I was told that I would have all day Sunday to rest. Though this turned out not to be the case (I'll get to that), the information had some bearing on what I decided to do with my Saturday evening. I figured if I took a long nap in the late afternoon or early evening, I could wake up in time to call my parents after their breakfast, watch the Bobcats thump Northern Colorado via the Big Sky TV website online, and then take another long nap in the morning and be up at a semi-reasonable weekend time to get some writing done.
The first part was the easiest; I did take a nap last evening. The second part was not much harder. I did wake up. I even managed the third part. My parents and I talked for about 45 minutes, which was good. They were anxious to hear from me.
The plan started to go off the rails at about part four. One problem was that the Bobcats were televised on Root Sports in the US. This is good if you're an MSU alum in Seattle or you know the right sports bar in San Francisco. It is very bad if you want to watch the Bobcats in Magelang, Indonesia. The games start late enough that places in Indonesia would be closed even if they could get Root Sports, and they wouldn't have Root Sports in Indonesia even if places were open. So instead, I followed the game on ESPN's box score and play-by-play. This was not as much fun as watching the game. The game was also not as fun as it should have been. The Bobcats did not play very well, not even well enough to thump Northern Colorado. Here lies Steps Four and Five of my decidedly non-foolproof plan.
It looked like steps six and seven would put me back on track, as I did both sleep and then wake up in the morning. I woke up a little bit after eight, which was maybe 20 minutes later than I would have liked, but I just flew two days and halfway around the world, so to get in a twist about twenty minutes on a Sunday would be silly. However, I should have known that Indonesia did not plan anything for me that would be as regular or routine as writing on Sunday morning. I do that a lot in the US.
Instead, just after I had finished breakfast, Pak Tanto called my room wondering if I wanted to take breakfast with him. I had already eaten, so he offered to show me around Magelang some more; Bu Tanto came with us as well. Some things we saw, like the park, the golf course, and the bank, I had already seen. Others, including many churches and mosques, I had not seen yet. Some things, like the military academy, I had seen, but I learned more about. Others, which I had seen but overlooked, I can now identify (coconut trees, banana trees, mango trees...). It was a nice drive. During this drive, Pak Tanto invited me to go jogging with him on Tuesday, when there is no school in Indonesia because of a government holiday. I have a lot of obvious and well-documented reasons to be nervious about that idea: my knees, the heat, my utter lack of anything resembling cardiovascular fitness, the unfortunate fact that my middle name is "fatty fat-guts," plus the novel fact that it would be at 5 AM on a holiday. I said "maybe." This will probably end up meaning "yes," as it seems like I end up doing everything I say I might agree to do in Indonesia.
Eventually, Pak Tanto stopped at a Buddhist temple. Pak Tanto and Bu Tanto invited me to go into the temple with them. They are Buddhist. It was very beautiful. There were reliefs of people, landscapes and dragons on both interior and exterior walls, which were painted in vivid colors. Altars inside were decorated similarly, or in a similar style but with wood, or with designs and dragons made of gold. I have been to a Buddhist temple before, in Chinatown in New York. This temple, in what Pak Tanto describes as a "small city" in Central Java, which is one of three provinces on one of seventeen hundred islands in the nation of Indonesia, is the equal of the one in New York City.
Pak Iwan has offered to take me to the biggest Buddhist temple in the world sometime in the coming weeks. I am even more anxious to see that than I was before.
After the Buddhist temple, Bu Tanto wanted to take me to a place in Indonesia where they serve dessert all day. I do not know what these are called, nor if they are common. In any case, they wanted me to try three different kinds of desserts. One was a banana with chocolate and cheese--having been past several bakery carts in the past 48 hours, I know that this combination of flavors, which would strike most Americans as strange, is pretty popular in Indonesia. Personally, I enjoy it. The other two desserts involved shaved ice, flavored water, and toppings. I liked one very much and thought the other was okay. During this time, I thought of some additions to a chapter in a novel I'm writing. I also met one of the students I will be teaching at the school. It was a successful stop overall.
After dessert, I came back to the hotel to find that there was an Indonesian Muslim wedding party gathering outside. There were a lot of people dressed in purple robes, both men and women. A few of the men wore ceremonial swords. I was still determined to write about the previous day, but I sat at the table near the window, so I could watch them leave.
The wedding party had left, and I had a passable start on my writing, when Pak Tanto called me again; he wanted me to join him for lunch at his restaurant. When I got there, Bu Tanto wanted me to try on two more batik shirts before eating. They were not from Matahari, and they are a little thinner, but that makes them more comfortable. I like the traditional batik patterns. I think when I come back to the US, I will continue to wear the batik shirts on hot days.
For lunch, we ate fried rice, although it was a slightly different dish than the one I had with Pak Iwan and Bu Yenni for lunch yesterday. I enjoyed it every bit as much, though. I am taking a liking to Indonesian fried rice dishes, which seems to please my Indonesian hosts. At lunch, Pak Tanto told me that there was a music festival taking place just off the hotel grounds, near the school. He said that the newer bands play earlier, but to go around three in the afternoon to hear better bands. It sounded like fun, so I agreed. I also told him that bands go in the same order in the US, because I thought it was an interesting similarity.
Between lunch and the music, I came back to the hotel to finish writing and watch a little soccer. I realize as I read about my days as I write them that I am quickly becoming a guy who always watches soccer. I guess it's not that unexpected, though. In the US, I was a guy who always watched some sci-fi thing or a cop show on Netflix, even while I was doing other things. Indonesia does not get netflix; it does not seem to have science fiction, and I haven't seen any cop shows. If it did have those things, I wouldn't understand them. Soccer is a good replacement habit. If nothing else, it's very portable. There's soccer being played somewhere at all hours of the day and night.
Anyway, I finished my writing, and I wrote three poems as well. I put most of my writing online very shortly before I had said I would go to hear the music. I rushed to change into one of my new batik shirts to meet Pak Tanto, but when I got to the music festival, it turned out to be heavy-metal music favored by teenagers in t-shirts. The band playing when I got there was Fist of Wisdom. They are loud. They growl their lyrics. Many of the t-shirts the teenagers were wearing expressed very angry, very political sentiments. Pak Tanto, of course, was nowhere to be found. We had miscommunicated.
Among young Indonesians in western clothes, I felt extremely out of place wearing a traditional Indonesian garment that was most obviously not my own tradition. I had worn it hoping to please Pak Tanto, but the crowd there had no way of knowing what, if anything, I meant by the awkward apparent cultural appropriation. Some of the people at the concert came up to shake my hand, either because they thought it was cool I was there, or to try to make me a little more comfortable, or to mock me. I'm not sure. Many others stared at me openly, with varying expressions. Curiosity and contempt were present in equal measure. In hindsight, I do not think it was a safe place for me to go; had I a different disposition and more sense, I probably would have been scared at the time. I did realize that, regardless of the fact that I have been listening to heavy metal music since a lot of those kids were born, I did not exactly belong there, either. I stayed to hear Fist of Wisdom, and then I left. I did some writing, and concluded my second 24 hours in Magelang by sending the first two text messages of my life.
Maybe it's wrong of me, but I'm still glad I went to see the music. Now I know there is Indonesian metal music. If I had stayed in, I might never have learned.
My next post will cover my first day of work at SBTH school, so I will end this post with something that happened after my 48th hour in Magelang. While I was writing this post (and watching soccer), I heard my first Indonesian rain out the window and on the roof. I have been told that this is the rainy season, so I guess I'm a tiny bit surprised that it took this long.
After I post this, I hope to work on my novel a little bit. We'll see if I have the energy.
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