I figured I should post something. Maybe something cultural, or something relating to the cultural experience, etc. No idea. We'll see what happens.
So, it's Friday, around lunchtime. I am the only non-muslim here at basecamp (the colloquial name for our office; pretty much everyone uses it, including my boss in Jakarta. It was thought up by Dylan I. Yeah, last year my job was held by another Dylan. A much taller one. It's kind of funny being another Dylan in the same position, as our name is unusal, definitely one that most Indonesians have never encountered [it seems Bob Dylan was less popular here than in Brazil; there, people sometimes just called me Bob]. So, for the people who know both of us, I'm either Dylan Dua (2) or Dylan Baru ("New Dylan"). I prefer the latter, 'cause I'm not a continuation, I'm a different person. Ah! Pardon the tangent.). On Fridays, most muslims, even some of the more culturally-muslim muslims, will go to answer a couple of the calls to prayer. I would love a crash-course on islam, by the way; if anyone knows some good books, please leave a comment here and let me know. T'would be greatly appreciated.
DISCLAIMER: this particular post differs from many in that it is the first to feature some of my own opinions. If you are interested only in the travel and adventure side of things, you may perhaps wish to jog on to the next entry. If you want to see my take on certain aspects of local culture, stick around.
Almost always, I am entirely open to local cultures. You don't get very far around here with preconceived notions and holier-than-thou American ideas, especially concerning theology, democracy and the value of a life. However, there is one cultural value I've quietly begun a little war over. A small guerilla war. I'm vastly outnumbered, and will probably lose. But for what it's worth, I'm taking my little stand.
Smoking.
Here's a surprising statistic: Indonesia has the highest per-capita smoking rate of any country in the world. I had never considered the possibility until I got here. EVERYONE smokes. Almost every man I have met in this country is a smoker. Most teenage boys copy their fathers, starting from somewhere between the ages of 13 and 15. Many women seem to do so as well, although it's on either a more clandestine or more private basis (smoke around the house, not while they are out in public). Adults smoke, it's a choice, it happens. My problem kicks in when it engages the younger set. This is a coffe shop culture here. I'll have to explain more about it later, but for now suffice it to say that sitting in a coffee shop and chatting for hours is the primary social activity in Aceh, for young and old alike. It is the number one most popular business to be opened by young adults (in terms of entrepreneurship, it's a pretty easy choice; low start-up costs, broad general appeal, staggeringly good local coffee available for a low price, and an easy clientele of the owner's own age? It's a perfect set-up). The problem is, the primary sponsor for these coffee shops are the cigarette companies. Lucky strike: a smoother version of ourselves. L.A Lights (colorful banners). There's even one, whose name escapes me at the moment, which is showcased in its television advertisements with three rockstars singing to a bunch of tweens, and being super-cool for the stuff they smoke. Cigarette banners line the walls of these coffee shops. They're outside the shops. They have personal endorsements for every big coffee shop. It's crazy.
The problem then becomes the kids. On the Takengon bike trip (which I will finish telling you about soon, I promise), I ended up riding with a group called "Bike 2 School." They are a group of maybe 15 high school kids who mountain bike all over the place as their prime mode of fun. They're a great bunch of guys, they're a riot, and they're a fun group to spend your time with. They also happen to smoke, almost every single one of them. We walked down a street one night on our way to grab some grub, and they pulled out their smokes. They offered me a smoke. I politely declined. They asked me, why don't you smoke? One guy said "Smoking makes you Stronger, man!" He flexed his muscles. His buddies said yeah, yeah! *Flex* It was like something out of a bad early-nineties D.A.R.E commercial. I tried to convince them otherwise. Nope. They are utterly certain that smoking makes you a man. It legitimately makes you stronger. Probably makes you better in bed, too. That's actually where I finally got them, though. We looked at a cigarette box, where it warned of "impotensi." I came up with a suitable, undesirable rude hand gesture. They died laughing, got the message, agreed it was not a welcome side-effect. They began to listen, a little bit. There's a lot you can say to a group of smoking teenage atheletes that'll get through. Just got to pick the right vehicle.
Another fairly powerful tool is $$ (or, in this case, Rupiah, the Indo currency, Rp). I sat down with them and figured out how much it cost, every year. Same with a buddy or two here in the office. For a guy who smokes three packs a day, that's three dollars a day at a dollar for a decent pack. Twenty one dollars a week. Round it down to twenty for inconsistencies, and times that by 50 wks, to be on the conservative side. One thousand dollars a year, or 10,000,000 Rp. Ten Million. That's nearly three months' salary here for someone with a college degree (stop and chew THAT one over for a second, yeah?). Probably not too different in percentage for a smoker in many families in the states. But here, when you tell a kid they could buy three to five iphones for that price, or just tell an adult that final figure in Rp, people take some notice. I'm trying other techniques, but only with my close friends. I'd prefer not to antagonize people. After all, it IS a cultural thing, and especially for adults, it's their choice. When it's kids though, and its based on pretty much zero information on health consequences, a little bit of information never hurts...
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Takengon, Part II: The First Day
(continued from previous entry):
I rolled over and woke up from a solid sleep at something like ten AM; a lordly five hours of rest had done me good. We soon discovered, however, that there wasn't enough water in the Mandi for us all to shower yet (Mandi = the all-purpose plastic scooper and water cistern in an Idonesian bathroom. The scooper bucket is your shower. It is also your sink, and your toilet-flusher. You ladle water into the throne, or kingly squatting-hole, to send things on their way. I embarrasingly had to ask how to do this my first day in-country, when I went to flush my plastic western-style toilet [I'm damn lucky for that, by the way; I have to thank my boss, Brian, for having it installed last year] and realized that it wasn't connected to any sort of water source or toilet-tank. There was a fairly physical demonstration, and I learned that this was a 'traditional' toilet). I've actually grown somewhat fond of the mandi, especially under certain circumstances. Here, we routinely suffer from a little phenomenon known as mati lampu (dead-lights, or power outages). The great thing about a Mandi is, you don't need power. You can ladle yourself down, and keep flushin' that toilet, just as well by candlelight or no light, when any other water source would just be dead. My mandi tank also happens to be huge; I honestly use actual running water, in the house, only about once a week, and that's only to refill the Mandi. That and the occasional luxury of turning on the tap (which means going outside to plug in the rickety electric water pump) to wash my hands in the "kitchen" instead of using the scooper to do so.
Pardon the diatribe. So, a few of us managed to stumble out of our place and down the hill in search of coffee and something to stuff our gullets. We ended up at one of the coolest Waru Kopi (Coffee Shop)s I've ever seen. It's a very cool, rocked out place, covered in paintings and artful graffiti by local artists, mostly young ones. The place has a giant "Parental Advisory" warning from an American music album on its sign, and bills itself as a meta-cafe.
It's a concert venue, a place to hang out, a place to chill and a place to meet. It also serves some of the spectacular local coffee, called Gayo coffee, some of the best I've ever had anywhere. The local specialty is a cup of coffee that also has some kind of whipped egg in it, a Gaston special, if I may. It's a little too rich, but it'll sure as hell wake you up in the morning, and give you some protein to get the day started. Just don't ask too many questions about it.
After our caffeinated protein mud, we wandered outside, not sure quite what to do. Then Ricardo said we were getting in a car. Apparently, somebody, someone's friend, or an administrator, or public official, or something, had driven up and we were going to go to their house. I didn't know what else was going on, so I shrugged and hopped in the chase car (the guy in question was up with some of our other friends in a Jeep type thing that actually did look like it could eat mountains for lunch. Never actually met the guy). Instead of a leisurely trip to the other side of town, though, we blasted out of the city, down a small road towards the mountains, into...someth
ing resembling the American old west. With mosques. We stopped on an empty country road in the middle of a vast valley, a lonely track that led off and up into the hills. At first glance, the open country around us looked like prairie, but when you look closer, it's actually just dry rice stalks. During the rainy season, that land must be incredibly fertile. For now, though, it's just open horse country. We piled out of the car and wandered down onto the paddies, following a little dirt track up to a family of nearly-wild stallions grazing near a wood shanty. I assume they were the property of said shanty-folk; the Gayo are prizewinning horsemen, and hold festivals and competitions of the like that are famous nation-wide. Also, being Indonesia, where it's cool to just let your animals graze wherever (the middle of the highway is a choice spot for cattle, it seems; a real test of motorbike prowess is dungheap dodging at road speed), we just...wandered up to the horses. In the middle of the ricepaddymidwest. Started taking pictures. My buddy was just standing there, trying to pat a little foal while the mother whinnied disapprovingly. The road lost itself up into the foothills down the way; a brightly-colored Labi-Labi (turtle-turtle, the slow-moving trucks with benches in the back and an open door you can fall out the back of; they're the local form of bus. I'll get a picture up later and tell you about our labi-labi party sometime. They play a style of music, labi labi music, that sounds kind of like a techno party that ran into a rasta gang, got stoned, stumbled off the dance floor and found its way into a hammock somewhere) rolled past incongruously, reflecting the gleaming silver domes of the mosques in the foothills off its shiny hubcaps. If John Wayne had stumbled out of that shanty in a coolie hat, I would not have been surprised. Where the hell am I?!
So that was awesome. We got back in the car, and headed up into the mountains. Then, we passed our guide, and...I never saw him again. I think we did pass his house, at some point. No big deal. Instead, we were just on this tiny, one-lane mountain road, twisting off into coffee-plant-filled jungle infinity. Sometimes there were chunks of road missing. Sometimes there really wasn't much road. Then, all of a sudden, we'd be in a tiny village, nestled in the folds of these mountains. We passed a wedding, where pretty much everyone from the surrounding areas was standing in and around the road, as well as some kind of small bus that had made its way back in there. We drove around like this, staring agog at this magic place outside the windows, for a solid half hour. Almost skidded off the road only once. Bottomed out on a rock only once. Then back to the ginormous lake, back to town, a fast lunch at a local fish joint (tiny fish seem to be the specialty, very crunchy) and, finally, jumped into our gear and strapped on our helmets. To the bikes!
To be continued...
I rolled over and woke up from a solid sleep at something like ten AM; a lordly five hours of rest had done me good. We soon discovered, however, that there wasn't enough water in the Mandi for us all to shower yet (Mandi = the all-purpose plastic scooper and water cistern in an Idonesian bathroom. The scooper bucket is your shower. It is also your sink, and your toilet-flusher. You ladle water into the throne, or kingly squatting-hole, to send things on their way. I embarrasingly had to ask how to do this my first day in-country, when I went to flush my plastic western-style toilet [I'm damn lucky for that, by the way; I have to thank my boss, Brian, for having it installed last year] and realized that it wasn't connected to any sort of water source or toilet-tank. There was a fairly physical demonstration, and I learned that this was a 'traditional' toilet). I've actually grown somewhat fond of the mandi, especially under certain circumstances. Here, we routinely suffer from a little phenomenon known as mati lampu (dead-lights, or power outages). The great thing about a Mandi is, you don't need power. You can ladle yourself down, and keep flushin' that toilet, just as well by candlelight or no light, when any other water source would just be dead. My mandi tank also happens to be huge; I honestly use actual running water, in the house, only about once a week, and that's only to refill the Mandi. That and the occasional luxury of turning on the tap (which means going outside to plug in the rickety electric water pump) to wash my hands in the "kitchen" instead of using the scooper to do so.
Pardon the diatribe. So, a few of us managed to stumble out of our place and down the hill in search of coffee and something to stuff our gullets. We ended up at one of the coolest Waru Kopi (Coffee Shop)s I've ever seen. It's a very cool, rocked out place, covered in paintings and artful graffiti by local artists, mostly young ones. The place has a giant "Parental Advisory" warning from an American music album on its sign, and bills itself as a meta-cafe.
It's a concert venue, a place to hang out, a place to chill and a place to meet. It also serves some of the spectacular local coffee, called Gayo coffee, some of the best I've ever had anywhere. The local specialty is a cup of coffee that also has some kind of whipped egg in it, a Gaston special, if I may. It's a little too rich, but it'll sure as hell wake you up in the morning, and give you some protein to get the day started. Just don't ask too many questions about it.After our caffeinated protein mud, we wandered outside, not sure quite what to do. Then Ricardo said we were getting in a car. Apparently, somebody, someone's friend, or an administrator, or public official, or something, had driven up and we were going to go to their house. I didn't know what else was going on, so I shrugged and hopped in the chase car (the guy in question was up with some of our other friends in a Jeep type thing that actually did look like it could eat mountains for lunch. Never actually met the guy). Instead of a leisurely trip to the other side of town, though, we blasted out of the city, down a small road towards the mountains, into...someth
ing resembling the American old west. With mosques. We stopped on an empty country road in the middle of a vast valley, a lonely track that led off and up into the hills. At first glance, the open country around us looked like prairie, but when you look closer, it's actually just dry rice stalks. During the rainy season, that land must be incredibly fertile. For now, though, it's just open horse country. We piled out of the car and wandered down onto the paddies, following a little dirt track up to a family of nearly-wild stallions grazing near a wood shanty. I assume they were the property of said shanty-folk; the Gayo are prizewinning horsemen, and hold festivals and competitions of the like that are famous nation-wide. Also, being Indonesia, where it's cool to just let your animals graze wherever (the middle of the highway is a choice spot for cattle, it seems; a real test of motorbike prowess is dungheap dodging at road speed), we just...wandered up to the horses. In the middle of the ricepaddymidwest. Started taking pictures. My buddy was just standing there, trying to pat a little foal while the mother whinnied disapprovingly. The road lost itself up into the foothills down the way; a brightly-colored Labi-Labi (turtle-turtle, the slow-moving trucks with benches in the back and an open door you can fall out the back of; they're the local form of bus. I'll get a picture up later and tell you about our labi-labi party sometime. They play a style of music, labi labi music, that sounds kind of like a techno party that ran into a rasta gang, got stoned, stumbled off the dance floor and found its way into a hammock somewhere) rolled past incongruously, reflecting the gleaming silver domes of the mosques in the foothills off its shiny hubcaps. If John Wayne had stumbled out of that shanty in a coolie hat, I would not have been surprised. Where the hell am I?!So that was awesome. We got back in the car, and headed up into the mountains. Then, we passed our guide, and...I never saw him again. I think we did pass his house, at some point. No big deal. Instead, we were just on this tiny, one-lane mountain road, twisting off into coffee-plant-filled jungle infinity. Sometimes there were chunks of road missing. Sometimes there really wasn't much road. Then, all of a sudden, we'd be in a tiny village, nestled in the folds of these mountains. We passed a wedding, where pretty much everyone from the surrounding areas was standing in and around the road, as well as some kind of small bus that had made its way back in there. We drove around like this, staring agog at this magic place outside the windows, for a solid half hour. Almost skidded off the road only once. Bottomed out on a rock only once. Then back to the ginormous lake, back to town, a fast lunch at a local fish joint (tiny fish seem to be the specialty, very crunchy) and, finally, jumped into our gear and strapped on our helmets. To the bikes!
To be continued...
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Breaking the silence! Adventures in Takengon, Part 1
My friends, I apologize. I have broken my promise of regular updates pretty spectacularly. The last update was one of necessity. This one will return to the original purpose of the blog. So, my adventure in Takengon!
It started on Friday, around lunch time. I got on the motorbike and met my friends Helen, Yvonne and Piva across from Hotel 61 in town (a strange, modern establishment that is built on top of, and around, an A&W Root Beer restaurant ("Real American Food!" It's like a burger and fried food joint, specializing in enormous pints of A&W root beer, sold in frozen glasses with a dollop of vanilla soft-serve ice cream in the middle. Pretty great). However, this was not our actual objective. We rode out down the road and turned down a small lane, headed for one of the city's most forbidden and succulent sins: THE PORK RESTAURANT! It's this small joint, a little secluded restaurant room behind a house-compound wall, sheltering a typical food-stall-cart in the back...loaded with Pork. I think it's one of maybe two such joints in this whole part of Aceh, though I could be wrong. I have no idea how they even get the pork to the restaurant, but I'm sure they have their ways.
Anyway, we were sitting over our lunch of sin, when Ricardo (Helen and Piva's boss, he met us there) brought up the fact that a bunch of them were leaving, that night, for a city in the mountains called Takengon. They were headed out for the three day weekend (holiday on monday) to spend a few days mountain biking around the area. That's all they really told me at the time, aside from "hey! Why don't you come with us?" I was thinking that this would be a relaxing weekend hanging out around Banda Aceh, or maybe somehow grabbing the night bus down to Medan with some friends from here on a quest to find a movie theater playing Harry Potter (there is not a single movie theater in the province of Aceh. Aceh is about the size of Alabama). I was having my fill of adventure just making my way here and, kind of uncharacteristically, wasn't really up for a crazy romp. So, this new idea, of hauling my out-of-shape tukus up some mountains nine hours away by car, was only partly appealing, especially last-minute. However, as we sat over some of those root beer floats a little while later, and Ricardo kept saying "spontaneous is wonderful, man! Come on! Spontaneous! You can borrow bike. I lend you water bottle, gloves, helmet, come on! We have space in car!" I was a little more tempted. I've been trying to find a way to get myself to start getting back in shape (my post-thesis, post-college physique is a bit lacking), and this, coupled with a love of biking, DID sound good...My girlfriend actually gave me the final push, helping me get psyched to go and do this thing. I dropped by a bike store, picked up the requisite bike shorts, bottle and helmet, threw stuff into my backpack, dropped a fast line to the family and hit the road.
We met at a coffee shop on the outskirts of town. Three SUVs and an enormous dumptruck-type-thing. The truck was full of bikes. We grabbed a little food, piled into the cars and set out into the night.
The open road in this country is somewhat of a terrifying proposition. Imagine your typical two-lane country road. Chop off about a meter of roadway on either side, so that cars most of the time have most of a full lane. Throw in some twisting turns and landslides. Take out random chunks of pavement. Add an assortment of wheeled vehicles, and let people graze their herd of cattle on the road itself. Now make it night time, and fill this road with a mix of country folk on motorbikes who live with no driving rules or customs, and a passle of hyped-up, suicidal van drivers and turbo buses who are trying to do the 12 hour drive to Medan in eight. This is the main highway through eastern Aceh, and we were basically racing on it. We hit the road at 9 PM and drove through the night, dodging goats, people and fate, and right around 4:30 AM we rolled into Takengon under the stars, stepping out of a car-climate from the tropical floodplains below into the cool, crisp mountain air of this lakeside city. We stumbled into our hotel up on a hill, a building that reminded me of the meeting hall at my old summer camp, and when the girls went off to their bedrooms, us guys piled onto a handful of mattresses that were made up on the floor of a conference room. We were so tired it didn't matter, and as soon as we figured out how we'd all fit, I happily passed out.
To be continued...
It started on Friday, around lunch time. I got on the motorbike and met my friends Helen, Yvonne and Piva across from Hotel 61 in town (a strange, modern establishment that is built on top of, and around, an A&W Root Beer restaurant ("Real American Food!" It's like a burger and fried food joint, specializing in enormous pints of A&W root beer, sold in frozen glasses with a dollop of vanilla soft-serve ice cream in the middle. Pretty great). However, this was not our actual objective. We rode out down the road and turned down a small lane, headed for one of the city's most forbidden and succulent sins: THE PORK RESTAURANT! It's this small joint, a little secluded restaurant room behind a house-compound wall, sheltering a typical food-stall-cart in the back...loaded with Pork. I think it's one of maybe two such joints in this whole part of Aceh, though I could be wrong. I have no idea how they even get the pork to the restaurant, but I'm sure they have their ways.
Anyway, we were sitting over our lunch of sin, when Ricardo (Helen and Piva's boss, he met us there) brought up the fact that a bunch of them were leaving, that night, for a city in the mountains called Takengon. They were headed out for the three day weekend (holiday on monday) to spend a few days mountain biking around the area. That's all they really told me at the time, aside from "hey! Why don't you come with us?" I was thinking that this would be a relaxing weekend hanging out around Banda Aceh, or maybe somehow grabbing the night bus down to Medan with some friends from here on a quest to find a movie theater playing Harry Potter (there is not a single movie theater in the province of Aceh. Aceh is about the size of Alabama). I was having my fill of adventure just making my way here and, kind of uncharacteristically, wasn't really up for a crazy romp. So, this new idea, of hauling my out-of-shape tukus up some mountains nine hours away by car, was only partly appealing, especially last-minute. However, as we sat over some of those root beer floats a little while later, and Ricardo kept saying "spontaneous is wonderful, man! Come on! Spontaneous! You can borrow bike. I lend you water bottle, gloves, helmet, come on! We have space in car!" I was a little more tempted. I've been trying to find a way to get myself to start getting back in shape (my post-thesis, post-college physique is a bit lacking), and this, coupled with a love of biking, DID sound good...My girlfriend actually gave me the final push, helping me get psyched to go and do this thing. I dropped by a bike store, picked up the requisite bike shorts, bottle and helmet, threw stuff into my backpack, dropped a fast line to the family and hit the road.
We met at a coffee shop on the outskirts of town. Three SUVs and an enormous dumptruck-type-thing. The truck was full of bikes. We grabbed a little food, piled into the cars and set out into the night.
The open road in this country is somewhat of a terrifying proposition. Imagine your typical two-lane country road. Chop off about a meter of roadway on either side, so that cars most of the time have most of a full lane. Throw in some twisting turns and landslides. Take out random chunks of pavement. Add an assortment of wheeled vehicles, and let people graze their herd of cattle on the road itself. Now make it night time, and fill this road with a mix of country folk on motorbikes who live with no driving rules or customs, and a passle of hyped-up, suicidal van drivers and turbo buses who are trying to do the 12 hour drive to Medan in eight. This is the main highway through eastern Aceh, and we were basically racing on it. We hit the road at 9 PM and drove through the night, dodging goats, people and fate, and right around 4:30 AM we rolled into Takengon under the stars, stepping out of a car-climate from the tropical floodplains below into the cool, crisp mountain air of this lakeside city. We stumbled into our hotel up on a hill, a building that reminded me of the meeting hall at my old summer camp, and when the girls went off to their bedrooms, us guys piled onto a handful of mattresses that were made up on the floor of a conference room. We were so tired it didn't matter, and as soon as we figured out how we'd all fit, I happily passed out.
To be continued...
Friday, July 17, 2009
Checking in on the morning of the Jakarta Bombings
Hey everybody,
I wanted to check in quickly and ease some minds: I'm very much ok. The bombings this morning happened at the Marriot Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Jakarta, and I am safely more than a thousand miles a way, in Banda Aceh. I hope that the friends and family of everyone reading this are safe as well, and if there are any problems, please contact me directly or comment on this post and I will do what I can immediately.
Best, and please stay safe,
--Dylan
I wanted to check in quickly and ease some minds: I'm very much ok. The bombings this morning happened at the Marriot Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Jakarta, and I am safely more than a thousand miles a way, in Banda Aceh. I hope that the friends and family of everyone reading this are safe as well, and if there are any problems, please contact me directly or comment on this post and I will do what I can immediately.
Best, and please stay safe,
--Dylan
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Please do not feed the monkeys!
Hi! I'm Dylan. I'm keeping a blog. This blog. I'm not a blogger by nature, nor have I been particularly good in the past at writing down my adventures and experiences. I'm gong to attempt to change this, and I've got a decent reason for doing so. I'm in Indonesia for the next 365 days.
This blog will follow my life as a Princeton in Asia fellow and intern at Search For Common Ground Indonesia, an NGO doing work all over the archipelago. For the first few months, I'm living in Banda Aceh, way out on the tip of an island called Sumatra.
I'll be here for about four months, longer with a little luck. If you catch me slacking off in writing about it, feel free to give me. I'll try to catch up on the past month or so as this week goes on. So, sit back, relax and, I hope, enjoy, as I eat with my hands, shower with a plastic scooper bucket and awkwardly rock my way around this country!Coming at you live from GMT +7 ,
Dylan
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
It would seem that men here are too cool to dry off after a shower
Based on the selection of towels at the big store in town, it seems that dudes just walk around dripping all day long and, clearly, looking cool as a result. There was not a SINGLE masculine towel in the entire store. And I'm talking about a pretty dedicated towel aisle here. Hundreds. And hundreds. Flowers, spirals, pink spinnies, yellow, periwinkle blue and, of course, Winnie the Pooh. I would have sprung for good ol' Pooh Bear and the nice fat "Wah Disnay" (walt disney, based on the lettering) over his head, but it looked like he himself was pretty much the the texture of sandpaper. I ended up going with the seafoam green; it had a tolerable level of flowers and other ornament.
Similar situation with bedsheets. Maybe only women use them. That makes very little sense to me, as there is a roaring trade in fast, western-style mattresses in this town (there's one main street that looks to be somewhat of a mattress warzone; at least five sleeperies, nearly back-to-back, one of which being a superstore of multiple floors that has the presumption to call itself the "Mattress King"). Last week, I spent a solid twenty minutes hunting for the only gender-neutral set in the store that would fit my bed. Turns out that the helpful sales rep was mildly wrong; I ended up with two fitted sheets for a bed several feet wider than my own. It's ok though, they're pretty sweet all the same. If I'm really hurting for some variety in a few months, there's a Superman one buried in the back that's calling my name...
Similar situation with bedsheets. Maybe only women use them. That makes very little sense to me, as there is a roaring trade in fast, western-style mattresses in this town (there's one main street that looks to be somewhat of a mattress warzone; at least five sleeperies, nearly back-to-back, one of which being a superstore of multiple floors that has the presumption to call itself the "Mattress King"). Last week, I spent a solid twenty minutes hunting for the only gender-neutral set in the store that would fit my bed. Turns out that the helpful sales rep was mildly wrong; I ended up with two fitted sheets for a bed several feet wider than my own. It's ok though, they're pretty sweet all the same. If I'm really hurting for some variety in a few months, there's a Superman one buried in the back that's calling my name...
My first adventure on the open road. We're still alive. I declare Victory.
About 45 minutes ago, Ocxie (my housemate/coworker; which do I call him?) asked me if I was hungry for breakfast, meaning that he’s hungry too. Of course I was. The only difference this morning, from any other morning here so far (all what, ten of them?) is that, for whatever reason, I was feeling more ballsy than usual. I asked Oxcie for the keys to the car.
WOAH.
I’d been meaning to ask someone to take me out for my first time on the road for about a week or so. Then, every time I’d have the thought, I’d find a good reason to put it off. I’m not talking about heading out onto the somewhat-lawless and disorganized Acehnese roads on a motorbike; I did that my third day here, for a good 45-minute ride back from the beach, and it was fine. I had a motorbike in Saigon, one of the motorbike chaos capitals of the world. Didn’t mean it wasn’t a challenge, both driving on the left (yes, they drive on the left here) and weaving through a herd of cows. It just means that I could do it with a reasonable degree of safety and confidence.
Taking the car, an ageing, boat-sized SUV, is a different matter entirely. I drive stick, but I had never done so sitting with the wheel on the right and the stick on the left. It kind of trips you out, getting a concept of where the front of your car ends on the other side. I got in and started the thing with a belch of smoke. We lurched around the SFCG front yard area, without stalling, and creaked out onto the road. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I kept trying to hit the turn signal bar. I turned on the wipers. The signal thing is on the right, doofus. Cars coming from the left, put it into fourth by mistake, made it to the rice cart. Got our breakfast, wiggled a U-turn across four lanes of motorbikes. Stop to let the trucks go by, then through the crowd of bikes like parting the waters. Bumbling, fumbling, stopped traffic cold, made it across, avoided the ditch, rumbled back up to the house. Made it.
Hot rice with spicy chicken for breakfast. Goes great with a side of shaky nerves and a well-used American driver’s license. For today, I declare victory.
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