Jakarta

            A friend who came over to dinner before we left Bozeman, and who knows Indonesia fairly well, suggested that we fly into Jakarta at night, stay in a hotel as close to the airport as we can, and then leave the next morning, so that the first thing that our kids see of Indonesia is not Jakarta.  It might have been good advice, but it’s not really my style of traveling, for one thing, and we didn’t have a choice, for another, because the agency in Jakarta made all the plans and I had to meet with the executive director and some of the staff this morning (including Tina, who sent me back to my hotel with sticky rice cooked with coconut milk and brown sugar, all wrapped in banana leaves, for me and my family – yummy).  I met with them, I should add, immediately after a grueling – this is the right word for it – trip across half the planet.

The worst leg was Minneapolis to Tokyo, where we sat four across in the very last row (row 67) of an oversold 747, as far away from the grainy screen showing lousy second run movies as we could be. Plus, in that trick of flying west, it was never ever night, and never ever even remotely dark in our part of the plane, and by the time we arrived Graham had had enough, so exhausted that he couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm about being in Japan. S, on the other hand, was beside himself about being in Asia, in Japan, in Tokyo, and his enthusiasm, once we got G off the plane, cheered G up and they wondered around the airport trying to get me to buy Japanese snacks – I ponied up for the wasabi kit kats and the fried shrimp crackers with seaweed and wasabi and three years of our daily allowance of sodium. On the seven hour flight to Singapore, S and G and Laura crashed, which was great, aided no doubt by the miracle of TVs with endless movie choices at every seat.

  Unfortunately for me, the person behind me used his screen to play video games, which responded to the touch of his finger, and he was a very enthusiastic video game player, punching the back of the seat with his finger tip at least every four seconds, which if you do the math (I had time to do the math) ended up being a lot of finger punches. I didn’t ask him to stop punching the screen with such a competitive zeal, so I think I cannot complain; instead I did those sort of passive-aggressive acts like leaning back really hard every time he committed some powerful finger jujitsu behind me. Regardless, I didn’t sleep on the flight, though I managed to doze for two or three hours during the seven hour lay-over in Singapore. (I also had a school of fish nibble off some of the dead skin on my hand, a remarkably odd sensation, I have to say.)  And then we had a 90 minute flight to Jakarta, where a lovely woman from the office met us in a taxi and brought us to our hotel, where we dropped off my family so I could go into a meeting with the executive director, who told me (in a line that appears to be one of the sub-rosa mottos of this organization) “Lower your expectations.” I’m sure I was a stimulating presence in the meeting, and I imagine when I left he asked his staff if they thought there was something wrong with my eyes.

When I got back to the hotel, it was about noon, and S was dying to go to the mall and eat sushi. (I made the mistake of mentioning the proximity of our hotel to the largest mall in Indonesia when I looked it up last week.) The mall! And it was a really fancy one too, with a Gucci and a Tiffany’s and a toy stores that sells those creative handmade wooden Swedish toys.  I managed about 10 minutes in the mall before I felt my mall brain begin to flood my cortex with a fight or flight response. Flight, but into the heat of the Jakarta afternoon – we’d decided to walk the mile back to our hotel. Even readers of this blog who do not have children, who have never met a child, will be thinking to themselves “Wow, that was a really stupid idea to have your two kids walk a mile in the Jakarta heat and humidity and traffic after that grueling trip” and it was, and I will leave you to imagine the consequences. 

G feel asleep on the bathroom floor when we got back to the hotel, at about 4 o’clock and it was impossible to wake him up – we tried, thinking this was a bad thing to be asleep so soon in the day. Somethings, though, you just cannot do, and waking him up to get him to dinner was one of them. So S and I went out instead, and it was much more pleasant than it had been at 3 in the afternoon, and we ate and wondered some incredible and narrow alleys full of bird cages and cats and chickens and one rat, by a mosque in a call to prayer as the sun set on the first week of Ramadan, and we ate some more at a satay stand and then took a three wheeled taxi the less than ½ mile back to our hotel, because S badly wanted to ride in one, and it was the best 50 cent thrill ride I have ever paid for. Now I’m writing this at about 8, the rest of my family out cold.

All in all a good birthday. Tomorrow we fly to Semarang and then drive to Salatiga, I hope in time for some of the evening activities in celebration of Indonesian Independence day (and our 20^th wedding anniversary).