Gabrielle abroad…

Oooh, where to start - I’ve been here two days and it already feels alot longer! Here’s my attempt at the Cliffnotes version:

Staying over in Singapore was KEY to my sanity - I woke up with a clear head, almost completely on this time zone, showered and boarded the one hour flight to Jakarta. The airport was very picturesque - Jakarta? Mmm, not so much. Big city. Lots of people. LOTS of them. I was surprised on the bus to see where and how they crowd the houses in the cities and towns. Maybe not as surprised to pass a Starbucks on the way to Bogor, though…..

Bogor was an (uneventful!) two hour bus ride straight from the airport. I had thought, it being outside of the city, that it would be quiet…peaceful…relaxing. Again? Not so much. Over a million people here, and I swear they are all driving the green and blue minivans, buses and taxis that circle the garden - It’s like a NASCAR track. Checked into the Pensione Firman hotel and rested the day and night there. Basic accomodations, with a delightful “breezy rooftop veranda” that overlooks neighborhoods of Bogor and out towards the jungles and volcanos. Included in the price is a five am wake up call from the mosque next door! (Really, though, you can’t get away - you hear the chanting from everywhere and all mosques).

Yesterday morning I had breakfast with two Dutch guys staying at the hotel - after a three hour conversation over Indonesian coffee, they invited me to join them for their plans for the day. Both of them - one with 15 years of Indonesian travels under his belt, and the other with an Indonesian mother - turned out to be the best pseudo-local completely fluent tourguides a girl could ask for. They both train in the Indonesian style of martial arts - later I found that I was traveling with the second place world champion from 1997 (who knew?!) - and were in the area to train their national/specialized master and other higher-ups, and to participate in a special ceremony honoring the transition of a student to advanced level. This is what I had the privilege to attend. Two hours and three bus connections later, the three of us were trekking through a village outside of Bogor to meet their master, and his VERY extended family, all living on the same plot of land, in bamboo and concrete homes/rooms surrounded by gardens.

Highlights of the night include: watching old and young practice and train, playing peekaboo with the Indonesian great-grand child of the village head, listening to his son-in-law perform on the flute, violin and other traditional instruments, watching the wayan goleng (puppet) master perform (when he asked me to try puppeteering, he announced that it was the naughtiest puppet of all, with a woman’s hand up his garments…!!…..), participating in the traditional ceremony all seated on the ground around 25 different plates of rice, meats, potatos, chili sambal!, spices, flowers, leaves, fish (which they all served on my plate…over and over and over and over..), and finally, after being told by the village elder/head that I HAD TO DANCE, training with women from three generations of traditional Balinese dancers for an hour, and then performing it for EVERYONE.

The ceremonial aspect of the day prevented me from taking too many pictures, but I know that there is video footage on a friend’s digital camera. Maybe I’ll post that eventually.

NEW as of 8-26-05 - Thanks Oliver!!!

Three things I didn’t expect to encounter in Indonesia:

(1) “Paradise City” blaring from a cell phone….of a very stern and serious man in traditional garb in back of a bemo in the middle of nowhere

(2) (Only funny to my science friends) After telling my Dutch friends that my thesis work was cancer research, he asked me if I had ever heard of something called BRCA1. ?!?!?! I actually found myself saying….”Have you ever heard of a gene called p53?”

(3) Probably the most stern, serious and very unsmiling elder of the village, and master of these arts, at first a little unwilling to meet me, later call me Gabrielle Sabatini and think it was the funniest thing he’d ever said (this was the puppeteer master).

It is crazy here, I’ll tell you that much, but wonderful. I *LOVE* it. My four weeks of learning the language were a little pointless, as most people understand English, but really gets me laughs while I try and butcher their language. One of the Dutch is completely fluent in Indonesian (and Javanese, and Sundanese, and Bogor, and Balinese, and…..) - it was amazing to watch a bemo full of somber Muslim women villagers’s faces light up, joke and laugh within seconds when they spoke the local lingo (and I tried my damnest to speak!). So learning the language is my main priority. Luckily I have the chance to practice!!!

Off the Bandung maybe? Or Gurat, I haven’t made up my mind.

Tags: Java, Tag Index

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