Culture Shock from the Land of the Bad Donut

Shortly before we left Bozeman, my friend Cathy started emailing me in French so that I could get used to the feeling of not knowing what people were saying to me. In retrospect, I probably should have taken the exercise a little more seriously. The excitement of the journey faded pretty quickly upon our arrival in Salatiga and the transition to life here has been, well, bumpy. As the house we have rented will not be ready for another week, we are currently living in very cramped quarters, on a busy street, smack dab in the middle of town. It is the life in the developing world at its frenetic best -- busses, cars and motorbikes whizz by at all hours, honking up a storm and belching out huge amounts of toxic fumes, the call to prayer from the mosque across the street seems to be going 24/7, birds screech and gekkos chirp, lots of gastro-intestinal distress. My limited Bahasa skills make doing even the most basic things seem like a monumental task. And, as we have no kitchen facilities, we have eaten out pretty much every meal for two weeks and the kids, who clamor like mad to eat out in Bozeman, are done with the whole enterprise.

Seamus and Graham have been, for the most part, incredibly game throughout. Seamus, in particular, has really jumped in. He has no hesitation bargaining with the becap drivers, getting lost in the alleys, or eating goofy food. He’s often followed by a herd of little kids yelling HELLOOO MEEESTER! and he shakes everyone of their hands. Graham is a litte more hesitant but still a good sport. I think he is a bit sick of the old ladies wanting to touch him all the time. Boules (the Indonesian equivalent of the gringo) are few and far between here. But they are homesick, that is for certain. Both are jonesing for American food, open space, and other familiarities of home. We are living in a very different place here. A colleague of Kirk’s mentioned the problem with air quality to which my little Montanan asked, “What is smog?” Fortunately, when we are very much in need of a familiar voice, there is an English language channel on the television although admittedly, it broadcasts only Japanese programming, and the oddest of programs at that. Last night G. & I watched a half-hour special on the development of commercial food slicers. I am not making this up.

School has started with equally mixed results. Graham’s class has 12 girls and 3 boys, making him a very welcome addition to the group. He has a male teacher for the first time and seems to enjoy Mr. Bryan. He joined the climbing club and is looking forward to soccer starting, although it is less organized than he had hoped. Seamus is a little more reserved. His class of 18 is somewhat subdued, not the gregarious, outgoing Equinox bunch he is used to and, with kids from many different ethnic and religious backgrounds, he‘s still figuring out the social rules. It is really tough to see him so unhappy and I have had plenty of ‘why are we doing this to our kids? moments. Kirk is rock solid on this front and I too am confident that he will win over his peers but Seamus is less certain. Oh, by the way, today was their third day of school.

(update: School went better today. S. had an acting class in which they were introduced to the concept of Improv. Need I say more?)

Moving into the house I think will make an enormous difference. It is adjacent to the school grounds where there are soccer fields, playgrounds, and considerably less traffic. Lots of the kids from Graham’s school live nearby so there is the potential for playdates and bike riding, etc. Plus it is half a block up from the only coffee shop in town -- a Starbucks-y knockoff run by an American ex-pat and her Indonesian husband. The only problem is, it is only open from 1 - 5 on Fridays although no once here thinks this is odd. The house was scouted out by Kirk’s colleagues before we arrived and it is awesome (if anyone needs a set for the climactic shoot out scene of their own Hong Kong mafia movie, this is it! vintage John Woo). Once we’re in we can cook our own food, and set our own schedule. The guesthouse we are staying in provides breakfast every morning but it is pretty basic, and sometimes completely unrecognizable. For a couple of kids with upset tummies, its not always
exactly what they need. We are closing in on a full month as gypsies and, no offence to Michael, my mom, or Yuyen and his cohorts at the guest house, all of us are ready to call a place home.

While it is true, we are still getting used to things, I must say that every single person we have met thus far has been warm and generous and welcoming. The city, while poor, is tidy and people take enormous pride in the tiny bit of greenspace they have on patios and windowsills. The surrounding countryside, which we have seen very little of, is gorgeous and we can see the smoking volcanoes from town. We have found our neighborhood quite safe, its not too hot, the food is great, and there is a little toy stall/workshop around the corner where sits a cute old guy who makes the most beautiful hula hoops out of bamboo and sells them for 29000 R or about $3 each. The kids are coming around and I think they will continue to do so but it’s the little things that get to them. Graham had a really difficult morning so we walked by the Wonder Bakery Roti & More for a treat on our way to school, just to put him in a good mood. He picked out a sugar donut. It was filled with tuna. The adventure continues...

Small and quiet

August 25, 2010

            One of the attractions of Salatiga, as we envisioned it from our house in Bozeman, was that it appeared to be a small town, or smallish at least, and quiet, perhaps. I can’t remember if anyone used those words, or if we projected them onto Salatiga, but if you suddenly found yourself on a Salatiga street corner during just about any hour of any day, “small quiet city” is not the first thing that would come to mind. Perhaps you would think, instead, “absence of traffic regulations” as you watch a truck pass a bus into oncoming traffic on the right (they drive on the left here) while about 20 motorcycles also pass on either side of the bus. On 10 of the motorcycles you’re likely to see a family of 2-3 that will include a toddler standing up in the front wearing no helmet (often even when the parents are both wearing helmets) or sitting between her parents (no helmet, in any position). We first saw this alarming sight on a Jakarta freeway when we arrived, and it seems to be the normal state of things. I watched one man zoom down the street with his small child calmly resting his face on the metal bit between the handlebars. 

            I’ve been enjoying these roads, now, on my second-hand bicycle (rattling gears and brakes that demand a little lead more time) back and forth to campus, and it’s quite funny, I’m sure, to observe me stopped at an intersection, in my slightly-too-small-because-it’s-S’s-because-mine-shattered-in-the-bag-on-the-trip–from-Bozeman bicycle helmet (perhaps one of 10 bicycle helmets on the island of Java) waiting politely for a break in the onslaught of motorbikes, bicycle taxis, buses, cars, trucks, etc. etc. while zooming by me without stopping to observe that oncoming onslaught is another onslaught on another road, somehow merging and crossing without a pause. I can sit there for five minutes while traffic flows heavily in all directions and no one stops. Pedestrians begin to wonder why this bule (the Indonesian word for gringo) is just standing there on his bike, I can tell. No one ever really honks that much (unlike Cairo, about which all I remember is the honking), so the honks here are serious – they mean that you are about to get hit, though I haven’t seen anyone get hit yet.   But once you get the hang of it (these are words you can quote to me while I’m in the coma from head trauma) it’s kind of fun, as much fun as I’ve had riding in traffic since I used to zoom through downtown Seattle going south on 4^th Avenue during rush hour – exhilarating and life-threatening, and when I arrive at campus I’m bathed in sweat induced by humidity and adrenaline.

            Still, when we ask about a quiet place that is close to Salatiga everyone looks at us a little funny and says “Salatiga is a quiet place.” You find the quiet when you turn off the streets into any one of the hundreds of alleys that criss-cross the town. I call them alleys, but they are pedestrian walkways that zig-zag through every part of town, usually narrow, passing front porches with 4-5 bird cages and dozens of lush houseplants, mosques busy with people at prayer or blasting out something sacred from over-worked loudspeakers, tiny little stores, the occasional noodle stand, some stray cats, at night bats everywhere. Almost as soon as you leave the main road it is pleasant and more relaxed on those alleys, the sound of the traffic mostly blocked by the buildings (except when the motorcycles go down the alleys, but they are restrained here and seem in this context to see pedestrians). As long as you have a general sense of the direction you need to go in, you can get anywhere in Salatiga via those alleys, and they are the best way to walk or ride bikes around town.

            We’ve been here ten days now, which when I type it seems impossible. It seems much longer, perhaps because there is so little that has any kind of familiarity to it. My children are attending a fundamentalist Christian school (the biology class is still all creation, all the time – Monday S told me, eyes rolling, that he learned in biology that the reason we die is Adam and Eve), I have only the most hilarious smattering of Indonesian, the food is still mostly a mystery (quite delicious, I think, though so far only G and I have dodged the traveler’s GI curse, and sometimes I could stand a tad less fish sauce), we don’t have access to the internet too often and when we do it’s like the pony express version, a website galloping bit-by-panting-byte to your computer from somewhere on the far eastern part of the island. Most tedious, at the moment, is the fact that the house we are going to live in isn’t ready yet, so we are living in a “guest house,” which when I heard the term in Bozeman I thought was a house that the University keeps for guests but it is not – it is a sort of boarding facility with two floors. My university is graciously footing the bill for us while we stay here, but the rooms are sort of small (we are spread into three at the moment). All the rooms have bathrooms, but none of the bathrooms have sinks. Instead, you are supposed to use the big blue plastic bucket with little scooper that sits next to the toilet which is also the shower room. Laura and I don’t have hot water in our room, and S’s shower head keeps popping off, so we go from room 208 down to room 202 every morning to use G’s bathroom, but god forbid you turn the hot water on first or you will receive severe burns immediately.  All our beds are double beds, and fairly comfortable, except for the fact that all the sheets and blankets are made for twin beds, which is slightly annoying when you share a bed with someone. 

            My teaching, too, is slightly frustrating. I will be teaching three classes starting next week  – three actual classes that each meet every week – and that’s a little annoying, but by the time it transpired there was little way to resist without looking like a complete prima-donna. I am teaching Critical Reading (35 students), Academic Writing (16 students) , and Public Speaking (16 students), and yesterday I met with the team who is also teaching critical reading. We have a handbook and a syllabus that we all have to follow – I think this is the same in the other classes too, though I haven’t really had a chance to examine the handbooks all that closely. The critical reading course seems to focus less on the critical and more on sort of loose reading strategies – making inferences, finding the main idea, etc, but no place where you can say “This writer appears to be a crackpot” or anything like that. The academic writing course, as far as I can tell, addresses the topics in ways that clearly are not inspired by anything I’ve been reading for a long time. And public speaking? Well, who knows. I have my first meeting tomorrow with the team, so I’ll know more then, I guess.  The word is that getting students to talk is like pulling teeth, but that’s fine. I have ways to make them talk.  I’m actually looking forward to it, just because I know it’s going to be so odd and so interesting, and because out of the group of 65 students I’ll have I know that I’ll become very attached to several.  I am rolling with it, and not so concerned, in part because I will make sure this doesn’t happen again next semester (or try to) and in part because I think it will be fun, in any case, to negotiate a brand new teaching context like this.

            Today (Wednesday) we finally cleared the immigration hassles. I am now registered as being in Indonesia with several ministries in Jakarta, the Indonesian consulate in LA, the provincial office for Central Java in Semarang, and the Salatiga police. Each has their own picture of me and my family, and all our fingerprints, all 40 of them. As promised, the university made the day a sort of excursion, and they sent along Eka, a wonderful young woman who has accompanied us on a couple of other excursions as well, and is fast becoming our best family friend.  We stopped first at a beautiful Buddhist temple that overlooks Semarang, then went to the Ciputra Mall, where S wanted to go to the movie store, and we did, after getting lost inside. In Bozeman I am kind of a stickler about never buying movies – it’s always struck me as silly – but here you can buy DVDs for $1 a piece (and no pirating, I am sure, never mind that they have Inception on the shelves) so we bought a whole bunch to watch in the guesthouse. After immigration (blissfully fast) and a quick lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken (staffed by three women in hijab who must have a hard time working all day in a fast food place during Ramadan), we went to the House of a Thousand Doors.

This was the administrative center of the Dutch Railway system in Central Java, built between 1906 and 1916. It’s a giant imposing building that speaks authority and power, extremely well-built (likely with not too much Dutch physical labor) with giant double-wooden doors everywhere. S wanted to go because he heard it was haunted, and we paid extra (actually, the university paid extra – they covered all the expenses of the trip, including the private car hire from Salatiga to Semarang and back) to go into the basement. The basement was where the Japanese, after they took over the island in 1942, kept prisoners – Indonesian men suspected of being rebels (the women became “comfort women,” an appalling euphemism that doesn’t get at years of daily rape) in miserable conditions. The Dutch rerouted a river to run under the building when they built it, so that the water would cool the rooms above, with concrete holding tanks about 4 feet deep and five feet square, which the Japanese converted into cells that would hold about five people each, in pitch black darkness. There were rooms where prisoners were executed, cells where they kept groups of prisoners standing. We had to put on Wellingtons to go down, because the basement is still full of standing water, and the whole place had that odd power that often resides locations where deep suffering has occurred. It was the first physical brush I had with the colonial past of Indonesia, and I left the building with a deeper respect for the country and the trials faced on a still tortuous road to independence.

            Amazing – such a long entry and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. This has not been an easy 10 days. Both my kids have resisted this place mightily at times, sometimes in spectacular displays of unhappiness, and I can’t really blame them – it’s nothing like anything they know. Laura has had a hard time too at particular moments – she’s been a little ill, and trying to manage a family that is completely adrift when you can’t even manage your own daily existence is rather overwhelming. And I get worried about all sorts of things, most of them centered around S and G: will the school ever seem not so silly? Will S make any good friends? Will he ever start to enjoy the food? Will the mosquitoes ever bite one of us besides Graham? G is rolling with things a little more than S – last night in the Chinese restaurant he spent about 20 minutes in the tiny little kitchen helping the woman stir the wok – but he collapses too, somewhat regularly, homesick and exhausted. They both had a wonderful day in Semarang today, however, and it put me into better spirits about everything.   I know, though, that this emotional roller-coaster will continue for a few weeks.

This entry, thank yous to Duncan, Ibu Wemmy, Eka, Alfa, Yuko, Ibu Frances, Ibu Dia, Pak Hendro, Yunen, Eko, Deven, Suwardi, our two drivers, the woman who’s doing our catering ($2.10/per night for 4 delicious portions delivered to our guest house – going out to eat was turning into a nightly cat-fight), the people that sold us our beds, the Hotel Grand Wahid, Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, and the woman ghost with the long dark hair in the basement of the House of a Thousand Doors.

            

Culture Shock

When I mentioned to a friend, an Australian who is in Salatiga on mission work and teaches in the department with me at Satya Wacana, that my children were enrolled at the Christian School, he said, "I'm a Christian, but in Australia, Christians aren't so concerned about the idea of the six-day creation as they seem to be in America," which comment I reflected upon when Seamus got the assignment in his biology class I mentioned in the last post. On Friday, the same biology teacher went on a tear about the close-mindedness of evolutionists, and said that intelligent design never mentioned God - as S reported it to me, she said that it might have been an alien - and that evolutionists brought too much emotion into the debate, and that more and more scientists were starting to come around to intelligent design. In his Bible class, when S asked "Can't you be a Christian and believe in evolution?" his teacher responded "Yes, but I don't have enough faith for that." Apparently the mention of evolution elicits great derision from his classmates, and a concern about the conflict seems to be a regular feature of the curriculum at this school.

There is no small irony in the fact that I have travelled 8,000 miles and the largest culture shock I am experiencing is with the Americans at my kids' school. It never bothered me that they would attend a Christian school - I attended, quite happily for the most past, a Christian university - and I am still working at keeping an open mind about it, but I confess that I struggle with the concept that intelligent design is a major topic in my son's biology class, and that others appear to be invested in making this a major academic issue. In fact "struggle with" doesn't quite get at the degree to which it bothers me - fortunately S seems more than anything highly amused by the whole thing, though it sours him a little on  about the school. But this is one day in to classes, and I am still committed to keeping an open mind. However, for the record, I am happy to agree with S that intelligent design is intellectual hogwash and that a biology teacher who puts it at the center of her curriculum might not be the most qualified person to teach science. We'll see how that goes.

In Indonesia, it is illegal not to have a religion, and my Australian friend (who speaks fluent Indonesian and volunteered to take us through the immigration process last week - we would have been sunk without him) told us that if people ask you what your religion is, and you don't have one (Unitarian Universalist, apparently, doesn't quite register as a religion here, according to him), said that you should say you are still searching. So yesterday, when a very nice man in the hot tub at the Grand Hotel Wahib told me he was a Christian, and what was my religion, I told him I was still searching. "At a crossroads, yes?" he said, and commenced to direct a long and pleasant conversation about religion with me. He also invited us to dinner sometime, which we will of course accept, even though I think he might be hoping to convert me. It's amazing to be in a place like this, during Ramadan, with call to prayer 5 times a day (the first at 4:45 AM). Religion seems to define all aspects of life here, though not in a way that I have found unpleasant or uncomfortable (except re: evolution, and that has nothing to do with my so far very gracious Indonesian hosts...).

(The Grand Hotel Wahib manages to be both new and crumbling at the same time - a kind of luxury establishment with a nice pool, water slides, a playground full of equipment that appears to have been cast-offs from old playgrounds -- it's full of springy-animals that simply collapse to the side when one sits on them, and there are faux Greek statues everywhere, one of them a pensive nude woman on a rock who seems out of place at a pool where most of the women are swimming in full body suits out of modesty. I'm writing this entry from the poolside, where we've brought the kids back to swim - it's just up the street from the guest house, and a decent cheap respite in the afternoon heat - with just enough that is familiar for S and G, whose difficulty at adjusting deserves its own post, later. From the top of the water slide you can see about a dozen mosques and three volcanoes.)

G and I bought bicycles yesterday, helped by the guy from the hotel, Yunen, who offered to go with us to help purchase them. He led us down the very busy main street and then into an alleyway that was full of live fish and fish tanks and mice and other pets for sale (and a million other things, and motorcycles and trucks and pedestrians) and then into a small entry way that led into the basement of the building where there were about 500 old bikes lined up and many men helping us look through them. We bought two bikes - full suspension mountain bikes that seemed in relatively decent shape - for about $45 a piece (I was a hilariously inept bargainer  - the conversation went something like this: he asked 450,000 rupiah, I said 300, he said 450, I said 350, he said 450, I said 400, he said 450, I said 420. He got 450). This morning when I got up to take an early morning ride around town on a quiet Sunday, the left pedal fell off, and Graham's front disk brake was clearly faulty, we noticed when he tried to ride it, so we went back to the bike store, this time alone, met by some of the same people. One older man in particular was happy to see us again - he had taken a shine to Graham, and sat with his arm around him while I tried to make myself clear by continually ruffling through my dictionary. I told him - at least I think I did - I was teaching at Satya Wacana (a Christian university, incidentally) and this excited him, and he pulled out his identity card to show me his name and to show me that his religion was Christian (printed right there on his card) and he shook my hand enthusiastically. I didn't say anything about the Unitarians. 

In Salatiga

It's been a few days since I've been able to get an internet connection, and so packed, really, that it seems like 20. We're in a frenzy of activity and craziness here - I'll try to give you a sense.

We flew from Jakarta to Semarang on Tuesday (Indonesian Independence Day) on a full flight. (We were almost the only ones who ate our boxed snacks - everyone else saved them I guess until after sundown). We landed at the Semarang airport and were met by a staff member - Aka - from Satya Wacana, who got us and our absurd amount of luggage "up the hill" as they say here. It's about 40 kilometers from Semarang, and 2,300 feet in elevation, and I had envisioned a winding mountain road past idyllic rice paddies instead of a highway that went straight up and was full of cars and taxis and motorbikes and buses all jostling quite politely for position. There are 130 million people on an island 1/3 the size of Montana - 3rd most densely populated island, after Hong Kong and Manhattan - so there's not a lot of room, pretty much anywhere, and there was never a break in anything, even on the side of the road.

We are staying, presently, at the guest house of the university, and after we got dropped off there, and changed, the Dean of the Faculty of Literature and Languages came and took us out to dinner. He was incredible, generous, friendly, incredibly welcoming, and he put us all at ease. It was a lovely way to spend our 20th anniversary, I can say, in a little restaurant on a back road in Salatiga, and the food was great. I still have not tried the chocolate-avocado shake, but I will.

I'd pictured Salatiga as a sort of quiet city, which I think now is an Indonesian oxymoron, though maybe I am rushing to judgement. While G napped right after we arrived here, S and I went out and took in the sights, strolling through beautiful narrow alleyways until we came upon a central market area, which was packed with stores and people and little food carts. We had some delicious ayam goreng (fried chicken, they love it here, and KFC is the most popular American fast food place, with Pizza Hut a close second, I think - there's a food stand near the University that offers "Ayam Goreng ala Kentucky").  The main street was loud, busy, and fun, and everyone is patient and kind. Salatiga is well off the tourist track, which I think makes people friendlier because they aren't as prone to considering us easy marks.

One of my lingering anxieties about this year was the school where we are sending the kids, an International Christian School. It appeared very religious in much of the information we'd read about. I don't have a particular problem with that, but it makes me a little nervous. When we toured the school on Wednesday (a beautiful facility with lots of space and green) we were very impressed, and several of the teachers came in and greeted us and gave S the homework he had missed (school started here on August 10). The biology teacher's assignment was to cover the book and find three bible verses that had something to do with creation, and to illustrate one of them, and on her syllabus it said they class would (among many other things) explore issues surrounding "creation/evolution." This infuriated S - "These are the people who give America a bad name" he said - and caused no small anxiety in me as well, simply because the idea that there are relational issues between evolution and creation strikes me as silly and certainly well beneath the curriculum in a biology class.

Fortunately, parents night was also on Wednesday, and while we left still knowing that it was a very religious place, we also left thinking the teachers our kids had were for the most part very good, and S and G also felt a lot better about it too. S was most excited about the teacher of his Bible class - they are doing an Old Testament survey this year, and he said he thought his teacher for that class was brilliant, and I am frankly delighted that my son will spend a year reading the Old Testament. Maybe then he won't think I am so mean - I never smote anyone, though I have been smitten.

I also went to my first faculty meeting on Wednesday, where the main topic of concern was that student theses are taking on topics that are too trivial or too general, and how could we help them deal with that. I told them these were apparently universal concerns, since apart from the extraordinary greenery out the window, we could have had the same conversation in my faculty meetings.

We also saw the house that we will rent as soon as it is ready, a brand new three story house right around the corner from the kids school. It's bigger than our house in Bozeman, and nicer, and it's a little ridiculous how cheap it is, and how extravagant. The fact that we'll have a maid and a guard makes me feel a little like a Dutch colonial, frankly. I could do without the guard and am uncomfortable about the maid - what I am told, however, again and again (by Indonesians and ex-pats) is that if we chose not to hire a maid, rather than looking like self-reliant people who are not interested in having servants, we would look like incredibly wealthy people (which we are, obviously, given where we can easily afford to live) who are too stingy to offer employment to people who desperately want to work. And frankly, trying to negotiate the markets and get food without someone who could help right now seems like it would be debilitating and overwhelming. So it is. The house is in a quiet part of town, very green, and today I found a back route that I could use to ride the bike I will buy as soon as I can.

We went back to Semarang yesterday because we had to get a limited stay visa, but we didn't have the right letter of invitation, so they told us we had to come back next week, and I could see all the air and energy leave S when I reported it to him. He was mad and bored and didn't like Indonesia as much as Bozeman and just wanted to come home at that point. We had two other people with us - a person from the International office on campus and an ex-pat faculty member who offered to join us as a help for us, and we would have been helpless without them, absolutely unable to cope. So far, we have been met with such assistance in any minor or major hassle we've had to confront, and I can't say how grateful I am for it. When I told the vice-rector of the University that S was so dejected at having to miss another day of school and drive back to Semarang to get his picture taken, she said "Well, we'll just turn it into an excursion. It won't be about the immigration office. We'll make sure you go to several of the tourist sites in Semarang." When I told S that, he cheered up a great deal. That's the sort of place we are in so far - a place that would be difficult to negotiate but for the wealth of generous people who seem committed to helping us do it.

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).

On not being prepared

So we leave on Saturday morning for a long and probably tortuous travel route that takes us through Minneapolis, Tokyo, Singapore, and then into Jakarta. It is about 36 hours of transit time altogether, with longish layovers in Minneapolis and Singapore. The transit hotel at the Singapore Airport is full, so we will arrive in Jakarta after a 90 minute from Singapore less than refreshed, of course, met at the Jakarta Airport by someone from the grant office in Jakarta at 8 in the morning on August 16. I'm not sure whether we'll be in Jakarta for one night or two, and I'm hopeful that arriving around sunrise in Jakarta during Ramadan (Indonesia being the biggest Muslim country in the world) won't mean we can't get something to eat. These sorts of petty ruminations can keep me awake at night.

Here, it's a little too much. In these situations, I have a tendency to go into denial, and instead of the focused flurry of activity the moment calls for I can wander around distracted by things like whether we will be able to eat when we get there on Monday, which can lead to a google search that soon will have me looking (in the most speedy internetish sort of way) into the arrival of Islam on the Indonesian archipelago and the sorts of food I might get were I to get lost in the neighborhood around the airport upon arrival. These matters are interesting, and I am sure that sometime in Indonesia Laura will be grateful that instead of running around Bozeman being efficient I was finishing the last little bit of _A History of Modern Indonesia_  quite an extraordinary book that I won't try to discuss here because it would make me sound like I think I know more about Indonesia than I do, which is still nothing.  I am happy to know that the giant tower built in the center of Jakarta in 1965 is referred to locally as Sukarno's last erection - Sukarno being the first Indonesian president/supreme-ruler-in-charge-of everything who made a cult of personality around his sexual prowess.

I got another email from the Dean today, still unclear about what the teaching will be when I get there. I have resigned myself to the fact that there is little I can do to prepare for this (read: nothing) and that I will have to do what I had to do when I taught in the jail, or when I learned to teach at Goodwill in Seattle (a shout out to Mallory Clarke, who worked with me there and taught me the most important things I learned about teaching) - that is, I'll have to improvise based on the context. He tells me everything is prepared already for me, which is a little frustrating, and which I would override if I knew exactly what I could get prepared for. Fortunately, one of my great professional skills is not being prepared. I've seen few people who are better at not being prepared than I am.  Even as I write this blog 48 hours before we leave, I am skillfully not preparing. If I write another entry before I leave, you'll know I am working to hone that skill even more.

Game on

I started this blog prematurely about three weeks ago or so, with two rapid entries that I thought would portend some particular movement. They didn’t, in any way, and so I stopped the blog, since the only thing that I could have written about would have been the fact that I had no idea when we were going, that I was finding it rather frustrating, that as the time grew closer to moving out of our house and soon being uninsured that was changing to a quiet sense that this whole thing might actually fall through, that I was finding the uncertainty a little overwhelming.

            There’s a story here that I’m not telling, because it’s a little long and kind of intricate and because I told somebody I would keep it to myself. The short of it is: I got my work permit a week ago, and I am in the process of getting the visas for our family, which includes a nerve-wracking Fed Ex of passports and other documents to the Indonesian Consulate in Los Angeles. We are set to depart on August 14, one week from today. We have moved out of our house, which is now rented, have lived for the past week in my mother-in-law’s apartment, which is small, and will move tomorrow into a friend’s house while he goes to Europe. We have everything one has to do before a major expedition like this, I guess, most of which means we will fly around next week packing, buying, and being shorter with each other than usual.

            I am very excited, to be sure, more than a little nervous. I’m suddenly cramming about Indonesian history, and doing a little more with the language than I had done.  It’s a strange psychological space: out of our house, still with many jobs to do, the departure not certain until the visas come through on time, no clear sense of what anything will look like or be like next year, flurries of emails and details and corrections.  Both boys are anxious, G especially, who seems prone to melancholy lately, extremely confused about the transitions and the goodbyes and everything else that is happening.  I’m a little like that too, if I am honest. From particular angles the whole process seems more absurd than anything else. But it is happening.

            I am not sure how much I will write before we leave. It probably depends on whether I start to panic or not, or whether there are more interminable delays. Everyone here is so excited for us, wishing us so well, and then having to well-wish several times more because they keep running into us. Sweet Pea, Bozeman’s big summer arts festival, starts tonight, so we’ll go through the whole story several more times in the next three days, when people say “aren’t you gone yet?” One person I saw even asked me how going to Indonesia was, since it didn’t make sense to him that we hadn’t gone yet.

            I haven’t traveled much, especially internationally, since my 20s; then, I prided myself on my openness to experience, on my flexibility. I hope I still have that and can sustain it under completely different circumstances. My reactions during this build-up suggest to me that this is going to take some relearning, and my Indonesian experiences thus far make me think that I am going to have plenty of practice.

            Last week, after my work permit came through, I got a call from another grantee who is headed to Indonesia too. When I told him that I had gotten assigned three classes to teach, and that I had told them I could teach two of them, he laughed and told me that his teaching assignment for the fall semester had been 6 classes. After he started explaining why he couldn’t do six classes, he figured out that they meant deliver six lectures! I have a suspicion that they might have meant something like that when they gave me my initial assignment, in which case my suggestion that I teach two classes instead of three I’m sure gives people a wonderful impression about the kind of person I am.

            Of course these are the reasons we do these sorts of things, because we are creatures of habit, committed irrationally to certain routines that seem normal, comfortable that our vision of the world is the one best one, because we believe we know more than we do, because it’s too easy to hide behind all that. We also get to do this, of course, because we are incredibly privileged and lucky people.  As the experience moves from idea to reality, that privilege and luck become clearer and clearer – I assume they will only get clearer when we arrive.