

Wait a second. Here I have to digress about the waking up thing. I have realized that the students at my Pesantren actually have no concept of sleeping in. They never do it. They don’t look forward to their day off so they can sleep in, because they get up at 5 for prayer regardless. I consider sleeping in to be one of the primary activities of an American high school student (other primary activities would include flirting with members of the opposite sex and experimenting with drugs and alcohol—2 activities that also certainly do not occur within the context of an all-male Islamic boarding school.)

2. Go wake up the American guy, drag him out of his house, and put him and his inquisitive tongue (which we can’t understand) into a cramped van with 12 other people or just make him cling to the back of a motorcycle.

3. Speed off to house number 1 with a crew of about 20 Pesantren teachers and staff. The person who lives here is a relative of one of our friends or something like that. When we walk in the door, the food will be ready and waiting, we need to shake hands with everyone (that totals about 40 handshakes) and make sure to comment on the height and whiteness of the American guy. If we are really shocked or particularly honored by the American’s presence, we will begin an unrelenting and interminable cell phone photo montage in every possible place with each possible combination of people at the party. Luckily for Mr. Jon, this doesn’t happen every time.

4. Silahkan makan. Makan! Makan! Please eat! For some reason, we always want Mr. Jon to be the one to start off the buffet line, and he must try a little of each dish (even the weird bouncy meatballs—luckily for me, I like food a lot and I can eat a good amount of it, so an eating holiday is certainly not the worst case scenario).

5. After no more than 20 minutes of eating and quick conversation in Bahasa Indonesia, we leave as rapidly as we arrived, but not before shaking everyone’s hand again. Pile back into the van and onto the motorcycles, and let’s roll to the next house!

Some of my Indonesian female friends in full formal Idul Fitri garb. Don't worry mom, they're all already married.

From my perspective, it took about as long to shake hands on the entry and arrival as the actual time we spent eating at each house. Nevertheless, it is quite efficient, especially given that one day I ate five meals before noon. The female head of the household never eats with the guests on these occasions, she is too busy setting up folding chairs, distributing individually packaged single-servings of water, and refilling the buffet from giant pots she brings out of the kitchen. This holiday is clearly about being all-inclusive. The more people at your house, the better, even if you don’t really know who they are. I tried to explain that we frequently do the opposite for Christmas in America—we always bring cookies and treats to our friends, relatives, bosses, and coworkers, but meal time is reserved for the closest family and friends and often takes place over a period of several hours. It certainly was nice to see everyone’s house and eat their food on the buffet tour, but I felt like meaningful conversation never came about because we spent most of the time engaging in the formalities of greetings and salutations. Still, throughout the whole week, when not touring buffets, everyone else was spending some good quality time with their families (though not around the Christmas tree). I spent some good quality time by myself reading and watching movies in my air-conditioned room. It is infinitely inexplicable to the typical Indonesian Muslim that I am able to live by myself, which brings me to my next subject.

Being a single male home-renter in Indonesia brings about some unique interactions and funny looks. Because I am tall and can grow a lot of facial hair, everyone assumes that I am much older than 22. Even when they find out that I am 22 (asking someone’s age, weight, marital status, or religion is not considered offensive here) they are surprised that I have not yet found a wife. The next questions, followed by laughs and/or looks of sheer bafflement are the following: Do you cook? Do you do laundry? Do you go shopping? Wait, you cook? How can you cook? What do you cook? Tik tik tik. The “tik tik tik” is the most common Indonesian noise, made by pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth and flicking it against the back of your front teeth while inhaling to create pressure. As far as I can tell, this noise is reserved for situations in which they are very impressed (like when a 3-point shot is made on the playground) or when someone is being rude or violating cultural norms (like when my friend Jane shows a little too much skin or the driver of my pete-pete almost crashes). So they are either impressed or disappointed…in ambiguous situations like the marriage conversation it is hard to tell how I am being judged—only that I am certainly being judged. Several of the men have suggested that they give me their Indonesian wife in exchange for one of my American girlfriends, and my quest to find an Indonesian wife has become my chief source of humor in a language where I still sound like a four year old.

The facilities: Kitchen and bathroom. Note: I am way too tall for that bathroom door.

So home-renting in Indonesia comes with a certain amount of social implications, but these pale in comparison to the logistical challenges of living in my house. Other creatures squatting on my property and sharing my living space are my primary concern. As far as I can tell, my house is the most infested of all the ETAs. John, a fellow ETA, stayed in my house for two nights and assigned the accurate yet hardly endearing title of “bug kingdom” to my humble abode. So far I have confronted roaches (I kill about 6 a day), ants, mosquitoes, frogs, giant spiders, a snake, rats, cats, geckos, flying bugs that I have never seen before etc. Just last night I was straining pasta into my sink, and poured the boiling water down the drain. Seconds later, as if someone rang the roach fire alarm, they started crawling out of every crevasse in the kitchen sink area and running for their lives in all directions!! Luckily I was Johnny-on-the-spot with the toxic spray and was able to chemically exterminate all of the stragglers. It was a triumphant victory and no doubt a significant blow to the bug kingdom, though I must admit I lost a lot of my appetite.

Attempting to wash dishes in my Leprechaun-sized kitchen. I have hit my head countless times on that cabinet as well as the doorframe in the background.

I have included some pictures of my house as it was the moment I first walked in the door on August 16^th. Pretty stripped down, though I do have AC (amazing and essential!), a washing machine, a fridge, western toilet (i.e. not just a hole in the ground) and a gas stove. Any of you who went to my dorm room or apartment in the last four years will know that I couldn’t live with the bare walls for long, so I am slowly decorating. I plan to take another set of pictures the day before I pack everything up, so I can see the impact my presence made on the place. Since these pictures were taken I have acquired a microwave, toaster oven, wok for stir fry, DVD player, and an Ipod speaker system. It almost feels like home, except when I have to engage in an aggressive bend just to get down to the level of my kitchen sink to wash some dishes (see photo). Also, two of my doors are too small for me to walk through with a good posture, so sometimes I feel like I am living on a submarine. The house itself is actually quite spacious, a little too spacious, because there is one room that is still completely empty. I just can’t think of any thing to put in it. So far, it is my secret planning room, devoid of furniture but covered with maps on all walls. It instills me with desire to take leave of the bug kingdom and explore more of this fascinating country—especially as I notice movement out of the corner of my eye, look down, and see another creature denizen of the kingdom scurry across the floor.

My living room. Clearly a couch deficit.

Travel Time!

From the standpoint of an unyielding optimist, an Indonesian domestic airline experience could best be described as ‘therapeutic.’ Firstly, the fact that, of the dozen or so domestic carriers not a single one meets FAA regulations gives one a feeling of hopeful resignation walking onto the airplane. Hopeful, as in hopefully we won’t die today, and resigned, because there are only two ways to travel in Indonesia…and boats are about twenty times slower and just as likely to sink as an airplane is to crash. Couple that with the ten or so mildly to extremely catastrophic earthquakes that have struck various areas of this country in the two months since I arrived and I am given a fatalistic and existential perspective on life—the prospect of myself dying on this airplane is just one of the many random chances of death I face on a day to day basis. As long as this philosophy of hopeful resignation is adopted before every flight, instead of being terrified when my ID isn’t checked, there is no scanning of carry-on luggage, or the plane happens to bounce twice on the landing; I disembark with a new appreciation for the birds and the trees and the heat and humidity and even the hustlers trying to get a piece of every tourist’s pocketbook while walking out of the terminal. Really, quite therapeutic. No wonder why belief in a higher power is such an integral part of this nation’s culture.

However, the Indonesian flying experience is not all dark clouds with silver linings that provide philosophical or spiritual epiphanies. Arriving in Mataram, Lombok was undoubtedly the best airport experience I have had and probably ever will have in the world. Walking along the runway into the terminal, a very nice man in broken English quite sincerely said, “Thank you for visiting Lombok.” This not being my first time traveling in a country where my white skin is an immediate indicator of wealth and ignorance toward local prices, I winced as I expected him to force me into a taxi cab, carry my bags demanding an exhortative tip, or try to sell me a dumbed-down tour package of the island. A brief discussion surprisingly revealed that he was simply a dentist returning from a business trip—a Lombok resident that was truly pleased to see a resurgence of tourist activity on his home island (the island’s economy has deteriorated as tourism wanes in Indonesia due to various factors including the Bali bombings of 2003). After this pleasant conversation, I stepped into the terminal and was dismayed at the fact that my bag had actually arrived at the baggage claim before I did. Unbelievable. I walked at a reasonable pace from the airplane to the baggage claim, and my bag had already magically arrived. I still don’t know how they did it. This is a country so notorious for delays and general temporal misunderstandings that they have a well-known phrase--jam karet--literally meaning ‘rubber time’ to describe this universal Indonesian tendency for tardiness.

One other baffling contradiction that works in great favor of the tourist is that, although no one checks your ID when you get your ticket and carry-on bag screening is occasionally deactivated, airport personnel are meticulous about making sure that the bag you take out of the airport matches your claim ticket. In other words, you may have to worry about a bomb or a knife or a gun on the airplane, but you certainly won’t have to worry about someone else making off with your bag at the baggage claim—a bag, mind you, that was delivered in an impeccably timely fashion. Turns out I have flown a half a dozen times since arriving in Lombok and I have never had an ID checked, yet also have not yet waited more than 3 minutes for my bag to arrive at the claim carousel. Once, the security guard looked at my friend Jane’s ticket, politely asked, “Are you Jane?” she simply responded affirmatively and walked on through. That's just a brief description of flying in Indonesia. Just ask me sometime if you want a detailed description of traveling by car, bus, boat, motorcycle, or on foot. All transport methods in this country are equally unique and idosyncratic.

As you may have guessed by now, I have been doing some traveling lately. For the past month my students and I were released from the Pesantren by the Ramadan holiday and I was given the opportunity to see some of the country. Unsurprisingly, I immediately gravitated toward the natural wonders, of which Indonesia is in no short supply. Basically, from Sept. 12th to Oct. 12th I was climbing mountains, relaxing on beaches, snorkeling, riding on boats, in cars, and on motorcycles, diving, reading, fishing, taking pictures, and spending some quality time with other American Fulbrighters. It was a predominately great experience, and here I will proceed to tell the story of the month in little detail with a great many pictures to support my travel tale. I have included a great many pictures because reading a list of where other people have been and what they have done is frequently only interesting to the person who is writing said list. Nevertheless, some of you may be genuinely curious about where I have gone and what I have done, so I have provided the following pictorial outline in the most interesting way possible, pausing only to delve deeper into my travel experience in order to relate stories that I believe are generally appealing and interesting to people other than myself.

Gunung Rinjani dominates the landscape of the small island of Lombok. First goal of the trip: get to the top.

Although it violates my self-image as an independent, self-sufficient, and mildly hardcore backpacker/mountain climber, we had a guide and porters for this 4 day hike. In retrospect, that was a very good thing because this mountain is steep and this national park is not developed enough to include switchbacks in the trail. The porters packed our food and some supplies, the most interesting of which was a live chicken. We were fascinated by this chicken, probably because the average American does not encounter live chickens in day-to-day life, and we always knew the location of the porters from the resounding ‘squaks’ of protest the chicken produced every fifth step. In general, here in Indonesia people are much more intimately familiar with the source of their food than we are in the United States. Later on in the journey, we saw pigs and goats scream in protest as they were tied to the roofs of buses. Rather than bringing a cooler with a frozen chicken breast on our three-day boat ride the captain simply brought 3 chickens and hand fed then every day (well, on the third day there was only one left to feed.) These and many other more grotesque scenes of blatant animal abuse were at first shocking to the American eye, because we live in a country where we can buy a Costco pack of 24 chicken breasts, 5 pounds of hot dogs, or two large packages of bacon. Here, if you want meat (which everyone does), you need to buy the animal, tie it down, take it home, raise it, kill it, and cook it. The concept of animal rights understandably does not cross the mind of someone raised in this culture. I must admit, animal rights began to seem a little absurd as I observed many markets and small towns where the humans were struggling to survive—with little regard for the animals.

Becky and I sympathize with the tied-down chicken that is soon to be dinner.

Summit sunrise: check.


First foray into freshwater fishing on the crater lake.


Pretty good view I guess.

Next stop: the beautiful beaches and relaxed party atmosphere of the Gili Islands.


Sunset over Gunung Rinjani--from the boat.

Goodbye Lombok. A three day ride on this boat took us to the land of Komodo Dragons. The boat ride was interspersed with stops for fishing and snorkeling.


There’s one!

Now we move on to a deserted island for 2 nights of camping and more (unsuccessful) fishing. This island was deserted, so we owned it for 3 days!

Off the boat and into the car for a drive through the mountainous and culturally rich center of Flores island.

The marketplace in Ruteng, Flores.


Traditional village, traditional crafts. Really, really traditional. This was a great experience.

A traditional woman pictured making traditional handicrafts in the traditional manner.
Two of the three different colored lakes of Gunung Kelimutu. Another summit sunrise.

Now onto Manado for a much-needed week of remaining stationary (traveling is exhausting) and diving every day!

Wonders from the underwater world.

Okay, that’s a good general pictoral recap of the travels. For many more pictures and commentaries please see my Webshots account.

http://community.webshots.com/user/jstrahl07

After a month straight of traveling, I came back to Makassar and looked at the map of Indonesia, realizing that I have still only seen a very small percentage of the country. Although I came away with loads of fantastic pictures and great memories, I still have a strange feeling that I cannot even comprehend the potential for exploration this country has to offer.

The tiny boxes and arrows indicate areas I have explored so far.