Bule from the blue

August 30, 2010

(Kirk)

            We took our first away trip, unsupervised as it were, this weekend, bussing it the 1 ½ hours southeast to Solo, one of the three larger cities in Central Java (Semarang and Yogyakarta are the other two). We wanted a place that would be relatively easy to get to (it only required one bus ride as opposed to having to switch in Solo to get to Yogya), a short trip, and interesting. After being in the cramped guest house for almost two weeks, we also wanted to stay somewhere comfortable and roomy, so I found a small hotel that met the bill – the Hotel Romoekho – and booked a room through a travel agent Wemmy introduced us to in Salatiga.

            We started the morning later than we wanted to, because Wemmy had arranged to have a bunch of the furniture that she has found to loan to us to be delivered to our house (we bought beds, but she has managed to find tables, desks, wardrobes, chairs, kitchen equipment, etc. etc. so that we haven’t had buy all that). G and S got to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck for a while, picking up and bringing furniture to the house – G, always excited by manifest violations of his normal safety protocol, was thrilled that he got to stand in the back when it was packed with furniture. By the time we’d finished that, gotten back to the hotel and packed and to the bus stop on the main street, it was about 11 or so.

            The bus came right away, the Pasat, air-conditioned, to Solo for 10,000 rp each (a little more than $1). It was packed, and at the beginning, we had to stand, though enough seats came open that we all got to eventually sit. It was an enormous relief for me not be on an excursion engineered by someone else – no private car hired to drive us around, no local guide found to chaperone, and for the start of trip, the rest of my family ensconced in seats near the back of the bus, I stood near the front and just looked out at the landscape, which for the first time since we’d arrived we could get a clear view of. Here at least the road wasn’t lined with stores and stands and etc. for the entire way, and we cruised by rice fields and corn fields and cultivated forests and smaller towns, the bus passing everything in the Indonesian oncoming-traffic-beware fashion. An uneventful ride, capped with a pleasant conversation with a man of 66 from Solo after I finally got a seat about 2/3 of the way there.

From where we were dropped, a fast and cheap taxi ride (all the taxi rides in Solo that weekend came under $2 each, which was good, because the temperature and humidity were not so benign). The hotel was extraordinary, the refurbished house of a 1920s batik merchant, art-deco, with a central lobby surrounded by fountains with koi ponds and an amazing collection of contemporary Javanese art and old photographs of Dutch soldiers performing various acts of occupation of the city during the Revolution in the late 1940s. The rooms were beautiful, comfortable, roomy, and we relaxed for a few minutes until we left at 2, heading by taxi first to an antiques market and then to walk the next block over to one of the two palaces in town.

In case you are planning a trip to Indonesia, I should throw in here that “leaving at 2” to go somewhere is not the soundest of travel – it means leaving when it is absurdly hot.  Fortunately, I resisted the impulse I always have when I travel, which is to just walk, no matter the distance – we simply took a taxi, everywhere, easy and pleasant, and I saved myself a good deal of grief. The antiques market was great and packed with all sorts of things, from shadow puppets to drawer handles to statues to old keys and posters, a sort of high end flea market. We didn’t buy anything, finding ourselves once again in a situation that we are too slowly learning to avoid: being in a place where the main goal is buying things at the hottest part of the day with two people (four, really) who all want to buy just about everything they see and can’t. It’s the same reason I don’t go shopping for breakfast cereals with my kids, and by the time we had pulled together, left the market and managed to get across the street to the palace (which we inadvertently snuck into, only after wandering outside the walls wondering how to get in and taking the first entrance), it was closed, and my entire family had a very locally focused “fight the patriarchy” moment.

Perhaps you know these sorts of travel breakdowns: they happen because complete cultural and geographic ignorance can quickly move from exciting to tedious, especially when its 95 degrees, super humid, in a busy city with giant blocks during a religious holiday when 90% of the people who live in the city are fasting so restaurants aren’t open. I tried – not wholly successfully – to just keep my head down and move forward, find a taxi, and mutter the name of the market we wanted to go to, Pasar Klewer, the batik market the had been recommended. I think the conversation, translated went something like this, me with my guide book open in stumbling (that’s a generous adjective here) Indonesian:

“We want to go to Pasar Klewer.”

“Pasar Kliwon?” asked the driver whose thumbnail on his left hand was at least four inches long, eliciting a startled and loud gasp from S when he saw it.

“Yes, thank you.”

And so we got dropped not at Pasar Klewer but at Pasar Kliwon, where there was no batik. It was a market, primarily I think a food market, but not a yummy-let’s-try-some-of-that-food-market, not a market that had much tourist traffic at all, really. It was dark, not as clean as we’ve become accustomed to (I’m trying to be nice about this, because I am a guest in this country), and certainly not as welcoming, with dogs and cats and chickens abundant and people I’m sure justifiably curious about why a family of bule who can say a few words in the language but can’t understand them spoken back appeared from the blue. Precisely, one can say, the place you would not want to take your family in a taxi if they were already annoyed with you and wanted to go someplace cool and interesting. Fortunately, after a little bit of confusion, a man led us in the right direction and then pointed us the rest of the way, and another man helpfully gave us a short mini-bus ride (for 4,000 rp – about 40 cents) to Pasar Klewer, which was an extraordinary, giant, and completely amazing batik market.  We got a little overwhelmed, but we left with a beautiful shirt for G, some cool pajama pants for S, and exactly the bag Laura was looking for, and we will go back another time, I am sure, I hope sans kids at least once, to purchase with more intention. It’s too easy at markets like these to get caught up in bargaining (which is of course very fun) or in worrying that you’re getting ripped off, and missing the fact that the distinctions that matter so clearly in the narrow fabric and people crowded aisles will not be the same when we return home and think “was that beautiful shirt really only $3, even getting ripped off?” It’s one reason I’m glad we’re here for a while, because I freeze up at moments like that and always return home thinking I should have brought a lot more with me.

We were recovered when we left, and went back to the hotel, where they served us tea and fried bananas with sugar and chocolate on them, and G tinkered with the beautiful array of gamelan instruments, and we were tired and a little crabby and Laura and I questioned the wisdom of trying to enjoy an amazing hotel with two overwrought children, but again we rallied, and soon headed out to the Galabo, a magnificent outdoor traffic free food stall with about 90 food stalls serving delicious and enticing food – satay, various kinds of local dishes I had ayam gudeg, which is chicken and rice with unripe jackfruit, amazing  (I don’t even know what a jackfruit looks like or is), G had a whole fish, fried, and managed to charm his way behind the stall (again) to help prepare it and some food perhaps delicious but not so enticing - in particular the stall that had a tank full of live cobras that you pick out like lobster in a restaurant and have prepared – fried or grilled – right there on the spot. G wanted to have some fried cobra, but it was a little much for me to gnaw on, frankly. There were also a variety of pills and tinctures made from cobra oil that were advertised as cure-alls – we skipped those too. The owner did , however, take a cobra out of the tank, put it roughly on the cobblestone surface, slap its back as it writhed around until it rose and frilled its hood and hissed. Let me know if you want some cobra jerky, maybe for the holiday season.

From there to the Sriwardi Amusement Park, where we went on the “Rumah Hantu” (haunted house) that featured lots of flashing lights, recorded screams, shaking skeletons, and a baby doll in an aquarium, on the Boom-boom cars (which were like bumper cars, only with less bumper and more car, vicious in a head-on collision, of which there were several, one between S and another car that gave a very little girl a rather jarring and ride-ending jolt), the mini-coaster, which was launched by the two attendants giving it a running push start, and the balloon-tower. Behind the amusement park was the Wayang Orang theater – we stopped in there for a performance from the Ramayana, super-stylized dance with full gamelan orchestra and loads of sexual innuendo (visual, and I’m sure verbal too though we couldn’t understand it) some great fight sequences (one of the warriors had really long thumbnails), and lots of moments when the characters didn’t do much, except chat and occasionally laugh diabolically. There were some very funny trickster characters, accomplished male dancers who were the highlight of the show – we’d seen their hilarious statues in several places at the antiques market earlier in the day – even when the merchants there tried to explain who they were they couldn’t help giggling the whole time (though I think we are pretty funny, right now, too.) What had been a rough night turned into a transcendent night, and the next day – tours of two palaces (one had male and female chastity belts from the 16^th century that were locked not with a key but with a magic spell that only the husband or wife know) and a lunch at the Grand Mall, which had an amazing food court that was packed with people eating midday even in the middle of Ramadan (which was why we went there – we wanted to eat in a place where we wouldn’t look rude eating).

A successful first trip: we learned how to get out of Solo on public transit, visited an amazing city, learned more about the history and culture of Java, ate (and did not eat) some wonderful food, all with a minimum of family stress. Like every entry, I find myself editing and editing, since there is too much to write about. The worst part of the weekend, in fact, was getting on the bus going the wrong direction when we got home (home?), and ending up way up outside of Salatiga, and then having to negotiate our way home with a bus driver who was clearly (and for the first time, really, since we got here) trying to gouge us. We ended up walking home after I finally shoved some money into his hand and we all got off the bus.

S and G are at 50% now, in terms of embracing this experience, which seems pretty good to me. This is extraordinarily exhausting, I can say, often overwhelming, especially for them uncomfortable (we haven’t seen too many westerners anywhere we’ve been, and S and G garner a lot of attention – G did in particularly wandering around the very crowded Grand Mall Solo wearing his new traditional batik hat.) They miss their friends and are at a school that is still as bizarre to us as anything else we’ve seen on Java (perhaps my new catch phrase: “It’s weirder than fried cobra”), our quarters are cramped and the food unpredictable. So we relish those moments when they get excited, by a traditional toy, or hat, or food, or a taxi ride, or anything. Let’s hope we keep finding those moments.