Traveling Solo: Indonesia: Thoughts and Experiences

How to sum up my time in Indonesia? I really have no idea where to begin because it wasn’t quite traveling but it wasn’t quite a vacation either.... I guess the short version is that I lived and ate very well and really loved having a lot of family around me :)

I spent a lot of time at first at my uncle’s Jakarta apartment, the Bellagio. Mostly I watched Starworld, sat drumming my fingers waiting for Internet sites to load, ate great food, and hung out with my Aunt. She’s fun :) I taught her how to play scrabble on the iPad and we even went swimming one day. We’d sit together sometimes while she knitted and I did travel research. She would make mistakes on a sweater for my mom, slam her fist down, and say “hmpfh!” Seeing a 62 year old woman do that is super cute! My aunt and uncle were renovating their house so at times, I was left alone to pick up new skills. For example, I learned to cook eggs in a microwave! Had I known how to do it before, I would have been microwaving eggs at work all the time! I was also waiting to hear back from the director at St. Elisabeth’s hospital as to whether or not I would be allowed to shadow a pharmacist there. (I ended up getting permission, but for the week Theo and I were in Bali/Lombok! I never did end up shadowing a pharmacist…. Good thing I guess because I don’t think I want a career in pharmacy anymore!) I guess two major life changing events took place before the start of 2012: I’ve decided not to pursue pharmacy and I’ve perfected the art of cooking eggs in the microwave!

Where Life is Hard: Life is indeed harder here in Indonesia. The traffic is horrendous, and is a constant. It makes it a struggle to go anywhere or do anything and just going to school and back for example, could mean five or six hours in the car each day! You cannot trust workers here. My aunt and uncle have had to literally watch the people working on their house for fear that the workers will steal the building materials! When they moved all their things back to the house, despite rewarding the movers with food and a generous tip, they still found a box of their things missing. I admire the people here because they have to know so much more about, well, everything than we do in the US. If something doesn’t work or something needs doing, I can generally trust that whoever I call will fix it or get the job done; it’s just not like that here. It is also hard living in Indonesia because of the income gaps. It makes it so that even locals try to screw each other over or extort some sort of bribe. In Africa, for example, I would expect to be charged a higher price because I am a foreigner. If I were with a local, I’d probably get a fair price. But when I was trying to extend my visa in Lampung for instance, the immigration official wanted 800,000 rupiah when the price is 250,000 rupiah… more than three times as much?! I didn’t say a word – it was my cousin who did all the talking and this still happened. The best (worst?) part is that there was even a sign in the immigration office that basically said no bribing here.

Bahasa Indonesia: I’ve made a big effort to improve my Indonesian and not only is it easier to communicate with everyone, but I also find I appreciate the oddities of the language more. Sakit Kuning literally means “yellow sick” or “sick from the yellow” and is how they refer to Hepatitis lol. Many people refer to pistachios as kacang ketawa… literally, the smiling peanut :) You can add “bangut” on the end to many words to act as an intensifier. My cousin, for example, was calling that one customs official a “brengsek (jerk) bangut” and it struck me as hilarious because I felt like he had just said something like “That guy’s a jerk, hella!” It’s been a lot of fun playing with words and learning how to say things properly. My cousin’s particularly enjoyed me saying once, “don’t act like a shy person (jangan bertingkah laku seperti orang yang malu-malu)” as opposed to “don’t be shy (jangan malu-malu).” :)

On Bathrooms: These toilets made me the most unhappy:

(No, there’s not a toilet behind me, the toilet consists of that little drain in the picture..) Most of the public toilets were pretty gross – wet everywhere and you never were quite sure if it was water or not. I think it’s also a sign of Indonesia’s third world status that there’s often no toilet paper in the bathrooms. Malaysia is rising, for example, and their toilets were well stocked! I was also not a fan of the bathrooms in older houses. If there’s no shower head, you take your showers with a bucket (also shown above). This is fine. But, the entire bathroom is wet after someone takes a shower and though it’s probably clean, it just feels wrong to step barefoot into a wet bathroom to use the toilet. Yuck.

While in Indonesia, I didn’t stay in one place very long… I think the longest consecutive stay I had anywhere was only about 10 or 11 days. Apart from my travels with Theo to Bali, Lombok, and Jogjakarta, I spent time in Singapore and Malaysia and even managed to make three trips to Lampung (on Sumatra).

Lampung: Getting here is exhausting… but that’s more a reflection on how exasperating the traffic situation can be in Jakarta. For an 8am flight, we had to leave around 530am for the airport. (We left at 530am for 9am flights too!) It’s a quick flight (~50 minutes) or a long drive (6+ hours) and I flew each time. The first time I was with my aunt and uncle attending Desy’s wedding. The second time, I was by myself. My Indonesian wasn’t so sharp at this point and it was a bit hard to communicate with some of the family in Lampung. I wasn’t used to being so utterly catered to either. For instance, I mentioned really liking the udang rebus (boiled shrimp) from a restaurant in Lampung…

Udang Rebus from Khuai Lok Restaurant = AMAZING!

As a result, I think I ended up eating udang rebus almost every meal during my visit! I can’t complain :) I was also unused to the heat (because I spent most of my time in the air-conditioned Bellagio; I felt hot and sweaty all that time in Lampung and even started developing a heat rash. The family in Lampung was incredibly kind to me though and being there without anyone else did wonders for my Indonesian :)

Chinese New Year: My third and final trip to Lampung was my chance to see Chinese people celebrating Chinese New Year. I think you’re supposed to do three offerings – one to the ancestors, one to God, and one for luck/prosperity… but I only saw one. My mom’s sister set up this offering:

It had all the traditional elements – pork belly, chicken, fish ball soup, and dried squid – and then random breads and fruits that the ancestors enjoyed when they were alive. After the incense burns out, they burn “fake money” – I never really got a clear answer as to why. I had been told that Chinese people like to eat expensive food for the New Year so on Chinese New Year’s Eve (and again on Chinese New Year), I had the very expensive shark fin soup and sea cucumber (along with fish ball soup, boiled chicken, cunkian [pork, shrimp, and fish cake] and more!).

Chinese New Year's Eve

Chinese New Years - Lunch!

The eating was fantastic, but the ang pao was even better! Never having celebrated Chinese New Year before, I never got red envelopes as a kid. This time, I said kyiung-hi (kYOOng-hee) to a bunch of people while rocking one hand clasped over the other back and forth… and I got several red envelopes :)

What a great holiday! Kyiung-hi is a way of saying Happy New Year in Ke, the dialect of Chinese my family speaks. In Mandarin, it’s something like gong xi fa cai (gong shi fah chai) and as a joke, you follow with ang pao nao lai (ahng pow now lie) … something along the lines of “Happy New Year, now where’s my red envelope?” This is at least what my one of my uncles told me :)

Unfortunately, I left Lampung the day after Chinese New Year. Well attached to my family there and still horrible with goodbyes, I cried a lot as everyone hugged me goodbye. It’s hardest when I don’t know when I’ll see them all again…. It was the worst saying goodbye to Tante Wanda since I’d spent so much time with her. I will miss them all and am definitely looking forward to whenever I get to see the family again. I hope it’s soon. :)

Random Food Photos: